Confessions: Language as a Simplified Pathway towards God
Since Augustine has a firm belief that human beings, born sinful, and “glued” to pleasures, are unable to reach true happiness unless they pursue God (or a better understanding of God). Writing Confessions, he tries and hopes to enlighten humanity by providing aids to find God. However, Augustine states that in order to reach God, humanity faces obstacles, such as language, time, limited perceptibility, etc. Thus, one thing that is odd about Augustine’s writing Confessions is that it seems contradict his claim that language obstructs the human’s ability to find God, because he is using language as a means to teach people. One possible reason might be that since human ability is limited, he has no other choices but to communicate through an imperfect medium, language. Nevertheless, Augustine believes that language is improvable, and can direct people to God (though imperfectly). According to Augustine, the language that is able to lead humanity to God excludes eloquence, but includes the language that provides readers or listeners with knowledge and truth. Moreover, Augustine picks to educate people through language not only because language is improvable, but also because it represents a simplified method to help humanity gain a clearer (yet still imperfect) understanding of God. Therefore, believing that humans have a capacity to develop their ability to use language, Augustine writes Confessions, a non-eloquent text providing truth and knowledge, as a simplified means of introducing humanity to God, and of showing ways to get closer to God.
Having finished telling the story about his life, in Book XI, Augustine proceeds to point out the two biggest flaws of mankind, which are the existence of time, and our reliance on language. According to Augustine, humanity is trapped in time. We focus on the separation of the past, the present, and the future. By this, he means that we can only perceive...