Stephanie Aline Marie A.

Barbas
Juris Doctor L21

St. Augustine and His Confessions

A Reflection Paper

St. Augustine of Hippo had traveled throughout his life and matured in his career as a public
speaker and teacher, while also raising a family. As he pursued his profession, he sought for his purpose
in terms of his belief in God.

Augustine focused his attention, in his written work "Confessions," on the possibility that God
might exist to the same degree that wisdom and truth do, that is, as ideas in the mind rather than as an
actual thing. Augustine believes in God, but such belief requires him to exist for the sake of his argument.
His viewpoint also emphasized memory as an unconscious knowledge that eventually led him to his
knowledge of God. He described memory as materialistic: it is reliable, everything has its own space
within it, and it holds infinite information. He also emphasized that it exists in all things, past and present,
and that no one can take it away from anyone.

Augustine believed that ideas in someone's memory must have been present in his mind before he
started learning them, just waiting to be recognized. "It must have been that they were already in my
memory, hidden away in its deeper recesses, in such a remote part of it that I might not have been able to
think of them all, if some other person had not brought them to the fore by teaching me about them," he
postulated (X: Chapter 10, 218). Furthermore, he explained that neglected memories slip back in remote
areas of the memory, and those memories become new ones again.

Like St. Augustine, we are born in this life to find our own purpose. We may encounter different
views and philosophies, secular or divine, along the way but our belief in God, our personal belief is what
matters.