Augustine Confessions Stoicism Analysis

Vida Ugochukwu
Introduction To European Civilization- Midterm-Essay

In his book Confessions Saint Augustine uses the theme of stoicism and Platonism throughout the different chapters (or in these case books) in throughout the entire book. He shows us his struggle with evil and the nature of God and how he overcame and found a solution for both issues.
Saint Augustine uses stoicism in abundance throughout Confessions. Stoicism is when you show no strong emotion toward something that would usually cause someone else to be very emotional. An example of what stoicism is, is in the passage from The Enchiridion (Epictetus 1997, 18), “…if you embrace your child or wife, that you embrace a mortal - and thus, if either of them dies, you can bear
it…”
Augustine uses stoicism when he talks about how it is bad and that it is a sin when a baby cries for everything, including things that can hurt the infant. He also shows stoicism when he talks about the loss of his friend. When he is talking about his friend it seems that the only reason he misses him so much is because he is the only person who he told everything to instead of the fact that he will just miss him for who is. It seems that Augustine is as stoic as he is because of the way he grew up and the fact that his mother was a Christian and his father was not. He seemed to have been going back and forth in how he viewed life because he seems very conflicted in the first couple of books.
Augustine once again shows how stoic he is when he made a bigger deal of his friend’s death than his own mother’s death. When he lost his friend in book four, he seemed more hurt and it seemed to affect him more than when his mother died. Although he did show that he was greatly affected by his mothers passing, it seemed that he was more set on hiding his emotions, and he spent only about a page or so mourning about his mother’s death, but he spent about three to five pages mourning the death of his friend and how that affected him. Although Augustine is very stoic throughout the book Confessions, it is also clear that he has a Platonism way of thinking as well.
Platonism is when you see everything from a spiritual sense and a spiritual beauty and love and to also not have any sensual desires.
An example of Platonism is form the book The Republic (Plato 2000, 181), he goes to say “…and they have been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like laden weights, were attached to them at their birth, but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness”?
Augustine uses Platonism a lot in Confessions. He uses it to explain a lot of things about himself and about what he believes in. “…and when I asked myself what wickedness was, I saw that it was not a substance but perversion of the will when it turns aside from you, O God, who are the supreme substance and veered towards things of the lowest order, being bowelled alive and becoming inflated with desire for things outside itself”. [ (Augustine 1961, 150) ]
Augustine had two issues that he did not resolve until he read a book about Platonism. His first issue was his battle with evil and his second issue was his look on the nature of God. They are both related and/or connected in that he had to understand one in order to understand the other. Platonism helped him realize that evil is not made by God, but that it is made by man and that in turn helped him figure out the true nature of
God.
Saint Augustine seemed to constantly battle the issue of evil.
The solution to all of his issues with evil were that he realized that all things created by God are good and evil is obviously not good, and that God created all things, and since he could not have created evil it is not a thing. He basically came to realize that evil was manmade and that it was manmade because God gave us the power of free choice when he created us.
Augustine also had issues with the nature of God. He comes to realize that God is perfect and that all of God’s creation is all good and that the nature of God is perfect and can never be anything otherwise.
Stoicism played a big role in Augustine resolving the issues he had with evil and the issues he had with the nature of God. Augustine showed stoicism with both of these by basically saying that even though he has done all of these bad things—sins on the body (which is what he says evil basically is)—anything and everything that is evil in the world is all manmade and that God could not have anything to do with evil.
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[ 1 ]. Epictetus, The Enchiridion (Uppers Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1997)
[ 2 ]. Plato, The Republic (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 2000)
[ 3 ]. Saint Augustine, Confessions (London, England: R.S. Pine-Coffin, 1961)