The Confessions of St. Augustine
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The Confessions of St. Augustine is a portrait of the inner world of Augustine of Hippo. The author was the bishop of Hippo in Roman Africa for 35 years, during the time of the decline of Roman civilization on that continent. Augustine is considered one of the important Fathers of the Church in the West, and he helped form Christian theology in the early history of the church. In his Confessions, Augustine shows the depth of his religious belief and writes extensively about his own inner turmoil about such events in his life as the time when he was a child and stole pears from a neighbors tree, a crime that haunted him for the rest of his life. Augustine borrowed heavily from Plato. He agreed with Plato about the status of transcendent Ideas, but he did so in an altered form. Augustine agreed that the Ideas constituted the stable and unchangeable forms of all things and provided a solid basis for human knowledge, but he noted that Plato lacked an adequate doctrine of creation. He argued that Plato's metaphysical conception could be fulfilled by the Judaeo-Christian revelation of the supreme Creator. Augustine thus identified Plato's Ideas with the collective expression of God's Word, the Logos, and saw all archetypes as being contained within and expressing of the being of Christ. His Confessions is an important work detailing the inner life and of the religious man. It is also a book that links the sinner with redemption, for Augustine presents himself as a gre
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ugustine 164).
The essence of the Confessions is a close and intense self-examination, and Augustine subjects himself to this analysis and draws conclusions from what he discovers. Augustine looks deep into his life, his actions, and his soul, and the profundity of this look into himself creates a sense of despair at what he was before and great joy at what he has become. the act of becoming, his conversion, is the central issue in this work, and it becomes a necessity as he sees the depths to which he has drifted in his life:
I probed the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it, and when I mustered them all before the eyes of my heart, a great storm broke within me, bringing with it a great deluge of tears (Augustine 177).
Another issue raised in the book revolves around the Manichees and the doctrines they espoused. Augustine expresses great angry at this sect:
The thought of the Manichees filled me with angry resentment and bitter sorrow, yet I pitied them too, because in their ignorance of the sacraments that heal us they raved against the very remedy that could have cured them of their madness (Augustine 186).
Augustine himself had been a member of this sect, and curing them of their "madn
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1542
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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