Confessions by Saint Augustine
Week 4: Book III — Carthage, the Theatre, and Cicero's Fire
Read Book III of The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Key themes: lust, the stage, Manichaeism, the reading of Hortensius, and Monica's tears.
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Augustine arrives in Carthage — a cauldron of temptation — and describes the complex, contradictory hungers of a young man who is looking for love in all the wrong places, and whose encounter with a single book by Cicero changes everything.
Discussion Questions
7 questions1.Augustine opens Book III with one of his most striking lines: "To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love." What does it mean to "love to love" — to be addicted to the feeling of desire itself? Do you recognize this in yourself or in contemporary culture?
2.Augustine meditates at length on why people enjoy weeping at plays — feeling sorrow for fictional characters without being moved to help them. He calls this "a miserable madness." What is his deeper concern about the effect of consuming entertainment built around the emotions of suffering and desire?
3.He describes a group of students called "the Subverters" — students who delighted in humiliating newcomers — and says their behavior was "nothing can be liker the very actions of devils." He was not fully one of them, yet he enjoyed their company. What does his ambivalent relationship with the Subverters reveal about the pull of belonging and social prestige?
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