Augustine's Confessions: The Life Of St. Augustine Of Hippo

Augustine’s Confessions is a diverse blend of autobiographical accounts as well as philosophical, theological and critical analysis of the Christian Bible. Augustine treats his autobiography as an opportunity to recount his life and mentions how each event in his life has a religious and philosophical explanation. Augustine had many major events happen in his life but only 3 events would deem of extreme importance to his journey to faith. Theses major events were Book II how he describes that he considered his time of adolescence to be the most lurid and sinful period of his life, Book III how this becomes the lowest point in his relationship with God because his

The uniqueness that radiates from Augustine's Confessions is heavily attributed to its literary structure. One part autobiography and another part personal confession, Augustine's Confessions was a bold and calculative piece that chronicled the life of man who struggled against personal adversity. Never before has anyone taken such great strains to emphasis the self in literature. Even less so, visualizing man as wholly independent and man's relationship with the divine. Regardless, Confessions perfectly encapsulates the incredibly arduous question of how one achieves real religious change. The notion of 'will' is another interesting feature found within Confessions. Augustine viewed man's 'will' as being a mechanism for religious change. However, he did not know how much 'will' an individual was capable of nor if it was enough to completely change the self. He would eventually settle on the notion that this change was incomplete as man's will alone can not bring him to the knowledge of god and therefore salvation. Nevertheless, Confessions deals with Augustine's own difficulties in combating worldly desires in a manor many found to be incredibly profound.

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, is a true defender of the Catholic faith with an inspirational conversion story which he shares in his writings titled the Confessions. Published around 400 A.D., St. Augustine Confessions had a major influence on western civilization. This beautifully written and intellectually brilliantly narrative on his conversion, St. Agustin brings to light his personal spiritual journey during his conversion to Catholicism. Completing his book in 400, St. Augustine incorporated praise of God, philosophical and theological inquiries, and the chain of sinful habits he had to break to give his life to Christ.

Saint Augustine’s Confessions are a diverse mix of autobiography, philosophy, and interpretation of the Christian Bible. Born and raised in Thagaste, in eastern Algeria, he has two sisters and a brother name Navigius. His father, Patricus, a small landowner and an official of the local government is still a pagan. Monica, his mother is a devout Christian. Augustine starts off by praising to God and that it is the natural desire of all men. However, Augustine does not have a lot of knowledge about God because he felt that he is too weak and powerless for God to come to him and help him. All throughout his life, he was very educated. Yet he made a lot of sins from birth through adulthood. Such as crying and tantrums of infancy; boyhood

One of the greatest problems Augustine struggles with in the course of his spiritual journey was with the image of God. Augustine was struggling with the idea that anything not occupying space could still have an existence. For a long time, he pictured God as “a secret breath of life” or like sunlight, when he shouldn’t have been “picturing” him at all. “My eyes are accustomed to such images,” he writes, “and my heart accepted the same structure.” In Book IV, Augustine was trying to conceive how God could have beauty and magnitude as attributes; he failed to realize that “you [God] yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty.” This error led Augustine further into problems of trying to imagine God. Under the influence of Manicheism,

Augustine was born in North Africa in AD 354 in the city of Thagaste. His father, Patricius, was a pagan and his mother, Monica, a devoted Catholic who relentlessly prayed for her son 's salvation. Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote Confessions between AD 397 and AD 398. He is regarded as a great theologian, philosopher, and one of most prolific Latin author 's of many works. Augustine was schooled at Tagaste and Madaura and later at Carthage where he became interested in Latin literature and became a teacher of literature and public speaking. Later in Milan he converted to Catholicism and was baptized, ordained, and eventually became the Bishop of Hippo. He is still considered an influential, but very controversial bishop of the Catholic Church (Smither, 2009).

Augustine uses Neoplatonism when he refuses to speculate how the soul joins the body to become an infant. In Augustine’s Confessions, Book 1, he states, “What, Lord, do I wish to say except that I do not know whence I came to be in this mortal life or, as I may call it this living death.” (1301; Anthology of World Literature) Like Greek philosopher, Socrates, he refuses to speculate on things he doesn’t know or in this case remember. Another way he uses Neoplatonism, is at the end of Book 1, when he lists all his sins as a small boy, and paints them as lesser sins of an adult, and him still having good attributes, but only through and because of God. His sins were due to “misdirection” of the material world and ways of the world instead

Augustine’s beliefs especially due to the fact that he was surrounded by such turmoil. Instability had taken root in his city as well as in his life; Rome had started to decline in power and Augustine had been the victim of loss and anguish. Augustine had lost his mistress followed by his mother and child. At this time of his life Augustine had preserved a faith in Manichaeism, which he realized did not help him understand the way of life or answer any of ponderings. Augustine maintained the same level of skepticism when he discovered Christianity and decided to convert; he questioned how God could even exist when there is such sin and chaos, he could not comprehend why God would let such turmoil take place. As a result, he made it his religious mission to answer these questions and try and make sense in God’s non-involvement in the lives of those who were suffering. To answer these contemplations Augustine referred back to one of his favorite philosophers, Plato and used his comparison of the material world compared to the perfection of the all mighty. These distinctions accurately described the struggles between the physical and the ideal, also coupled with Neo-Platonists Augustine had the ability to liken the purity of the soul trapped in an imperfect body conflicted by temptations to souls trying to fulfill their Christian faith. Plato’s definitions of eternal truth were strongly similar to the ideas of Christian ideology. Plato's metaphysics and epistemology shaped the foundations for Augustine's apperception of Christianity showed signs of imitating platonic ideas especially the concept of metaphysical forms, which Augustine believed was God

