Advice for Essay Thesis on Virgil
I am an upperclassman undergraduate and a Classical Liberal Arts major. Through my advisor and primary professor, I did a directed study on Virgil, going through all his works in translation, Book 4 of the Aeneid in Latin, and some scholarly articles.
I am still completing the essay (I have an extension), and my professor approved of my thesis and says he really likes it. He is out traveling, though, so I cannot really ask him for further advice. Would anyone on here who is well-versed in the classics and/or a fellow student be willing to give me feedback or advice? Here is my introduction with the thesis in bold:
There is a reason Augustine’s Confessions has been often translated as poetry, as it is a kind of Christian poem or epic. While much of the work focuses on Augustine’s own experience, even that experience is made to teach the broader themes of God, human sin, and salvation, for the epic begins with the human state, “quia [Deus] fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te [since you (God) have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you].” The state of mankind is one of restlessness, “inquiet,” because, as Augustine experienced in his youth as he pursued elicit desires, fallen people seek to be fulfilled in earthly things rather than God himself, and the result is destruction, hate, and misery. Only when one is converted to obeying the divine will, as Augustine was by reading the command of St. Paul in Romans, can the darkness of passions be escaped. Out of the many experiences of isolation from God he had as a youth, one of them concerned his education and, in particular, Virgil.
He laments his early studies in Virgil, but he does not fault the Aeneid itself but his way of reading it. He read of Aeneas while “oblitus errorum meorum [forgetful of my own wanderings]” and wept for Dido who killed herself for love while not weeping for himself who “in his a te morientem [in these things was dying far from you].” If young Augustine had let it, as the scholar Andrew Fichter notes, the Aeneid would have been an “exemplum to move him in the direction of moral insight.” Yet is this merely rhetorical flourish or a forced reading on the part of Augustine? By no means, for, though Virgil was a polytheist over 400 years apart from Augustine, there is a reason Christian authors like Dante and Luther could not drive him from their imaginations. He was the poet “naturaliter Christiana,” and that includes in the way in which, as Augustine articulates, he outlines the human condition in Dido and its solution in Aeneas. The story of Dido and Aeneas is a moral tale in which Virgil demonstrates the destructive nature of disordered human passions and the necessity for them to be ordered to divine duty, foreshadowing Augustine’s notion of fallen human nature and conversion.
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Although he likes my thesis, I am still struggling with how to write it and whether it is in the best form possible. I am not sure if the best structure is to write a paragraph about some ideas in the Confessions and then several paragraphs showing the connections in Virgil, or something else. Right now, I'm just trying to exegete Book 4 and show how Augustine's reading is natural to the text itself.
And yes, I know it is only an undergraduate essay, so in some ways I may be overthinking it. However, I want to write something solid that I could submit to grad school if they ask for an example of my writing, and I also want to explore this topic further in my grad research, so I want a good foundation. My professor also has high expectations of me, and since this is one of the final essays I will be writing for my undergraduate degree, I want to make sure it is of high quality.
Thank you!