Augustine and Dante Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Augustine and Dante - Essay Example dea of Plato’s intellectual light into a Christian conception of spiritual light by describing the source of intellectual light as Truth or God, presenting it as evidence of God’s work within our minds. This interpretation of intellectual light as Divine Illumination had significant impact on Augustine’s theories regarding the soul, including what the soul was capable of doing and how it related to the body as he wrote in his Confessions. A thousand years later, Dante Alighieri would use these ideas of Divine Illumination to provide the underlying theme for his Divine Comedy. Augustine wrote his famous Confessions when he was in his early-40s. He wrote it as a means of exposing the sinful child he was, how he came to be a Christian and what that has meant in his life. Augustine presents his book in terms of a biography tracing his own spiritual development. He starts with childhood up to age 14 is covered in the first segment of the book in which Augustine exists as the ‘natural’ sinful man. However, as he approached his 20s, one of his friends died and he began studying with Aristotle, adopting a life of philosophy and reveling in a life of sorrow. This represents the second stage in his spiritual development which is a kind of seeking and considering his values. His full enlightenment begins as he sits in the garden one day and hears a child singing a song instructing him to read. Since his friends are talking to him about the Bible at the time, this is the book he begins reading. What he reads convinces him to convert to Christianity. The deaths of his mother and two more friends cause him to stop studying rhetoric and begin to meditate on the spiritual values of confession and the senses. This progression of the soul is almost identical in Dante’s work. The long narrative poem begins when Dante as narrator is rescued from a dark wood in which wild beasts threaten him and he is aware that he is in a place of self-destruction. He travels to the