A Blast from the Past: Gilgamesh in Augustine

Eliza Colbert

    For those of you who weren’t in honors last semester, you probably won’t understand most of this post. That is because Augustine’s Confessions unexpectedly reminded me of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which we read last semester. The passage which reminded me of Gilgamesh is in Book 4. In this book, Augustine talks about his best friend. He recounts how he spent every day with his friend until his friend died. Once that happened, Augustine tells how he was consumed with grief and misery. The story sounded slightly familiar, but I didn't realize I was thinking of The Epic of Gilgamesh until I read this line: “I suppose that the more I loved him, the more hatred and fear I felt for the death which had taken him from me, as if it were my most ferocious enemy” (4.11). This line just screamed Gilgamesh to me.

    But it wasn't just the one line, the whole story of Augustine and his friend parallels Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Like Augustine, Gilgamesh mourned for his friend when he died. For both of them, the loss of a friend made death a scary reality. Gilgamesh grew to hate and fear death, just as Augustine did at the time. Almost everything Gilgamesh does after the death of Enkidu is for the purpose of conquering death. In this way, death could be viewed as Gilgamesh’s enemy. Augustine likewise saw death as a fearsome enemy. I find it interesting that Augustine’s experience with his friend’s death so closely matches that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. While Augustine did not travel to the ends of the Earth to find immortality, his altered view of death mirrors Gilgamesh’s. The similarities may not be glaringly obvious, but they were obvious enough for me to make a blog post out of it. I’m interested to hear if any of you saw this same connection to Gilgamesh that I did. P.S. I commented on Sophia's and Sydney's posts.