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An Approach to Teaching Augustine's Confessions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

William J. O'Brien
William J. O'Brien*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Abstract

The present article suggests one way a college teacher might finesse some of the pedagogical problems surrounding the autobiography of Augustine by raising a set of interrelated questions calculated to draw the student into the experiential heart of the Confessions. Attention to the literary contexts within which Augustine locates the account of his conversion allows the teacher to relate the theological significance of the work to the life experience of the student.

Type
Creative Teaching
Information
Horizons , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 1978 , pp. 47 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1978

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References

1 Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 165Google Scholar.

2 Burrell, David, Exercises in Religious Understanding (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), p. 11Google Scholar.

3 Augustine, Saint, Confessions V, 2, tr. Pine-Coffin, R. S. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 159Google Scholar. (Hereinafter referred to as Conf.) The italics refer us to the same passage from Matthew that appears at the close of Book VII and at the beginning of Book IX. I take the passage as pivotal, looking backward to the limitations of the Platonic vision of existence exposed in Book VII and forward to the Christian vision that is beginning to emerge.

4 A few pages later when the reader is introduced to Ponticianus, Augustine mentions incidentally (?) that he (Augustine) was studying Paul‘s writings with the greatest attention.

5 Conf. VIII, 2, p. 160.

6 Conf. VIII, 5, p. 164.

7 Conf. VIII, 5, p. 165.

8 Conf. VIII, 5, p. 165.

9 Conf. VIII, 5, p. 165. The Pauline text is Romans 7:24, 25.

10 Conf. VIII, 7, p. 169.

11 Conf. VIII, 8, p. 171.

12 Conf. VIII, 10, p. 173. Among the better general discussions of Manichaean doctrine are Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 206–237Google Scholar; and Puech, Henri-Charles, “The Concept of Redemption in Manichaeism,” in Campbell, Joseph (ed.), Bollingen Series XXX, 6 (New York: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 247–314Google Scholar.

13 Conf. VIII, 11, p. 175.

14 Conf. VIII, 11, p. 176.

15 Conf. VIII, 12, pp. 177–178.

16 Conf. VIII, 12, p. 178. The Pauline text is Romans 13:13, 14.

17 Conf. VIII, 12, p. 178.

18 Conf. VIII, 9, p. 172.

19 Conf. VIII, 9, p. 172.

20 Conf. IX, 1, p. 181.

21 For a penetrating exploration of this point, see Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 252–260Google Scholar.

22 It is interesting that Augustine makes the identical point in his “first Christmas sermon,” which takes its theme from the same Matthew text. Cf., Saint Augustine, Sermons on the Ligurgical Seasons. The Fathers of the Church 17, tr. Muldowney, M. S. R.S.N. (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959), pp. 4–5Google Scholar.

23 Conf. I, 1, p. 21.

24 Conf. I, 20, p. 40.

25 Conf. XII, 32, p. 309.

26 Jonas, Hans, Philosophical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974), p. 285Google Scholar.

27 Cf. Jonas, Hans, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 227Google Scholar: “This is what has become of the Biblical idea of man's being created in the image of God! The ‘image’ has become a device of the Darkness, the copying not only a kind of blasphemy in itself but a devilish trick directed against the original.”

28 Ibid., p. 228.

29 Ibid., pp. 228–229.

30 Cf., pp. 54–55 above.

31 A slightly different interpretation of the significance of the theft of pears has been offered by Ferrare, Leo in ’The Pear-Theft in Augustine's ‘Confessions,’” in Révue des Études Augustiniennes 16 (1970), pp. 233–241Google Scholar. That interpretation has been challenged by Courcelle, Pierre in “Le jeune Augustin, second Catinina,” Révue des études anciennes 73 (1971), pp. 141–150CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My own interpretation places more emphasis on the Manichaean doctrine of “Jesus patibilis” and receives some support from the work of Geerlings, Wilhelm in “Der manichaeische ‘Jesus patibilis’ in der Theologie Augustins,” Theologische Quartalschrift 152 (1972), pp. 124–131Google Scholar.

32 Conf. IV, 3, p. 74.

33 I should note that Peter Brown understands the significance of Augustine's middle years more in terms of his psychological need to turn anxiously to the past. Cf. Augustine of Hippo, p. 164: “The note of urgency is unmistakable. “Allow me, I beseech You, grant me to wind round and round in my present memory the spirals of my errors …’ (Conf. IV, i, 1.)”; and p. 165: “The writing of the Confessions was an act of therapy.” I have been perhaps more impressed by Augustine's theological subtlety and rhetorical skill in these, his middle years.