Philosophers Have Used Their Works Term Paper

In Book I of his Confessions, for example [Childhood], Augustine states:

for my sustenance and my delight I had woman's milk; yet it was not my mother or my nurses who stored their milk for me: it was Yourself, using them to give me the food of my infancy, according to Your ordinance and the riches set by You at every level of creation.

Since God is present within every human thought and action, suggests Augustine, if one looks deeply within, one will find the God in oneself.

Dante Alighieri medieval masterpiece the Divine Comedy is also the story of a spiritual awakening, although in this case an allegorical rather than personal one. It contains three separate works, the Inferno (Hell); the Purgatorio (Purgatory) and the Paradiso (Heaven). The Inferno, the first of the three, represents the first part of an elaborate metaphor for a spiritual journey, of the creative imagination, through Hell, the first of the three realms Dante must traverse.Within the Inferno, Dante plays a dual role: that of both author and spiritual traveler. With his guide Virgil (who is, like Dante, a poet, and the author of the great Roman epic poem the Aeneid, about the journey of Aeneas through the Underworld) Dante emerges, at age 35 (like Augustine, in midlife) and in despair (possibly a metaphor for a spiritual "midlife crisis" or an episode of depression caused by his recent political exile from Florence). He spends the night in a "dark wood," from which he emerges into morning and a "sunlit hill" (Dante, the Inferno, Canto 1 (Introductory description). Life Augustine's Confessions, the Inferno suggests that one may.....