Abstract

Oxymoron is an important rhetorical expression for Augustine. He uses it to express God in the Confessions ; "You are deeply hidden yet most intimately present." After that, he says " in these words what have I said ?" These lines are peculiar speculation form which talks about God in oxymoron and his reflections on such ambivalence in language. He also uses oxymoron to express that the human being's state in front of God is essentially ambivalent, saying " whom I should attach myself, but was not yet in a state to be able to do that." Thus, oxymoron is the most appropriate way of speaking about God and the speaker himself. Moreover, when he talks about the beauty of God and of this world by the beauty of God, oxymoron brings its ability into full play to explain both, because the crucial ambivalence is in beautiful things as creatura bona, which has the nature of being totally beautiful and totally ugly. Also the same is the aesthetic experience, which is both intellectual and sensitive. These are evidently based on his vertical passionate love for God as beauty itself and also on his horizontal moderate love for creatura. In this, we find the aesthetics of the ambivalence founded on oxymoron