When you have the opportunity, please correct the other mistakes of St. Augustine.He was wrong about reincarnation.
I invite you to contrast John Paul II's theology of the body and his exaltation of marital sexuality as an icon of the interior life of the Trinity with Augustine's pessimism regarding the depravity of the human condition, particularly in the area of sexual desire, which he said was basically disordered and should be separated from the desire for procreation.
At all events, far be it from any true believer to suppose that by these words of Solomon those cycles are meant, in which, according to those philosophers, the same periods and events of time are repeated; as if, for example, the philosopher Plato, having taught in the school at Athens which is called the Academy, so, numberless ages before, at long but certain intervals, this same Plato and the same school, and the same disciples existed, and so also are to be repeated during the countless cycles that are yet to be -- far be it, I say, from us to believe this. For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising from the dead, He dieth no more. "Death hath no more dominion over Him; and we ourselves after the resurrection shall be "ever with the Lord," to whom we now say, as the sacred Psalmist dictates, "Thou shall keep us, O Lord, Thou shall preserve us from this generation." And that too which follows, is, I think, appropriate enough: "The wicked walk in a circle," not because their life is to recur by means. of these circles, which these philosophers imagine, but because the path in which their false doctrine now runs is circuitous
*Jonas was real. His story was not a parable, or a metaphor, as you say. But, in this post he is not mentioned. Has a whale swallowed the context of our exchange?