Preview

Augustine's Happy Life

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
800 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Augustine's Happy Life
The “Happy Life”, According to Augustine

“How then am I to seek for you, Lord? When I seek for you, my God, mu quest is for the happy life. I will seek you that ‘my soul may live’, for my body derives life from my soul, and my soul devices life from you. How then shall I seek for the happy life?”

Saint Augustine's passionate and immeasurably personal account of his conversion and views has enamored readers for centuries and stood the test of time. Unfortunately, the passion and personal nature of the writing can stand as a barrier to comprehension, with much dense ideas to breakdown, and many possible interpretations. Add to this the fact that the work has the character of one long and sustained prayer to God, contains many passages that are tediously meditative, and refers to a time and place that are foreign, to understand and appreciate the work is daunting, to say the least. However, one overarching sentiment of his book ‘Confessions’ is indisputable; his views on what components are necessary to live a life of true joy. There is one unanimous goal that every human being mutually strives to achieve, which is to simply be happy. According to Augustine, the true and greatest joy is joy in God. Even to those who have yet to believe in him remain drawn in toward some image of true joy, leading them on a quest to obtain its origin. We all yearn for it, yet the only path that will ever arrive at this destination is through God. To experience it without him is impossible. Any straying, disobedience, or refusal from God can only be caused by a human’s ignorance in acknowledging that God is the root of all good. With that said, it is easy to comprehend why we all seek it: because it fills the hunger in our hearts. All beautiful things come from God, with all aspects attributed by him. He is the center of being, the index catalyst in the universes existence. To understand anything without him is to only see the surface, and to never have any deeper meaning.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Autobiography is a method which allows the reader and the writer to reflect on a personal, and factual journey through the past. The creation of the autobiography opens up new doors which enlighten the reader into the development of history, which is a uniquely western idea. Augustine’s Confessions uses this story as an autobiography to describe his distinctions between his ideas of Inner and Outer Man, which he reflects through his various books. He also uses the distinction between his books to describe his life as a pilgrimage from the City of Man to the City of God.…

    • 658 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Augustine, although recognized as a saint today, was not always a man of great faith. For most of his life, he was tempted with sin, and he struggled to figure out who God was. In the earlier part of his life, he was fascinated by rhetoric. He admired famous rhetoricians, and he even wrote some works of his own, including The Confessions, in which he reveals the struggles he faced. Augustine’s attraction to rhetoricians is not something unfamiliar to a modern audience, as today it is something called “celebrity worship”.…

    • 671 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In W.W. Jacobs ¨The Monkey’s Paw, the first man who had the monkey’s paw was an old fakir who had put a spell on it to show that fate ruled people’s lives and if you chose to interfere with it then it would bring fate upon themselves. The old fakir had already used two out of the three wishes and wished for his third wish to be death. So the old fakir died and that’s how Sergeant Morris got the paw. Mr. White was hesitant about using the paw because he thought that the magical paw would not work.…

    • 503 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Montaigne and Augustine

    • 1372 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In response to Montaigne 's statement that posited the superiority of human nature over the practice of "owing our competence to our own powers", I believe that Augustine would firmly disagree and claim that in order for humans to truly come into communion with their creator, that they would need to transcend their natural urges and inclinations by way of prayer, confession, and piety. In his Confessions, Augustine spoke of a drunkard who, through the procurement of a few begged coins, had seemingly obtained happiness (although, admittedly, it was not true happiness) due to the dulling of his senses and thus finding a temporary escape in his cognitive awareness and regressing to more of his natural or animal state. Augustine later commented that he on more than one occasion felt like the drunkard in search of temporal happiness, but knew that the way was not to be gained by regressing or dulling ones intelligence and…

    • 1372 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Saint Augustine’s Confessions autobiographically chronicles his spiritual journey into developing his beliefs and accepting Christianity. He only recounts the events from his childhood and adolescence that lead to his conversion. Instead of anecdotally laying out his life story, Augustine chooses to write about his personal struggles to become a devout Christian. Throughout the story, he entangles himself into different philosophical schools of teaching to better understand his take…

    • 961 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    PHI2000 The Good Life

    • 1319 Words
    • 6 Pages

    St. Augustine defines happiness as the enjoyment of the chief good; out of the soul is where man finds himself and what is found cannot be lost but is led by following God and obeying his will (Sommers & Sommers, 2010). St Augustine believes that to live the good life is to obey God’s will and command he maintains that we cannot achieve salvation or happiness without God’s grace (Sommers & Sommers, pg 330). In support of St. Augustine I believe that man has the choice to live life to the fullest even through the trials and tribulations that he may experience and suffered. St. Augustine who distrusted reason and taught that moral goodness depends on subordinating oneself to the will of God (Rachels and Rachels, pg 158) which also helps to support his thought that through God can we attain the good life.…

    • 1319 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cowboys Post Civil War

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The way things are now are very different from the ways they did it in the past.…

