. Describe Augustine’s Confessions and explain its importance as both a religious document and a major literary text

Question

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Answer 1

1. Augustine had recently been made Bishop of Hippo when he felt the need to come to terms with his past. He did this in the form of the Confessions, the first Western autobiography. Though addressed to God, it was intended to be read by fellow Christians.
Augustine had enjoyed an apparently wild adolescence. He describes it as a kind of “overcast” and “shadowy” atmosphere in which he gave up the “bright path” of friendship for carnal pleasure. (The references to “light” and “truth” reflect, to some scholars, the influence of the Mithras cult on early Christian thought.) For Augustine, sex is the means of transmission of original sin, and sexual desire is evidence of humanity’s inability to resist it. Such thinking about the dangers of sexuality has exercised enormous influence over Western thought. In Book 8, leading a dissolute life as a student, but despairing of his lifestyle, he describes his conversion to Christianity. 2. Augustine’s storytelling is so compelling that the Confessions became one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages.
3. The frankness of Augustine’s autobiography would also make it influential later. But the Confessions is also a profoundly religious treatise. For Augustine, humankind is capable of understanding true ideas only when they are illuminated by God. He adds to the Platonic emphasis on pure ideas a Christian belief in the sacred word of God, in which God’s “light” is understood to shine. In the Confessions, too, Augustine codified the idea of typological readings of the Bible, proposing, for example, Eve, the biological mother of humanity, as a type for Mary.