Mr. Harris
Church History 2nd period
October 2, 2017
Saint Augustine, Intellectual snob or intellectually curious?
Throughout the confessions, by Augustine of Hippo, Augustine was academically curious. Augustine was not an intellectual snob. St. Augustine’s intellectual curiosity lead him to convert into the Christian faith. Augustine was academically curious, not because he thought there was any practical purpose for it but simply for the sake of knowing and having knowledge. In the Confessions, Augustine shows us that he is intellectually curious. He asks himself what he loves about God. By asking himself what he loves about God, Augustine attempts to find and get to know God. Saint Augustine knows there is a God. He set …show more content…
Augustine talks about memory. Augustine tells us that memory is so grand that we could not grasp what it truly is. Saint Augustine, asks many questions regarding memory, he asks himself why he cannot understand the vastness of memory. Saint Augustine also asks why we cannot understand memory, memory is a part of our mind, if memory is part of our mind then is it really that vast that our minds cannot understand it. The mind holds memory and in that memory, there are different skills that memory can possess. Saint Augustine questions that memory is a simple concept. He goes on to tell us about the different types of memories such as emotional memory, skillful memory, and ideal memory. This is another example of how academically curious Saint Augustine was. Augustine took something that we do not think about going so into depth, such as memory and asked a variety of intellectual questions about it. Augustine also talks about the pursuit of happiness throughout the confessions. Saint Augustine asks how people can purse a happy life without knowing what a happy life is. He says that maybe we already know what a happy life is because we might have already lived a happy life at one point in time. Augustine also says that maybe its not the pursuit of happiness that people look for, maybe it is the pursuit of happiness in God they look …show more content…
Augustine shows us throughout the Confessions that he was academically curious and was not an intellectual snob. He was not intellectually curious for a practical purpose but because he wanted to simply grasp and have knowledge of things. Augustine also show us just how importance his intellectual curiosity was. It was not only important in an intellectual way but also in a moral and spiral way. Without St. Augustine’s moral, spiritual and intellectually conversion, Augustine would not have gotten where he is. He would have never embraced the true existence of God and would have never converted into a Christian. These things were important because they made Saint Augustine the person he is today. He came to be known as the person who brought Christianity into the Roman