Augustine Confessions Analysis

The relationship between entertainment and violence has always been rife with controversy. Today’s debate over violent video games, movies, and television shows is yet another manifestation of this timeless issue. In Confessions, Augustine addresses how humans consume violence as entertainment and proposes two reasons for why they do so. One is an act of pleasure seeking that uses the sight of tragedy or violence to bask in the feeling of false pity. The other is a carnal desire for excitement and adrenaline fueled by primal instincts. According to Augustine, both motivations degrade and dehumanize the viewer of violence. However, Augustine deeply valued the importance of learning from any viable source; Cicero’s Hortensius convinces him “that

He casts unequivocal blame on Alypius for indulging his base instincts and succumbing the mindset of the crowd. However, he does not explicitly state whether the lethal games of the gladiators are inherently immoral. Augustine focuses solely on the role of the audience in the arena, struck with a “frenzy of hideous delight”, and Alypius specifically (105). Alypius’s “friends and fellow-students” compel him against his will to come with them to the games, but once he arrives, a combination of curiosity and social pressure breaks his resistance and makes him a slave to the brutal spectacle (105). Augustine’s moral judgment is obvious as he describes the descent of Alypius into savagery: “Seeing the blood he drank deep of the savagery. He did not turn away but fixed his gaze upon the sight. He drank in all the frenzy, with no thought of what had happened to him, reveled in the wickedness of the contest and was drunk with lust for blood. He was no longer the man who had come there but one of the crowd to which he had come, a fit companion for those who had brought him” (103). The cause of Alypius’s moral failure does involve individual concupiscence, but it is the social influence of others around him and the Dionysian destruction of individuation that defines Alypius’s transgression and thus incurs the anger of Augustine.

From the perspective of the modern reader, Augustine’s description of lust for violence does not seem to mesh with The Aeneid. Surely, no one in today’s culture would turn to Virgil’s classic work to satisfy his or her thirst for gore. However, The Aeneid is a lengthy work and Virgil certainly wanted his audience remain enthralled throughout its duration. Perhaps his detailed and repetitive descriptions of battlefield violence are at least partially intended to appeal to the audience’s carnal desire for blood in the same vein of Alypius and the crowd at the gladiator games. If this were this case, Augustine would certainly condemn Virgil’s motivations. Myriad examples of seemingly irrelevant deaths of minor characters, described in gruesome detail, abound in The Aeneid and lend credence to the theory that Virgil inserts unnecessary graphic imagery into his narrative in order to target his audience’s perverse attraction to violence for its own sake. For example, Virgil describes relatively minor Trojan warrior Antiphates’s death at the hands of Turnus in the midst of a large battle: “The black wound’s open chasm/Yielded a foaming wave of blood” (lines 976 and 977). The death of Antiphates is of little consequence to the plot