Essay on The Essence Of a Soul

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

Augustine’s different writings, primarily in his confessions, he demonstrates that faith and reason are simultaneously gained and understood. With the true form of one comes the truth of the other. This is somewhat evident when looking over Augustine’s life and his different religions. Near the start of Augustine’s search for great intellect, he first sought the Bible. Augustine read parts of the scripture and was expected to find something similar to the writing of Cicero: elegant and beautiful constructed Latin, which at the time, the Bible was not. He found the text and religion itself distasteful as he was unimpressed with the supposed role models of history. What Augustine failed to see at the time, something he later remarked on, was that the beauty of God’s word was not found simply in the way the text was written (though there are many psalms written in beautiful literary fashion) but in the life found within the message. Nevertheless, Augustine found no sustenance in the words he read, and he moved

This is joy grounded in you, O God, who are the truth, ‘my illumination, the salvation of my face, my God.’” Repeatedly examples of the paradoxical nature of the Christian God are presented in Saint Augustine’s Confessions. But the unquenchable thirst for answers to these paradoxes that Saint Augustine exhibits are merely illustrations of man’s longing for truth. Saint Augustine himself laments over the yearning he felt for truth. In fact, it was this desire that led him to the Manicheans. But if God is truth and truth leads to God then how did the pursuit of truth lead Augustine so far astray for so long? The answer lies in the wickedness of human nature; man spends all his life searching for truth, yet although his soul craves it, his mind longs to control and perverse it. Saint Augustine journeyed far and wide, and spent years digging through books and papers trying to find the truth his soul craved. But he continued to ignore and snub God because he wanted that truth on his own terms and not on the terms of a divine and supreme being. Often man denies the presence of a superior being even when the inner void and the truths of the

Augustine continues his discussion of what makes a man. The question lies in the discussion between man being of the body only, of the soul only, or both. He talks about this to determine where man’s chief good resides, and from where it is discovered. “Man’s chief good is not the chief good of the body only, but the chief good of the soul” (Augustine 264-267). Augustine states that a person’s chief good is found in the soul and that the soul gives life to the body. The soul provides bodily pleasure, pain, strength, beauty, swiftness, etc. Without the soul, there would be no

In Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will he explains that the human soul is predisposed to have a good will and that “it is a will by which we desire to live upright and honorable lives and to attain the highest wisdom” (Augustine 19, 1993). Augustine believes that in order to be free we must live according to our good will. To follow our good will we must live according to the four main virtues in life: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. He defines prudence as having “the knowledge of what is to be desired and what is to be avoided” (Augustine 20, 1993). Augustine establishes fortitude as “the disposition of the soul by which we have no fear of misfortune or of the loss of things that are not in our power” (Augustine 20,1993).

Augustine was eminent by Platonism and declared that there is one God and that God was and is the wellspring of all Happiness because of His perfect adoration. In this manner, anything that needs to do with our ethics cognizant is at last God and we ought to uninhibitedly need to take after our cognizant as it is divine law Augustine sees awareness as God is letting us know what is correct and what isn't right, he is our witness and the voice of God ought not be addressed, but rather it is our human senses that permit us to second figure our nature and conflict with God's arrangement and this prompts is the reason we encounter a despondent life we see as insufficient. My Argument is that if God is the voice of our awareness and our cognizant

At a younger and earlier stage of his life, St. Augustine felt abandoned in some way by God and found no strong connection to a higher being as he developed into a materialist who could only grasp tangible concepts. Little did he see in his life that God was with him through his trials and tribulations as a man on a journey who fell into a life of sin through lust and stealing. Augustine writes, “But in my misery seethed and followed the driving force of my impulses, abandoning you. I exceeded all the bounds set by your law, and did not escape your chastisement-indeed no moral can do so” (Confessions 2:4 p. 25). This driving force was God’s providence. Augustine was spending time in sin, God was punishing him with a sense of emptiness that could not be filled. By turning to such pleasures, he turned away from God and needed such illicit things to realize that he needs a sense of something more in his life. He states, “Before you I lay my heart and my memory. At that time you were dealing with me in your hidden

XII, p. 130). It is obvious from this quote that Augustine now fully subscribes to the idea of only one God, who created “all things.” This differs from Gnostics, who believed in two Gods—one of matter and one of the spirit. This is shown in the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, which states, “Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature” (Mary 4:30). This means that matter and nature are “contrary,” meaning they are two separate things that were created by two different Gods.

