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Analysis Of The Confessions In Homer's Aeneid

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In the Confessions, Augustine formulates his argument by self-consciously integrating methods of rhetoric used in Homer’s Aeneid. With this and his own style of writing, he is successfully able to narrate his life and demonstrate his captivity from the concupiscence that dominated his life. Augustine shares this road of conversion to Christianity effectively by incorporating aspects of epic style and putting language at the center of his Confessions. Through including different devices and influences on other epics, such as invocation, narrative descriptive writing, pathos in his suffering, allusions, and digressions, Augustine guides the reader successfully from beginning to end, on the journey towards God and salvation of his human …show more content…

Though he was in a clash between worldly ambitions and the love of God, we can see from his writings that his heart burned intensely for truth. In Book 1 of his invocation, he says, “let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you”, thus demonstrating his craving desire to be with God despite the road that his past had led him to. We can also comprehend by what he tells us in book III about his pleasures, that “loving and being loved were good to [him]”, which is why he inclined towards lustful desires not knowing that the only one who could satisfy these desires was God. This ends up being his main point of narrating these certain events of his life, to help us grasp that any inclination towards what is not of God will not fill our cup. To successfully navigate the reader towards his conversion, Augustine narrates his story using a certain form of language. He structures his narration in chronological order by the way they happened, from infancy to the time he became bishop. However, he does not give us exact details on these events like Homer those in The Aeneid. For instance, in book one a storm approaches as Aeneas sails towards Italy, “a howling gust From the due north took the sail aback and lifted Wavetops to heaven...”. He goes on to describe this massive storm in detail until Aeoulus quiets the waters. On the contrary, Augustine recounts the events from his past by the way

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