Augustine of Hippo, later known as St. Augustine, is credited with one of the most influential literary works of all time. Not only did his autobiographical work, Confessions, have great influence on both medieval and early modern writers like Dante, Montaigne, and Rousseau, it also had a profound effect, in fact a large one, on medieval thought and the thought of eras to come. It is also widely considered to be one of the first of its kind in the Western world. One might ask themselves what could’ve motivated Augustine to complete a work that accomplished such a large feat, especially in the midst of a severe writer’s block. I propose that Augustine was primarily motivated by love—the love that he has for God and the love that he believes God has for him—and the subsequent emotions that result of that love, like shame, compelling him to write an open letter to God, or prayer if you will, confessing his past sins and glorifying God before the masses.

St. Augustine of Hippo, who is a well-known saint in the Catholic Church and around the world, is looked up to as a person who has gone through many hardships but in the end found his way to God. Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was a man swollen with pride, who sinned for the fun of it. While living his short-lived sinful life, his mother begged a priest to talk to him so he could persuade him to relieve his bad habits. The priest told his mother that “he will find out for himself through his reading how wrong the beliefs are, and how profoundly irreverent”(Ⅲ,12,21). Through his readings of Cicero and the Bible, the Natural Philosophers, the Books of the Platonists, and the Books of St. Paul, St. Augustine received the grace

Augustine converted to orthodox Christianity late in life. He struggled with the many earthly things he needed to give up for a complete conversion of body, mind, and soul. It is in Confessions that Augustine shows the world

St. Augustine was born in Taagaste, Roman North Africa on November 13, 354 AD and was given the name Aurelius by his parents Patricius and Monica Augustine. At the time of his birth, his father was still a pagan, but his mother eventually converted him to Christianity (Chadwick 6). Aurelius was raised receiving a Christian education and from a very young age, he had a great respect for the religion. He learned to make the Sign of the Cross and certain ideas about the faith he kept very dear to his heart including: a Divine Providence, Christ the Lord Savior, and the belief that hell existed for those who did not live up to the Christian Faith’s standards (Chadwick 11).

To begin with, the earliest figure that has a hand in shaping the spiritual progress of St. Augustine is Cicero, author of Hortensius. Although Augustine never met Cicero, his text in defense of pursuing philosophy has a significant impact on Augustine. Cicero is a pagan and claims that genuine human happiness is found through using and embracing philosophy Cicero uses his writings to advocate for an abstract, higher order of thinking beyond the physical, unlike the Manichees Augustine later encounters, but similar to the ideology Bishop Ambrose relates to Augustine about Christianity. The Hortensius argues that people who say philosophy is a useless venture and does not lead to happiness, can only make that statement using philosophical thinking, therefore contradicting themselves. Cicero’s writings have such a strong effect on eighteen-year-old Augustine after he reads them that Augustine says, “The

Saint Augustine (354-430 C.E.) is often considered the greatest of all Christianity’s founders. His theology is vital to the doctrine of the clinical church and years yet to come. His abilities as a preacher and commentator brought about his fast development in the church hierarchy to come the bishop of Hippo in northern Africa. Saint Augustine best regarded works are his autobiographical Confessions and The city of God. These two writings deliver a Christian interpretation to events and reasoning to slavery.

Born and raised in Thagaste, in eastern Algeria, he has one brother named Navigius, and two sisters. His father, Patricus, a small landowner and an official of the local government is still a pagan. Monica, his mother is a devout Christian. Augustine starts off by praising to God and that it is the natural desire of all men. Yet Augustine does not have a lot of knowledge about God because he felt that he is too powerless for God to come to him and only God can help him. All throughout his life, he was very educated. However, he made a lot of sins from birth through adulthood. Such as crying and tantrums of infancy; boyhood pranks like stealing pears to feed to the pigs; bodily pressure like sex, food, theater, etc. With all these sins dragging Augustine down his mother constantly prays for his son to find God and strongly believe that one day he will convert to Christianity. He then heads on to Carthage to study Cicero, which inspires him to become a rhetorician. Monica’s prayers were finally fulfilled. Which resulted Augustine in exploring the philosophical road that led to his conversion from Macheanism to Neo-Platonism to Christianity. But later felt sorrowful for his mother that had died and confesses to God that everyone is a sinner right when they were born and through God that this sin can only be absorbed. He later moves back to Thagaste and then became Bishop of Hippo. As a “doctor” of the Church, he defended Christianity against false (heretic) interpretation.