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“Confessions” – Book IV: Chapters 9 – 16
An olive tree that is believed to have been planted by Saint Augustine in Thagaste.
Yes, it’s been a while. But we’re still here and ready to go ahead.
We will continue with Book IV, Chapters 9 – 16.
In this book, returning to Thagaste from his studies at Carthage, Augustine began to teach rhetoric, making friends and chasing a career along the way. Though giving some account of these worldly matters, Augustine spends much of Book IV examining his conflicted state of mind during this period. Having begun his turn toward God (through the desire for truth) but continuing to be ensnared in sinful ways, Augustine wrestled painfully with the transitory nature of the material world and with the question of God’s nature in relation to such a world.
The these sections, be mindful of how Manichaeism influenced his thoughts during this time and how he tries to rectify them now looking back.
Questions for ‘Confessions’ Book I: Chapters 1 – 10
Don’t let this baby’s unbearable cuteness deceive you. She’s a helpless, natural born sinner according to Augustine.
Hi everyone, we will be covering Book I, chapters 1 – 10.
Augustine titled his deeply philosophical and theological autobiography Confessions to implicate two aspects of the form the work would take. To ‘confess’, in Augustine’s time, meant both to give an account of one’s faults to God and to praise God or to speak one’s love for God. These two aims come together in the Confessions in an elegant but complex sense: Augustine narrates his ascent from sinfulness to faithfulness not simply for the practical edification of his readers, but also because he believes that his narrative itself is really a story about God’s greatness and of the fundamental love all things have for Him. Thus, in the Confessions form equals content to a large degree—the natural form for Augustine’s story of redemption to take would be a direct address to God, since it is God who must be thanked for such redemption. (That said, a direct address to God was a highly original form for Augustine to have used at the time).
Project Augustine 