Evil And Evil In St. Augustine's The Confessions

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

In the Confessions by Saint Augustine, this great philosopher experiences many problems and emotions related to sin and evil. As a boy, he often felt darkness, blindness, and confusion while attempting to find rest in God. Augustine started out in childhood with a restless heart because he had to live in two different worlds. These worlds consisted of his mother’s Christian faith, and the world of everything else. These two worlds confused and disturbed Augustine as a child. Augustine’s father was pagan and his mother was Christian, and they both wanted him to be very successful in the world. As he became confused, he began asking questions that could not be answered such as, “Humans often feel restless, but what is it they need to feel at

In Augustine’s Confessions, he confesses many things of which we are all guilty; the greatest of which is his sadness of not having a relationship with God earlier in his life. He expressed to us that to neglect a relationship with God is far worse than the pity he felt for Dido. In reviewing his life, he had come to examine life and how there are temptations in this world that can keep us distracted. He tells to us how he became aware of this fact; everything is negligible except love for God, and his own guilt at not having found this truth sooner.

An omnibenevolent God created a man with the capacity to sin; as Augustine has addressed, the evil in man resides from his will. Augustine, however, does not address how evil stems also from the human nature of temptation that was a consequence of the original fall from Eden. Augustine touches on this theme when accounting for the origins of his sin, but he never fully declares it. “I loved to excuse my soul,” Augustine begins, “and to accuse something else inside me (I knew not what) but which was not I. But, assuredly, it was I, and it was my impiety that had divided me against myself” (62). Here, Augustine admits to denying his own human nature to sin, and blames it on something beyond his will, such as a result of creation. Bonner,

In St. Augustine’s Confessions, the tension between knowledge of God and the habitual life, and by extension the struggle between continence and incontinence, are central to St. Augustine’s evolution as a faithful servant of God. These tensions are evident in several episodes of weeping throughout the text, as the true reason for his weeping stems from a disruption in the habitual life or from his inability to change his habits. St. Augustine’s weeping as a youth over the death of Dido, his weeping before his conversion, and his mourning of the death of his mother, Monica, all stem from the tensions between knowledge and habit, continence and incontinence, and help to illustrate St. Augustine’s development over time.

According to the current definition from Webster, good is defined as morally excellent; virtuous; righteous; pious; where as evil is defined as morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked. One could

The reason that we even have an experience of a perceived evil is because for the soul to experience itself as any particular thing, the exact opposite of that thing must come into the realm of existence. In other words, in this relative existence, hot cannot be hot without cold, darkness cannot be without light, and you cannot be you without that which is not you. So I believe that what we call evil is just the opposite end of the spectrum of good, not something separate.

However, Augustine has another agenda- his confessions are also meant to show his praise and love for God. He says this in the fifth book with: "Accept the sacrifice of my confessions by the agency of my tongue, which Thou has formed and quickened, that it may confess to Thy name... But let my soul praise Thee, that it may love Thee; and let it confess Thine own mercies to Thee, that it may praise Thee." This is a clear declaration of his praise to God, and ​almost another underlying message of the text to the audience. So as he is writing about his life, he is trying also to set an example to the audience about how his choices were not always the best and use this as a guide to their own lives. And finally through his story, use his conversion and change as a way to praise God to show that even someone who "strayed off" the path was able to redeem themselves and how merciful and good God is to accept someone even as sinful as he was.

In St. Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine’s worldly experiences throughout his autobiography are crucial to his understanding of Christianity. Augustine reflects on his childhood experience of stealing pears from his neighbors to understand his sinful nature. Augustine struggles to understand his motivation for taking the pears when he knows that the pears are not necessarily better than those at his own home. He finally recognizes that this transgression is of the most wicked nature because he was sinning for the sake of sinning. “Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself”(29). By reflecting on a worldly experience, he is able to reach a

In St. Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Inferno, the central characters in their respective narratives are presented a message from which induces distinct reactions. More importantly, their reactions are reflections of their perspective concerning the Christian outlook

Over the course of time, things that seem important now are bound to change. For example, before Augustine’s time, Christianity was just becoming legally recognized. Today, Christianity is one of the world’s most widely known religions. Augustine shows us that while most things do change, human nature is not one of them. Throughout his piece, Confessions, he describes to the reader how humans are born evil, and cannot change until they have the capacity to do so. Through reading this autobiography and Hsün Tzu’s piece, Man’s Nature Is Evil, as well as Mencius’s piece, Man’s Nature Is Good, it seems that Augustine agrees more with Hsün Tzu than Mencius. They both agreed on the ideas that all humans are born evil, they remain evil through

Augustine is our exemplar to human nature, as well as the guideline to what it means to be human. He demonstrates both the good and bad qualities that humans obtain and show that not everything can always be all-good. In the Confessions Augustine talks about how he knows about his own imperfections. He states “At one time in adolescence I was burning to find satisfaction in hellish pleasures” (Augustine, Confessions, pg. 24). Many of his imperfections have brought a new way of thinking about the human being. In the Confessions, Augustine focuses on his autobiography and how sin comes from inside us humans. From this we have learned about the term introspective conscience and how it depicts when someone is constantly looking at him or herself and looking at the motivation to sin.

This paper examines St. Augustine’s view on evil. St. Augustine believed that God made a perfect world, but that God's creatures turned away from God of their own free will and that is how evil originated in the world. Augustine assumes that evil cannot be properly said to exist at all, he argues that the evil, together with that suffering which is created as punishment for sin, originates in the free nature of the will of all creatures. According to Augustine, God has allowed evil to exist in the world because it does not conflict with his righteousness. He did not create evil but is also not a victim of it. He simply allows it to exist.

Faith, it is the complete trust or confidence in someone or something. We as humans can only define it as that because we cannot tangibly grasp faith, or even understand it as we do our emotions. It can be as overwhelming as love and yet there may not be a reason or an understanding to why we have it or put our faith into someone or something. The only way to describe it is through the claim faith and reason are compatible. This claim is examined in the stories, Genesis, as God creates human beings to live amongst his other creations but to have free reign over the land, the Romans & Corinthians, as even Jesus’ faith was to put to the test, and it is deeply explored in St. Augustine’s Confessions. Furthermore, the compatibility of faith and reason is seen in The Book of Matthew as Jesus travels the lands of Israel blessing them with his own faith. Faith and reason would not be attainable if it weren’t for our triune God subtly giving us the knowledge we need to make decisions on our own.

God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, which makes us wonder what kind of morally sufficient reason justifies God to allow evil. We know that evil exists in our world, but so does God, so would God be the source of evil as well as good? We have established that God is the omnipotent and benevolent free creator of the world, but suffering and evil exist. Is God unable to prevent evil? If so, he would not be omnipotent. Is He able to prevent the evil in our world but unwilling? If this were then case then he wouldn’t be benevolent. A Persian thinker, Mani, suggested that the answer to this question was a kind of duality between the good and evil. This pluralistic view of the good and evil in our world would suggest that God is