Augustione:Confessions
Tristiatiana Johnson
4/21/15
Timothy Teeter
Late Antiquity
352
It is often best to take the word confession with a grain o f slat as it can have many meaning. It can mean professing to your sin, but it can also mean bealief, as in a declaration of belief. Conffeeion is at it's core aextend declaration of Augustines faith and his loe fore God, however ------ He countiously begrees his lack of faith,his lust , his sins all in this cohievsie journey from a life filled woth son to a life seeking the worship and belief in God. Manichaeism, and his misunderstanding of Christianity. In what is essitanal a 13 book prayer Augusitines seeks a life free of sins and filled with critisims. Confession is diided into three secetions…show more content… In these book we contine to see him a slave to lust . He begins to find comfort in shows and has also began to study the tht law, he still keeps bad company and he still breaks the law, quite frenquitly. It is In the course of his studies, that Augustine somes across a copy of Cicero's Hortensius, and it changes his entire outlook. Reading the book excites his love of philosophy, and he resolves to pursue true wisdom. Augustine decides to study the Bible, but finds it lacking in literary style.It is this chapter that sets a stage fro his conversion to Christiany, which her comes so close to in the but ultimately shays away from since it dosen't dchalegng him intellectually .In Carthage, by plagued desire he continue storay from the path of God as he seeks physical love in a serch for love. The torments of sexual desire is a major theme in of the Confessions, and Augustine often seems to identify all human sin with lust, or in his terms, "concupiscence." "Concupiscence" is ultimately a selfish and excessive desire for anything, not only for the pleasures of the flesh, and Augustine constantly identifies misdirected desire as the root cause of his wanderings from God As stated before, Augustine parrells the sin of sexual promiscuity to the ogiginal sin committed int the book of Gnesis. While he doesn’t outright states this view, it is nonetheless taken from…show more content… They follow Augustine complete conversion to Christianity after a life of sin, and the subsequent life he leads after the life changing event. In this book Augustine is a essinitally a chritian in all but name as despite yearning for a closer relationship with God , he cant bring himself to gie up a life of lustful desires.In a same ein as Constante, He put of his baptism but he was more in the vaine of fear, he eventually decided to be pubiiclly baptized. Though his thinking had changed he still engaged in sinful desires, such as such as keeping sa concubine despite an intention to marry. His own example will be first in his public acceptance of baptism and second in the writing of the Confessions itself. Augustine's final conversion at the end of Book 8 is the most famous episode from the Confessions. In a moment of intense emotional crisis, Augustine hears a mysterious child's voice chanting, "Take and read, take and read." When he does so, he encounters Romans 13:13-14, and the passage abruptly lays to rest all his doubts and fears about leaving his old life behind. In a way, it is almost a fairy-tale ending: Augustine has been desperately looking for certainty his entire spiritual life, and here, in one moment of clarity, he gets the relief that only absolute certainty can give him. Intellectually, he has been prepared for this moment for some time, and emotionally, he has been in a state of