With god aware of the evil that humanity has created, Augustine’s explanation of how god has already forgiven and created a way for humanity to embrace the light provide spiritual reasoning for sins that are committed. As with the sacrifice of Jesus and offered redemption of the many sins that are committed reflect the all-knowing and forgiving nature of god. Through his personal experience Augustine’s mental state throughout his life until finding god is one of the factors for his conclusion to the problem and question. Putting this in perspective, to know the god has already forgiven through redemption and has already sacrificed for humanity, further prove key elements in his perfect state being that he is all loving and all knowing. Furthermore, to think god in the event of being merciless and vengeful or angered by humanity which causes him to inflicts evil onto the world by his will is not a valid reason due to the sacrifice and redemption which he has allowed to happen in restoring the good which his creation lacks.

According to Augustine, God is the creator of heaven and earth (Confessions, 14). God rules over creation justly and perfectly. He can see all because He is everywhere (Confessions, 16). As God’s “law is truth as [He] is truth,” so too is His “law of love” as He is Love (Confessions, 14, On Christian Doctrine,

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds. Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves. Consequently, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself.

In our unit on Christian philosophies, one thing that we learned about was the influence that Plato had on Christianity. Plato took the idea of one's "self" as split between the physical body and the soul. Also, his theory of the forms basically foreshadowed the Christian idea of a divine heaven, of which the real world where we currently live is strictly a mirroring image. Both views of the world show an assumption of stagnant reality and complete truth, preparing people for the coming of Christianity. Augustine, who came at the end of the line where Plato existed, took both reasoning and logic as complements of faith, and that this pair would define Christianity.

Great philosophers over time have shared ideas about their lifetime. There were no more captivating philosophers than Plato and Augustine who fed off one another. Even though they were born at different times, their ideas impacted the life they lived in and future lives. St. Augustine was a student of the wise Plato, who fed off his ideas and created his own form of philosophy. Plato on the other hand orbited the idea of the theory of forms which, later St. Augustine incorporated into his beliefs. St. Augustine used the notion of god to resemble his ideas, as well as Plato’s and a mix of Christianity to incorporate his own knowledge. The philosophical views, the ideas of good and

The cause of evil itself, according to Augustine, is the human will, and thus all blame for it rests on our shoulders, not on Gods. We willfully turn our souls away from God when we perform evil deeds: “look for the source of this movement and be sure that it does not come from God” (On Free Choice, 2:20). Even the punishment that God imposes on us for our evil is something that we brought on ourselves, since “punishment is used in such a way that it places natures in their right order” (On Free Choice, 3:9). Thus, a first solution that Augustine offers to the problem of evil is that human will is the cause of evil and reason for divine punishment. A second and related solution is that the evil we willfully create within our souls is only a deprivation of goodness. Think of God’s goodness like a bright white light; the evil that we humans create is like an act of dimming that light, or shielding ourselves from it to create an area of darkness. It is not like we’ve created a competing light source of our own, such as a bright red light that we shine around to combat God’s bright white light. Accordingly, the evil that we create through our wills is the absence of good, and not a substantive evil in itself. Augustine writes, “That movement of the soul’s turning away, which we

     According to Augustine, “Human beings are endowed with a power that he calls the will.” He emphasizes the will to being the center of freedom. Unlike other philosophers, who are determinists, Augustine, who has a libertarian view, sees our will as free choice. So for whatever we may choose to do, we become solely responsible for our actions which are caused by external factors instead of internal ones.