Spiritual Hunger and the Search for God in Augustine’s Confessions: A New ‘Sensory’ Approach to the Text-Audience Interaction

This article investigates the role of sensory metaphors food and hunger in communicative project Confessions. Under broad framework cognitive poetics, which focuses on interaction between text audience, I analyse how language contributes to an appeal readers’ imaginations emotions that they might be responsive viewpoint put forward by text. find Augustine stimulates reorientates especially his Manichaean intuitive but also cultural familiar conceptions sensible world relation God, their religious dietary rituals and, extension, experience God. This, argue, seems a persuasive device encourage new interpretation senses as signs point towards immaterial reality, understanding man’s relationship God utterly transcendent unchangeable.