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This short excerpt from St. Augustine of Hippo’s autobiography, Confessions, describes an incident in which Augustine uses to evaluate the nature of virtue and sin. He attributes this event from his youth as a proposal for the need to find God in order to find grace and turn away from sin. Augustine shows profound honesty when he confesses that he stole the pears not because he wanted or needed them, but because he enjoyed the lustful, immoral and wicked feeling he obtained from the act of stealing and that he had a deep, subconscious desire to sin. Augustine tells this tale as if he is reconciling for his actions. It is presented with such rectitude and reconciliation that it feels more like a prayer than a forthright autobiography.…

    • 905 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Determining whether the God you praise and worship is choleric because of your presence by the sins you’ve created is a never ending battle in the 17th-18th centuries. Upon the Burning of Our House is a poem, with nine stanzas, written by Anne Bradstreet explaining her understanding and able to live and learn from sin with God. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is a work, written as a sermon, by Jonathan Edwards who preaches to all the non-Puritan sinners, that if they don’t convert and take blame for their sins, God’s anger toward them will be unbearable and force them to the pits of hell. Analyzing Bradstreet’s and Edwards’ works, a reader can distinguish the personality of the two writers and the different views of God that people acquire.…

    • 678 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Augustine's Flaws

    • 1465 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The Confessions, written by St. Augustine, have a large part of theology in today’s world because of the great deal of contemplation and conversion that Augustine experiences throughout his lifetime. While these are both true, there are major flaws in Augustine’s understanding of God due to a multitude of reasons. Augustine even makes this claim in his own writings, stating that he continues to have a restless heart even after the book was written. Because he believes that God is greatly superior in which humans cannot begin to understand Him because of our great inferiority, Augustine fails to develop his own personal relationship with God because he sees too much of a distance between himself and God, explaining why he continues to have…

    • 1465 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the fourth book of Confessions by Augustine he begins to question his faith so he joins a group known as the Manichees but he is disappointed and deceived by their teachings; he also learns a lot about his friendships and grief. Shortly after his friends Baptism Augustine mourns his death and he gains a new perspective on friendship. He discovers that friendship is the binding of one soul to another and he did not want his friend to die because the memory of him will be lost. A friendship is when two separate bodies share one soul and the death of his friend means that Augustine's soul is broken in half. Augustine then begins to analyze his own misery and he comes to the conclusion that his own misery is a selfish indulgence; he states…

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Biblical Worldview Essay

    • 722 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the eschatology perspective, the epistle of Romans teaches in 8:28-29 God’s ultimate goals. God’s purpose for choosing us and the goal of the program He has predestined is our conformity to the image of Jesus Christ: “to be conformed to the image of His Son.” This optimism protracts believers even while they suffer, knowing “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (8:28).…

    • 722 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    St. Augustine blames our own selves for our happiness. I think St. Augustine has a point alone. We have needs and desires being humans. Tracing it back, our unhappiness is rooted in ourselves. The only problem I see in the discussion is that St. Augustine is less concern about the process of what makes a person unhappy and more focus on the root of unhappiness.…

    • 276 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This paper contains the different definitions of what it means to be a human being and living a good life. In this paper we will take a look at Hobbes and Augustine’s definition of the human being and the good life. Both of these philosophers give examples of what they think the good life is, and the desires of human nature. In this paper I will talk about Augustine and his thought of how in order to live a good life, one needs to seek God to find true happiness. I will also talk about what being a human being and living the good life means to Hobbes, and his thought of how human equality is the ticket to happiness and the good life. I think Augustine offers a more accurate description of the human being and the good life because I agree that true happiness can’t be found in earthly things. I believe there is much more to life than finding happiness and self-worth in success, money, fame, popularity, and etc. Life chasing after materialistic items won’t bring you happiness because you will always feel like there is something more you want and desire, the materialistic items won’t satisfy you.…

    • 1618 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    St. Augustine

    • 1874 Words
    • 8 Pages

    St. Augustine of Hippo is one of the most influential men when it comes to the Christian faith. When walking the Christianity section of a bookstore today, one can find mountains of books either by or about him. After seeing so much on the man it leads one to wonder who exactly was St. Augustine of Hippo and why exactly was he important to the church. St. Augustine is not just studied in religious aspects but in philosophy as well. Augustine was born in 354 in Roman Africa. His father, Patricius, was a pagan, and his mother, Monica, was Christian. Scholars believe that Augustine 's ancestors included Berbers, Latins and Phoenicians (Portalle). Augustine 's family name, Aurelius, suggests that his father 's ancestors were freedmen of the gens Aurelia given full Roman citizenship by the Edict of Caracalla in 212. Augustine 's family had been Roman, from a legal standpoint, for at least a century when he was born. It is assumed that his mother, Monica, was of Berber origin, on the basis of her name, but as his family were honestiores, Augustine 's first language is likely to have been Latin (Portalle). At the age of eleven, he was sent to school at Madaurus, a small Numidian city about nineteen miles south of Thagaste. There he became familiar with Latin literature, as well as pagan beliefs and practices (Portalle). While at home in 369 and 370, he read Cicero 's dialogue Hortensius, which he described as leaving a lasting impression on him and sparking his interest in philosophy (unknown).…

    • 1874 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays