St. Augustine Confession Analysis

Confession carries different meanings and serves different purposes. One meaning may be admitting to one’s sins and another may be professing one's beliefs and thoughts. Situating confession in the present Foucault frames confession’s place in our society in The History of Sexuality. Presently the confession is proliferated through all realms of society. We confess our ills to doctors and rely on the confessions of criminals to persecute them as guilty. Yet to be able to trace the importance of confession one must consider St. Augustine’s autobiographical text Confessions. St. Augustine lived in the period right before the Middle Ages and for most of his adulthood he believed in maniquism, he was not a devout catholic from the start. In

Many of the sins he writes about were scandalous for the time, what were his motives for confessing them through a book? Through the mode of narration, language and form its possible to abstract the importance of confession to Augustine. Augustine addresses God in his writing, making the novel itself akin to a confession in church. In the opening passage Augustine establishes the rhetorical mode of narration he will use throughout the whole text. By quoting a psalm, “Grant me Lord to know and understand” (Augustine, 3) on the faith one must have in God, Augustine establishes himself with a knowledge base to better communicate that he is well versed in scripture and that his musings in the narrative have their basis in the Holy Book. He frequently interjects these quotes from scripture to begin a series of questioning. This serves to make his point of view more relatable to the audience, an audience that may not have converted to catholicism yet. By asking these questions Augustine awkledges the doubts that happen when someone believes in God, doubts that he had for the time before his conversion to catholicism. Even the fact that he writes these questions and admits to not having answers is

If a man of great faith who becomes a saint can question the meaning behind scripture and even question God then it makes it more obvious that doubt and