The most striking element of the first five books of Confessions is, for me, the massive deviation in rhetoric and content from everything we have read thus far. The fact that Christianity overlapped with the Roman empire, and that Augustine uses Ovid, Virgil, Homer, and other Greek literature to discuss the Bible and Christian ideals is simultaneously bizarre and fascinating.
Though we began to see a shift away from individual honor and glory in the Aeneid (towards the success of a city-state and collective glory), Augustine not only diminishes the importance of individual glory, but essentially denies its possibility, saying "Yet you alone are worthy of honor and are glorious for eternity" (2.13). Augustine's continual discussion of how human flaws and evil stem from deviation from the highest way of "being" imbued in everything by God (Book 3) reframes the spectrum of legacy and glory: the best humans can hope for is to achieve this pure form of being, eliminating the possibility of being glorified after death. After such a consistent focus on memorialization and immortality in the previous literature we've read, this shift feels dramatic and abrupt.
Beyond this difference in belief and social structure, something else that stood out to me was the vast difference in Greek and Christian perspectives on sexuality. In Book 3, Augustine outlines that the three causes of sin are lust for domination, lust of eyes, and sensuality. And throughout the narrative of his adolescent and college years, he confesses and condemns his sexual experiences, urges, and even thoughts. This is in stark contrast to the Greek perspective on male sexuality specifically, in which sex and procreation are almost revered, or even a contrast to Genesis in which reproduction is dealt with unflinchingly as a necessity, certainly not anything shameful. The pervasive modern conception that sex is something to be ashamed of and secretive about seems to originate with Augustine. I blame him for the absurd fact that sex is a taboo subject, which is totally illogical given its biological necessity and omnipresence. In a similar vein, Augustine asks that god "cleanse me from these flawed emotions" (4.11), and constantly criticizes (and confesses for!) things that he had felt in the past. As my (social worker) mom has always told me, it's important not to invalidate your emotions, and completely pointless to feel guilty about feeling a certain way. Augustine's idea that there are wrong emotions is also seem to counter to Homeric/Virgilian tradition (though these texts contain criticism of excess emotion). I personally disagree with Augustine here, but recognize the huge impact that this idea of metacognition, evaluating our own emotions, has had lasting implications even through present day.
Another obvious variation relating to this judgment of emotions is the conception of morality. In Oedipus, as well as the Iliad, the act of saying aloud or revealing an action is the point at which the perpetrator becomes accountable for it (for instance, though Oedipus realizes what he has done, he doesn't want to say it aloud). However, Augustine's perspective (and what I already was familiar with as a Christian idea) is that individuals can be blamed for their thoughts and emotions. Since I don't believe in God, I don't think that we can be actually held accountable for having "bad" thoughts, but I can understand how an omniscient God necessitates that emotions/thoughts are as important (and telling about character) as actions.
On a last, unrelated note, I found numerous indirect references to Plato's Symposium, which I found vaguely ironic given the homoerotic content of Symposium and the sexually repressive tones of Confessions. Here are a few:
"To me it was sweet to love and be loved, the more so if I could also enjoy the body of the beloved" (3.1). This reminded me of Plato's discussion of the lover vs. the beloved, and which is love itself. Here, it seems that love is both the lover and the beloved.
"Do we love anything except that which is beautiful? What then is a beautiful object? And what is beauty?" (4.20). Symposium discusses the relationship between love and beauty, and describes the Platonic form of Beauty. While Augustine toys with similar ideas here, it seemed to me devalues physical beauty (or really physicality at all) as a measure of merit, as he tries to shift from appreciating rhetoric to ideas, and from viewing god as a physical presence to something more abstract.
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