Augustine And Scrooge Analysis

Young Augustine and elderly Scrooge both have an imbalance between superficial success and internal happiness. In Augustine’s anecdote about his encounter with a drunk beggar he is miffed by the happiness of a seemingly hopeless beggar. Despite his success in his career, Augustine’s internal struggle to find meaning prevents him from achieving happiness. On the other hand, Scrooge requires three trips with ghosts to realize that there is a better path of existence. Both Scrooge and Augustine need to learn the value of being a complete person compared to only pursuing financial or professional success. However similar the arcs of their progression from misery to happiness are, how they arrive at these new understandings are drastically

After Augustine converts to Christianity and he hears the child saying, “tolle lege”, Augustine is certain that God is speaking to him. A Christmas Carol is obviously a work of fiction and the ghosts serve as an interesting vehicle to give an interesting commentary about what it means to live a life of fulfillment. The reader is left with the comfort of feeling that they are clearly not as miserable as Scrooge was and pleased with the arc of the redemption narrative. On the other hand, Confessions is viewed as the first autobiography which implies that everything in the book happened. However, some of the events of Confessions are nearly as fantastical as the events of A Christmas Carol. Furthermore, the redemption arc of Confessions is nearly as perfect as that of A Christmas Carol and is based on the belief that the Christian form of God which relies on The Bible. In The Bible there are much more incredible stories than that of A Christmas Carol, including but not limited to Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus’ walking on water, the burning bush story, and Methuselah living to 969. These stories are viewed as facts of history, but are much more ridiculous than three ghosts visiting one man in the middle of the night. This distinction between Confessions and A Christmas Carol leaves the reader with the implication that Confessions is almost the first self

Both men need to learn similar lessons and are motivated by fear, but Augustine is much more aware of his predicament and is able to spur change from within. Augustine is no doubt aided by the extremity of his interaction with the drunken beggar to help him see the proverbial light. Despite these seemingly glaring differences between Augustine and Scrooge, an interesting contrast arises from both stories reliance on the mystical. Even though Augustine does not need the preposterous supernatural, he transforms his life to center around the crutch of the “conventional” supernatural. This ironic foil is an interesting aspect of the first “autobiography”. While both men have a major imbalance between professional success and internal happiness and rely on the help of ghosts to help overcome these deficiencies, the implication of the stories could not be more different. Imagine if a university’s exemplar was the redemptive tale of Scrooge, that would read like something from The Onion. Even though Confessions relies on more outrageous claims than A Christmas Carol, it is viewed as reasonable source material for the birth of a