Body and Soul: Springboards for Love
Saint Augustine and Catherine of Siena went through distinctive spiritual journeys in order to reach and experience true love. Confessions, by Saint Augustine, and The Dialogue, by Catherine of Siena, reveal these journeys faced by both authors. To begin with, each author discusses that people must love their neighbors before true love for God can exist. But Augustine emphasizes that the individual pleasures of the body and the soul must be overcome in order to reach divine love for God; Catherine on the other hand, presents the different spiritual stages that the soul must endure to experience love. Therefore, both Augustine and Catherine stress that the senses of the body and the emotions of the soul need to be used as a stepping-stone, but can also act as a barrier for love. Saint Augustine believes that love is triggered by the desire to reach the beauty, truth, and good of God. Yet, it must be recognized that God "is the Life of the life of my soul," and that He created the form and spirit of the human body. Consequently, God "assigned its own place and its own function" (Augustine 213) for the body and the soul, and using the senses for enjoyment rather than for the objective
The Confessions continues by examining the pleasures of the mind. He talks about pity by describing people who are sad and begin to weep from "a pity springing from spiritual selfishness, because she has not yet completely put underfoot and drowned her self-will" (Catherine 162-163). Through the pleasures of the body and the mind it is simpler to understand that the senses and emotions must be used for the sole intent of praising and glorifying God. you have taught me that all is good that God has made, nothing is to be rejected; only we must be thankful to him when we partake of it . People should always listen to the words of the song with the intent of listening and understanding the true meaning of the words with respect to God. Likewise, divine love is only attained by way of love for one's neighbors, and then, virtuous love for God. By pitying these people, the viewers have accepted others' misfortunes in order to make themselves feel better. But I heard you teaching me and I heard the commands you gave. This commandment of the Law is "to love [God] above all things and your neighbor as your very self" (Catherine 165). Their appetite is insatiable, but they are never satisfied. God says that people "forget, to their own misfortune, that the tongue was made only to honor me, to confess their own sins, and to work for the love of virtue for their neighbors' well-being" (Catherine 173). But if these beautiful things divert our attention from focusing on God, they have become evil temptations since "they are paltry trifles in comparison with the worth of God's blessed treasures" (Augustine 48). (Augustine 249)Accordingly, searching for knowledge is useless because God teaches and commands us himself with self-knowledge.
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