Response Paper on Augustine's Confessions

Response Paper on Augustine's Confessions

The purpose of this paper is to discover St.Augustine's intention, motivation, and needs of writing the thirteen books of “The Confessions.” Why St. Augustine has written about his own life, own sins, his own arriving to elegance, and what kind of message has St. Augustine tried to make in his thirteen books? This paper will discover what incidents happened in the life of St. Augustine that might encouraged him to write his “The Confessions”, probable motivations for causes St. Augustine might have written the book, what kind of a book “The Confession” is, and what the themes and subjects of St. Augustine's book can communicate to the reader of this paper. The other half of the paper discusses about distinguish spirituality of St. Augustine, some weak and weird points related to his spirituality, reconciliation of his work with the fact that Augustine is a roman catholic, doctrines taught in his work, the reasons behind classic nature of his work, and practical lessons for an individual's own life after examining the work of St. Augustine.

To start with, it would be essential to provide some background of St. Augustine's “The Confessions.” His work was commenced around 397 AD and was available in print form near 401 AD, thus approximately one or two years after St. Augustine became bishop, in Valerius' place of and was regarded as the bishop of Hippo. There exist a number of theories, specifically in academic, about why St. Augustine wrote “The Confessions?” O'Donnell (2005) stated he believed that “The Confession” by St. Augustine was not written actually for any pragmatic reason that is leaning towards others, at least not principally, however, the book mainly addressed towards God. O'Donnell (2005) further argued “human readers are not only disregarded, but seated in the ...