St. Augustine's Confessions: the Connection Between Character and Evil

St. Augustine 's Confessions: The Connection between Character and Evil Saint Augustine 's powerful prayer to God tells the story of his struggles that led towards his conversion to Christianity. This journey toward Christ was difficult for Augustine, as it required him to overcome his misunderstanding of evil and his own sin. In Augustine 's adolescents, a strong desire for lust overtook his life, not only hurting him spiritually, but also hurting the one woman who supported his conversion, his mother Monica. Upset and looking for repentance in all his wrongdoings, Augustine wanted to begin a spiritual journey toward God, though he was not exactly sure who God was. He learned of different forms of evil and sin through his recollection of his infancy and youth, his study of the Manichean religion, Neoplatonist doctrines, and finally his conversion to Christianity. Augustine 's study of the different concepts of evil and sin prepared him for his conversion and his influential role in the Christian religion. Augustine 's struggles take many forms throughout the Confessions. The reader frequently finds Augustine internally struggling with God by asking difficult, philosophical questions. The answer to Augustine 's question of what the seed of evil is, is revealed in Book VII and develops throughout the prayer. The translator of the Confessions, Henry Chadwick, tells of the different forms of evil throughout the prayer stating,
"Therefore ‘evil ' is not Being but a lack of it, a deficiency inherent in having been placed on a lower step that higher entities. Since to exist is for a Platonist to be a ‘substance ', evil has no ‘substance '." (xx)
Chadwick is describing both the Manichean and that Platonist views of evil. Both of these views in the prayer provoke Augustine 's interest to study more about both religions. After Augustine 's conversion to Christianity, he learns that evil is the result of the misuse of free choice through rational thinking (Chadwick

Bibliography: Augustine, Saint. Confessions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Chadwick, Henry. Confessions: Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. McMahon, Robert. Augustine 's Prayerful Ascent. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1989 Stock, Brian. Augustine the Reader. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.