Death And Enlightenment By Augustine - 1313 Words

Death and Enlightenment It may seem reasonable that Augustine accepted, at the time of his friend’s death, that God is unchangeable and humans are a temporary creation and just a part of the whole. However, by paying close attention to the text Augustine is writing the Confessions retrospectively. He ends up recognizing the directionality of his love and the change in his grieving in the future, after the deaths of his friend and Monica. Augustine is looking back on his life and is noticing where his ideas of love and grief were wrong. Only after Monica’s death, Augustine understands that humans are a temporary creation and God alone is never changing. When he looks back in retrospect he also sees the change in his grieving. He ends up accepting that grief is a human sin that God can forgive. When Augustine was a Manichean his passionate attachment to his friends shows how he failed to recognize that the love of friends is good, but friends must be loved in God. Humans cannot be loved in themselves alone because only God does not change. The death of Augustine s childhood friend in Thagaste acts as a message from God. His friend s Catholic family has him baptized before his death, which was almost done to Augustine. Augustine, being a Manichean at the time, no longer believes baptism is essential to life, but his friend, also a Manichean, refuses to share in his disapproval for the Catholic Sacrament and rejects Augustine s attention. Whether the baptism had anShow MoreRelatedSt. Augustine s Confessions And Dante s Inferno1746 Words   |  7 Pagestowards life and passion. In Book VIII.xi (29) the reader finds St. Augustine in a state of despair and anguish because of his ongoing internal struggle between his mind and body. Afterwards, he undergoes a surreal experience that ultimately leads to the climax of Confessions, his conversion to Christianity. 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