Confessions, Augustine of Hippo

 

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 “And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.” 

“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.” 

Confessions, an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written in Latin between AD 397 and 400. The work outlines St. Augustine's sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity

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Augustine wrote the Confessions, Christianity was still in its'infancy. Its main body of followers were1l1:e ..peasant class, for if had no philosophical found­ations with which to attract the intellectuais. Augustine however, was an intellectual aaiviste and was faced with the dilenlma of substan­tiating the Christian religion in the eyes of the- intelligentsia:. How might he do this? Necessarily; he was forced to draw upon previous sources - th~ same ones that the intellectuals were familiar with and subscribed to. Augustine relied upon the authors of the Old Testament and the New Testament, also, Virgil, Cicero, and Anaximenes, but none more so than the Neoplatonists. Even though it is highly un­likely that St. Augustine had direct access to either Socratic or Platonic modes of thought, as is evidenced by his reference to the fact that he disdained Greek as a written language '(Bk.l,