The Journey

Sarah Walker

ENGL2301.H2

Grimes

Dec. 8, 2014

The Journey

Journey: “an act or instance of traveling from one place to another”. Both Confessions by Augustine and The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri take readers through two different journeys. Augustine’s Confessions is an epic, but also a “diverse blend of autobiography, philosophy, and critical exegesis of the Christian Bible”. He recounts various spiritual battles on his path to salvation. His Confessions is considered the first known Western autobiography. Dante’s The Divine Comedy is an epic poem that describes Dante’s travels through Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. It is considered the “preeminent work of Italian literature”. Their processes of learning, their “guides”, and the methods of teaching/learning they encounter all play a role in Augustine and Dante’s spiritual journeys.

In Confessions Book I-IX, Augustine shares his progress toward God from childhood until the death of his mother. Looking at his spiritual journey beginning with Book I [Childhood], Augustine reflects on “human origin, will and desire, language, and memory”. He paints a nerve-racking question of how one can seek God without yet knowing who or what He is. “I know not where I came from, when I came into this life-in-death – or should I call it death-in-life? I do not know” (Confessions, Book I, 47). In Book II [The Pear Tree], his most famous, Augustine tells of the most sinful period of his life, “I burned for all the satisfactions of hell, and I sank to the animal in a succession of dark lusts” (Confessions, Book II, 52). He fell into a whirlwind of erotic desires and even theft. Book III [Student at Carthage], is where we see Augustine surrounded by his worldly/sinful desires, “a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me” (Confessions, Book III, 54) and ultimately ends up at his lowest point in his relationship with God. Book V [Augustine Leaves Carthage for Rome] is about his time teaching in Carthage and how he is now...