To Carthage then I came Burning
Following the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE, the city became an important Roman colony in North Africa. The quotation comes from the Confessions of St Augustine, an autobiography written around 400 AD.
Augustine was a Roman African, born in 354 AD. In his Confessions he describes an early life of sinful behaviour, exacerbated when he became a student in Carthage, a city filled with temptations. He describes himself as a "slave to lust" until his conversion to Christianity; thereafter he became a celibate priest and encouraged sexual abstinence and the avoidance of selfish pleasure. He thanks God for "plucking" him out of his evil ways.
Burning not only refers to St Augustine's lust, but also the Buddha's Fire Sermon, in which he points out that we are all suffering, as a result of our desires, angers and delusions.
Eliot's Fire Sermon, a heap of broken images of bad sexual experiences and misery, concludes in an unpunctuated mash-up of St Augustine and the Buddha, pointing to the need for self-sacrifice if we are to escape our own moral and spiritual waste land. He will return to this theme at the end of the poem.
Augustine was a Roman African, born in 354 AD. In his Confessions he describes an early life of sinful behaviour, exacerbated when he became a student in Carthage, a city filled with temptations. He describes himself as a "slave to lust" until his conversion to Christianity; thereafter he became a celibate priest and encouraged sexual abstinence and the avoidance of selfish pleasure. He thanks God for "plucking" him out of his evil ways.
Burning not only refers to St Augustine's lust, but also the Buddha's Fire Sermon, in which he points out that we are all suffering, as a result of our desires, angers and delusions.
Eliot's Fire Sermon, a heap of broken images of bad sexual experiences and misery, concludes in an unpunctuated mash-up of St Augustine and the Buddha, pointing to the need for self-sacrifice if we are to escape our own moral and spiritual waste land. He will return to this theme at the end of the poem.
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| Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St Augustine Back to poem |
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