Saint Augustine Worldview Essay

In this paper, I intend to show Book X, chapter twenty-seven of how Saint Augustine’s Confessions clarifies on Augustine’s overall worldview and helps us to grasp what it means to be a responsible self according to Augustine. In Book X, Chapter twenty-seven, Augustine references serval themes that can be seen throughout the book, which includes the Prodigal Son and the importance of order. These themes reinstate Augustine’s worldview in that God is in everything and why according to Augustine we must live through God in order to be a responsible self. Augustine addresses the story of the Prodigal Son from the book of Luke, in which the younger son took his inheritance that was given to him by his father and went off to live in a distant land. The Prodigal Son was searching for pleasure and “his soul was blinded, and this blindness was the measure of the distance he traveled away from [God]” (Augustine 38).
Like the Prodigal Son, Augustine was blinded when he “looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but
He reiterates the idea that God is in all creations and that God creates only good; “You, my God, are the source of all good” (Augustine 49). With this in mind, one can connect this to Augustine’s overall worldview in that God is in everything.

According to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine asserts that to live a life of a responsible self one must pursue happiness merely for God, and overcome the gravitation towards sin. Augustine believes that humans were created, “for [God] and our hearts find no peace until they rest in [him]” (Augustine 21). He believes that God is within all individuals and all creations in this world. In Book X, chapter twenty-seven Augustine wants to uphold the idea that we can not find happiness in “earth pleasures” because “to rejoice in [God] is the only true happiness” (Augustine