Widely considered the first modern persona to emerge in Western literature – although he lived in the fourth century! – St. Augustine is also the quintessential doctor of the Western Christian tradition, a philosopher-cum-theologian whose place in the canon of the “Great Books” is firmly secured not only by the Confessions but by such classics as The City of God and On Christian Doctrine. It is arguably the Confessions, however, that reads most easily to our contemporaries, seeming at times as if it could have been composed in our own day – so startlingly honest and frank is its tone, so poignant its consideration of the human condition.

In this Seminar, we encounter the narrative of a man whose conversion – as seismic in its proportions as perhaps any ever recorded – leads him not to the secure precincts of a comforting ideology, but rather to the wild frontier of the ultimate Mystery: Augustine does not so much give us answers, as introduce his readers, believers and unbelievers alike, to the full extent of the important questions waiting to be asked. Indeed, in the thirteen books of the Confessions we discover that faith, far from avoiding the challenges of reason, takes them to an otherwise unattainable and entirely new level….

FORMAT

Each seminar will include a lecture, followed by small-group reflection (if numbers warrant) and large-group discussion in the second half of the class. The goal is for us to inspire one another to a prayerful, but reflective, (re)reading of the text, in order to both stretch our minds and open our hearts. It is hoped that students will allow the streams of their other classes to flow into the course of their reading while also bringing the riches of their own learning and life experience to bear upon their engagement of this classic work

TEXTS & READINGS

Saint Augustine. Confessions. Oxford World’s Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 2008.
The following are recommended:
Peter J. Brown. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. University of California Press, 2000
Kim Paffenroth & Robert P. Kennedy, eds. A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions. Westminster John Knox, 2003.
The Confessions may be accessed on-line in English and Latin.