St. Augustine's Struggles

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discusses the self in a more practical manner by relating his own life and struggles to find inner happiness and wholeness. He critically inquires what it means to be a person and by exploring this idea of the self and being a person, he himself found personal subjectivity. In the Confessions, St. Augustine relayed his own struggle as a person, specifically, he transforms himself into a metaphor of the struggle of both body and soul in order to find genuine happiness, which he later on discovered exists only in God’s love. He uses allegories and transforms himself into a literary character to present himself to God. By doing so, he actually collocates eternity with the ephemeral and the creator with the created. Given this scenario, what …show more content…
He didn’t want to teach anymore and just abandon his worldly desires such as sex and having a successful career. It is noticeable that throughout Confessions, Augustine struggled between two opposing forces, sexual desire and spiritual desire until he decided to confront this issue. In his garden, he heard a child saying “tolle, lege,” meaning “take and read”. At that time, Augustine was reading the letters of St.Paul and allowed the book to fall open on its own. He was surprised to see what fell in front of him, specifically at the thirteenth verse of the thirteenth chapter of the letter to the Romans wherein it says “to give up the way of the senses and walk the path of Christ.” With this, Augustine realized that to be truly free, one must choose the interior soul over the distractions of senses. He chose to follow Paul’s advice and decided to give up sex, marriage and instead chose to live a spiritual life. He chose the soul over the body, the intellect over desire, faith over questioning and reason over uncertainty. Specifically, to put it in action, the first thing he did was to give up his teaching position, he decided to become Christian and received baptism. St.Augustine felt that it was a good decision because upon doing so, he experienced peace
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