St. Augustine

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             " I read and understood by myself all the books that I could find on the so-called liberal arts, for in those days I was a good-for-nothing and a slave to sordid ambitions. But what advantage did I gain from them? I read them with pleasure, but I did not know the real source of such true and certain facts they contained for what good was my ability, if I did not use it well?" (IV, 89).
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             He thought that a person did not necessarily need wisdom to understand and embrace God; he need only have faith. In book five, Augustine spoke of this principle by comparing two men:.
             "A man who knows that he owns a tree and thanks you for the use he has of it, even though he does not know its exact height or the width of its spread, is better than another who measures it and counts all its branches, but neither owns it nor loves its Creator. In just the same way, a man who has faith in you has all the wealth of the world- (V, 95).
             It can be argued that his intellectual pursuits further complicated his conversion because he was tormented by certain philosophical questions that became obstacles to his ultimate goals. In his youth he was obsessed with counting all the branches, while never seeing the whole tree. At times Augustine asserted that his pursuit of worldly wisdom was in direct conflict with his journey towards God.
             "What, then, was the value to me of my intelligence, which could take these subjects in its stride, and all those books, with their tangled problems, which I unraveled without the help of any human tutor, when in the doctrine of your love I was lost in the most hideous error and vast sacrilege?" (IV, 89).
             Despite all of the negative aspects of his education on which Augustine focused, it is obvious that his schooling was an essential part of his character. Other than Christianity, his education was the most important factor that shaped his early life. Augustine would have been a different man without this education, and without it his conversion would also have been different.