Augustine

A detailed Summary of Augustine

In the Confessions, by Saint Augustine, Augustine addressed himself articulately and passionately to the persistent questions that stirred the minds and hearts of men since time began. The Confessions tells a story in the form of a long conversion with God. Through this conversion to Catholic Christianity, Augustine encounters many aspects of love. These forms of love help guide him towards an ultimate relationship with God. His restless heart finally finds peace and rest in God at the end of The Confessions.

Augustine finds many ways in which he can find peace in God. He is genuinely sorry for having turned away from God, the source of peace and happiness. Augustine is extremely thankful for having been given the opportunity to live with God. Augustine uses love as his gate to God's grace.

Throughout The Confessions, love and wisdom, the desire to love and be loved, and his love for his concubine, are all driving forces for Augustine's desire to find peace in God. The death of his friend upsets him deeply, but also allows him to pursue God to become a faithful Christian. Augustine often experiences darkness, blindness, and confusion while attempting to find rest in God, but he knows that when he eventually finds him his restl

Augustine talks of many different forms of love. Another form that he talks about and demonstrates many times in The Confessions is the desire to love and to be loved. Augustine's relation to his mistress focuses on the problem of restless loves, while showing that Augustine had the desire to love and the desire to be loved. For one thing, he went to Carthage wanting to be in love. He evidently was not in Carthage long before he found his mistress. Many young men stayed with a woman until the time came to marry them back then. This is what Augustine did. The love of wisdom is an experience that touches Augustine very deeply. The book that moves him to a great degree is the Hortensius by Cicero. The reading caused him to reach toward God, even though he had only learned of God seriously through Monica. It helped him to develop a different outlook on God and take life more seriously. In this love of wisdom both the love of heart and enlightenment of mind came together. This love was not dry, but it became a flaming passion that came alive in him. Cicero renewed this love for Augustine. Augustine decided that he would love first all of God's truth and all other things would find their place and take proportion. Wisdom itself meant that the one true order of the world is what makes everything stick together. Augustine later recognized this as God's truth and word, by which God had made all things. This wisdom came into the world as Christ. Augustine's conversion is clear in outline and was greatly influenced by different variations of love. From childhood he had loved the name of Christ and associated with his mother about this and about her love for him. Also, when he read Cicero it summoned him to embrace the truth and love the wisdom of knowing the truth. He later experienced renewed love for the church and for Catholic things from Ambrose. Once God had come to him in compelling love, his surrender to a new life simply replaced, if it did not completely abolish, the old tormented division. The death of a very close friend of Augustine's made him realize that all love should be rooted in God. All our love starts with God's seed,

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Approximate Word count = 1443
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous