Augustine and Love
Augustine states continuously that he was not yet in love, but was in love with love. This statement doesn't make sense to me. I don't believe that someone can be in love with something, if he or she doesn't understand what love is. "I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the very depth of my need hated myself for not more keenly feeling the need." (pg. 35) How can Augustine hate himself if he doesn't know what loves feel like? I think a lot of Augustine's statements about love are interesting. Augustine has some very good points about love, but he contradicts himself also. Is Augustine saying he wasn't in love or he doesn't understand love? Both of these statements make me wonder how can he be in love with love, if he isn't in love.
After stating this, Augustine continues to support his statement by talking about friendship. Is the friendship Augustine mentions lustful or sincerely about love? "Thus I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of unclean desire and sullied its limpidity with the hell of lust." (pg. 35) Obviously Augustine is letting the idea of love turn straight to lust. He talks about unclean desires, but he says he wants to be clean and courtly. Maybe Augustine has the wrong idea about love.
Augustine claims, “I cared for nothing but to love and be loved” (Book II, Ch.2). Augustine demonstrates his desire for love just like Dido shows her love to Aeneas and even commits to suicide in order to pursue her love. By contrast, Aeneas never admits his marriage with Dido. However, there is a major distinction between Dido’s love and Augustine’s love. For Dido, her love is more about carnality and romanticism, while Augustine’s real need is the love of God. That’s why Augustine writes a self-condemnation about his mistaken love at Carthage, as he says, “I also fell in love, which was a snare of my own choosing” (Book III, Ch.1). Augustine denies sexual love. Instead of insisting on romantic love like Dido does, Augustine chooses to give up and begins a new a journey to find what he is destined to do, same as Aeneas leaves for Dido and continues to find
...estructive. Love led to Dido’s physical death and it lead to Augustine’s spiritual death. Virgil and Augustine further demonstrate that there our ideals greater than love. Aeneas ends his romance with Dido in order to fulfill his destiny to become founder of Rome. Aeneas must obey the gods before his passion. Augustine forsakes his life of lust when Christ calls him. He obeys his God and learns to love and esteem Him above all else. Aeneas fulfills his duty to his gods and to his country; Augustine fulfills his duty to His God and his church. Duty should take precedence and overpower love.
Due to peer pressure, Augustine steals a pear from a tree while he’s rebelliously acting out with his friends. What is troubling is that he did not steal the pear because he enjoyed the taste or genuinely wanted it, but rather, he committed this crime due to a wicked desire for sin. He has an overwhelming love for sin that
This act of evil is another example of Augustine’s restlessness, for he was looking for understanding and clarity through defying divine law. This love of sin itself is a driving force towards God, Augustine writes, “There was time in my life when I was afire to take my fill to hell” (II.1.1, p33). Augustine later understands that by God allowing him to sin, it drew him closer in relationship with God by showing him that sinning does not produce fulfilment. He writes, “You were ever present to me, mercifully angry, sprinkling very bitter disappointment over all my unlawful pleasures so that I might seek pleasure free from all disappointment” (II. 4, p34). God is showing him mercy only because he knows that later he will understand that life is more fulfilling with
St. Augustine's sordid lifestyle as a young man, revealed in Confessions, serves as a logical explanation for his limited view of the purpose of sexuality in marriage. His life from adolescence to age thirty-one was so united to passionate desire and sensual pleasure, that he later avoided approval of such emotions even within the sanctity of holy union. From the age of sixteen until he was freed of promiscuity fifteen years later, Augustine's life was woven with a growing desire for illicit acts, until that desire finally became necessity and controlled his will. His lust for sex began in the bath houses of Tagaste, where he was idle without schooling and "was tossed about…and boiling over in…fornications" (2.2). Also during that time, young Augustine displayed his preoccupation with sexual experience by fabricating vulgarities simply to impress his peers. In descript...
Augustine believed that it is because of the free will that God has given to each of us, we have the choice to choose not to sin. He believed that man was made to obey God, but when Adam chose to sin man lost his free will. Man had lost the grace of God which allowed him to continue in sin, and according to Augustine the sin of Adam affected the entire human race. Augustines life was about his confessions. For twelve years he had and inappropriate relationship.
..., the closer he was really moving toward God. He began to realize that God is all good, so nothing he creates will be of evil. “God does not create evil but it is of the world” (Augustine 230-31). Once he took responsibility for his personal life and spiritual walk, Augustine began to uncover the truths to his life. He reveals one must take responsibility for their actions and confess to develop a stronger connection with God. He then comprehends; God allows bad things to happen in your life to show you that you need him. Evil is not a lesser good, but it is a reflection of ones moral well-being. In order for one’s well being to be saved one must confess their sins to Christ.
... hand, a love which is holy: agape, unselfish love, and on the other hand a love which is unholy: distorted love of self; selfishness. Augustine clearly acknowledged unselfish love, which is holy love, the love of God. Augustine’s philosophy of love of self is defined as self-seeking and egotistical. The two self-loves are entirely divergent. One is self-giving, selfless, self-sacrificing, and the other is self-centered. One builds up; the other idea of love is self-destructive. One turns to God, and the other turns away from God. In my opinion, I think it is almost impossible in today’s world to live in the way that Augustine accepts. Nevertheless, I can agree somewhat due to the fact that he referring towards an eternal life with God in a Christian sense of thinking. In our secular culture of today's culture, many more people are beginning to turn away from God.
Augustine philosophized that evil exists due to free will; God had let human beings freely choose the kinds of lives they will lead and actions they will take, however unfortunately this results in inevitable evil. The soul must over come these temptations to rejoin God in the eternal. Augustine refers to this Platonic "ascent of the soul" in Book 9 of his Confessions where he recounts his journey to God by addressing his conversion and his exit from a secular life. He talks about his baptism with Alypius and Adeodatus and reading and writing about Neoplatonist views of Christianity. Based on these influences from Plato, Augustine 's concluded instead of trying to see existence of the transcendent in other beings one must realize the presence is everywhere including inward, no matter how compromised the soul might have become, thus showing everyone owes their existence to God. Augustine reiterates this notion saying, “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?” (Augustine). Augustine claims God made all beings with the intentions of purity in all, even when one such as himself
During the 16th and 17th century, many love poems and sonnets were written and most likely circulated for amusement and satire among poets. Though every poem is written about the poet’s undying love for their beloved, they all display different attitudes to love and ways of showing it.
It is in this solidarity that we love properly and in our natural states of sexed beings there will be no sin of lust, but an appreciation of the creative beauty of God (100). Once we are at this point, our hearts will be open to true worship of God, which is a sacrifice of the heart that is shown through external rituals so that we show ourselves and our neighbors the true glory of God (102). It is in this true worship that we turn away from this world to be with God, and we will abandon the glory and pride of the empire to be able to enter into the city of God. Cavadini exposes to the reader that Augustine’s City of God is a pilgrimage that leads us to the ideal state of solidarity, and that the “perfect worship of God is [in] the Eucharistic life” that transforms society into the compassion of Christ, that is the pure love for one another
But we humans are now constantly attracted towards evil, attracted to excessive satisfaction of our lower desires for material things and pleasures. And the only way we can break free from this kind of sinfulness is if we receive grace from God. But there is no way we can simply earn this trust or grace just by simply being good. We are unable not to sin. Our will cannot free itself from the bondage to sin through any effort of our own. However, through no merit of our own, God may bestow His grace upon us. And if he does, we may avoid sinning, but if he does not, we are left to what human nature now offers us, the certainty of sin. Augustine’s understanding of evil is that he circles around one main point; all that exists is good. To truly understand what Augustine, mean, we must first understand what is evil and what are the nature of God. He defines evil as a contrary to nature, hurtful and corrupts. This is a privation of good. For example, if a cut is evil, but if the cut is taken away then the evil is gone. However, the cut cannot have existed if the health of the body was good. By accepting these definitions, we can say that if evil is the privation of good, then as shown, something must first be good for it to be evil. Therefore, evil cannot have an independent existence apart from
He often struggled with his own desires and actions. He was ashamed of his impulses and believed that this type of fleshly sin was holding him back from god spiritually. He states that he wishes he could take up abstinence and envies those who do. Even after he is forced to leave his long time concubine after his mother arranges his marriage, he takes up another. After the misbehaving’s in his youth this is what Augustine feels guilty for the most, and seems to haunt him throughout the book. This was not a completely unusual view in Augustine’s time period. Abstinence was thought of highly in many religious sects and looked down on
Some people believe that there is no such thing as “true love” they believe that love is nothing but an illusion designed by social expectations. These people believe that love ultimately turns into pain and despair. This idea in some ways is true. Love is not eternal it will come to an end one way or another, but the aspect that separates true love from illusion, is the way love ends. “True Love” is much too powerful to be destroyed by Human imperfection; it may only be destroyed by a force equal to the power of love. Diotima believed that “Love is wanting to posses the good forever” In other words love is the desire to be immortal and the only way that we are able to obtain immortality is through reproduction, and since the act of reproduction is a form of sexual love, then sexual love is in fact a vital part of “True love”. Sexual love is not eternal. This lust for pleasure will soon fade, but the part of love that is immortal, is a plutonic love. You can relate this theory to the birth of love that Diotima talks about. She says that love was born by a mortal mother and immortal father. The mother represents the sexual love, the lust for pleasure. The father represents the plutonic love that is immortal. Plutonic love is defined as a true friendship, the purest of all relationships. A true plutonic love will never die; it transcends time, space, and even death.
In The First Letter to the Corinthians and Confessions, sexual immorality is a prominent issue on which both Paul and Augustine spent long lengths— Paul made numerous warning to people not to be immoral and Augustine was regretful about his adolescence years for having too many immoral sexual behabior. According to these two authors, sexual immorality is defined as any sexual experiences without getting married and is often known as adultery. Even though they share the same definition for sexual immorality, they differ from each other from two aspects: the cause of sexual immorality and the solution to sexual immorality. For the cause of immorality, Paul believed that the lack of control of physical desire is the main cause that leads to sexual