“The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and be loved” (24). As mentioned in Book II,Adolescence, Augustine recounts that growing-up involved a kind of explorative search for love that permeated his youth. From this understanding, it becomes apparent that the Divine or God becomes Augustine’s fulfillment in this endeavor for an unconditional and all abiding love or agape, that challenged and changed his interior life over time until he devoted himself to the Divine 386 CE. He writes, “I intend to remind myself of my past foulness and carnal corruption, not because I love them but so that I may love you, my God. It is from love of your love that I make the act of recollection” (24). However, it seems that Augustine, as well as us in the 21^st Century, present what we want a particular audience to see and understand about ourselves and our lives in relation to world around us. British essayist and cultural thinker, John Berger, explains the act of “seeing comes before words in his work, Ways of Seeing. Berger expounds that, “it is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain the world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and know is never settled…yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight (Berger, 7).

Thus, it seems like what I see and would potentially write about in my own life in the 21^st century would consist of interconnective narratives of my own interior life – my ruminations, my perplexities, my memories, my tragic and wondrous experiences, my being and becoming, my past, present, and prospective future. Since writing in itself is supposedly purposeful for some reason or agenda, the act of recording one’s thoughts seems to always be driven by some external factor (a career, self-expression, recognition) that intrinsically motivates one to pursue such inquiry. However, I think if I tasked myself with writing something just for myself, and maybe someone would find it in the 22^nd Century, I would intentionally include the aspects of my life that might seem quite mundane to someone today, like process of doing my laundry or placing my grocery items on the black conveyor-belt at the market. In both these instances, information about the currency I used to purchase my clothes and groceries would be described, the type of clothes and food I wore and ate would be included, and the kinds of automated machines that I used to complete these tasks proficiently would be referenced. I imagine in the next century that the industrialization of more advanced automated devices will be produced, which will most likely make my everyday routine look like I am probably over-exerting my energy and monotonously wasting my time. Through these narratives of my routine, I would incorporate my thoughts and explanations – how I saw things around me through the interactions with others. Hopefully, what I see and know about my life and the lives of the others around me would be meshed closely together, so that an understanding of my livelihood and practices of our civilization could be teased together forming some sort of historical recollection.

For Augustine, it is clear that he is intentionally writing his Confessions for a specific purpose, in which he is using a kind of sincere piety to rhetorically persuade others of his own  reverent self-presentation of his relationship with God. Within this reverence, the reader is given glimpses of what his life looked like, for instance, we become aware that “one learns the three R’s of reading, writing, and arithmetic” during the time of Augustine’s education. It becomes evident that education was to teach an individual to be literate and mathematically able to manipulate numbers, rather that teaching one the natural properties of science or the historical or mystical occurrences within the social sciences. However, the reader must make a good amount of historical inferences within Augustine’s writing to the time period in which he is writing (around 400 CE) to obtain an understanding of the social scene he finds himself within. In other words, Augustine sees the world spiritually through God solely without any other point of reference, like the rural, and urban ways of living and being. The Divine is omnipresent within every aspect of his life from his waking to his resting. Thus, it seems as if he intentionally wrote in a way that every moment of his life was spent critically contemplating about the meaning and presence of God in his life. In a sense, what is excluded from his Confessions is his doubts (of faith in God), his fears of being physically alive, his joy, and his mundanity of his everyday life. These exclusions provoke questions regarding Augustine’s actual self – did Augustine interior life truly revolve around his piety of God, or is Augustine just persuading his audience to undeniably believe so to gain others to become reverent to the Divine?

Ultimately, “what we see [within Augustine’s text] and know is never settled” (Berger, 7). Presumably, the reader must decide for themselves Augustine’s intentions for writing. However, it would be interesting to understand what kind of social, economic, and political influence the church or religion had during the time Augustine wrote his Confessions. Could there be some sort of societal gain from both prospects of the governing and the citizenry to have the whole population believe in the duty and practice of being entirely devoted to God?

Work Cited: Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. British Broadcasting Corp., 2012.