Metaphors of Illness and Health. Book II of St. Augustine's Confessions

Abstract

The starting point is the passage in which St. Augustine acknowledges that God has forgiven him both the sins he committed willingly and those he did not commit through God's grace (Confessionjs 2.15), a twofold intervention by God that can be understood as corresponding a twofold therapy: curative and preventive. The premise is that the spiritual and ascetic tradition of the Church has always assumed that physical and psychological illnesses have an equivalent in spiritual illnesses. Along the same lines, we assume that in his text Augustine describes "phenomena pertaining to the soul by analogy with phenomena pertaining to the body," and, based on this primisem, we propose here to follow the revers process: to consider the spiritual ills that St. Augustine describes in himself as equivalent to a multifaceted dysfunction pertaining to the mind and a multisensory dysfunction pertaining to the body. It is this equivalence that allows us to consider the metaphors alludes to in the title of this study. The setting is the second book of his Confessions, in which St. Augustine confesses his spiritual state durign his adolescence.