St. Augustine's Character as Illustrated Within His Confessions
The character of St. Augustine (354-430) as seen within his Confessions (begun 397), which he wrote as a long epistle to God, in midlife, marks a distinct turning point in the life, attitudes, and values of Augustine the man. The content of Augustine's Confessions itself points to personality traits of Augustine's including honesty, sincerity, humility, piety, a capacity for self-reflection, and a desire for self-improvement. Augustine spent his youth licentiously, and up to the point of his midlife, remained far more interested in hedonistic pursuits than in being of service to God. All of that changed for him midlife, however, precipitated by a sort of "midlife crisis" (as we would call it nowadays). At that point in his life, when he was about 43, Augustine realized that none of the activities from which he derived temporary pleasure were genuinely fulfilling, and that genuine fulfillment came to him only from service to God. Augustine was also strongly affected, in a spiritual sense, by his mother's death at around this time. Augustine's mother had been a devout Christian, far more so than Augustine's father, and she had always hoped that her son would follow her own spiritual path. However, St. Augustine's own Christian beliefs were not especially strong until after his mother's death. It was then that Augustine himself converted to Christianity, taking the core value of his beloved mother into himself. In this essay, I will discuss how Augustine's character is reflected within the words of his Confessions.
Augustine's Confessions is, first and foremost, a work of self-revelation. As...
Thy anger had overshadowed me, and I knew it not. I was become deaf by the rattling of the chins of my mortality, the punishment for my soul's pride; and I wandered farther from Thee, and Thou didst "suffer" me; and I was tossed to and fro, and wasted Augustine's reflections in this passage brought into fore the fact that rebellion against the divine authority was, for him, through the
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