So Ancient and So New: St. Augustine's Confessions and Its Influence
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.49 (753 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1587318199 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 176 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The study of any masterpiece can change one’s life, but the Confessions of St. Certainly, the barbarians of materialist thought long ago sacked the civilization our ancestors inhabited. Augustine, like Plato’s Republic or Dante’s Commedia, has the almost uncanny power to enact in the reader what it describes. It recounts Augustine’s central, intensely personal, and ultimately liberating struggle to conceive of spiritual substance, an intellectual achievement without which he cannot even hope to accommodate his understanding to the reality of God. The most direct engagement with Augustine is obviously Rousseau’s. The vast wake of Augustine’s work includes writers from Dante and Montaigne to Nabokov, but three representative figures were chosen to show his influence: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Confessions (Rick Sorenson), James Joyce in the whole range of his work (Eloise Knowlton), and T.S. Plato’s book reconfigures the city of the soul by freeing it from enslavement to the tyrannical passions and making it answerable to reason in its pursuit of the good. The essays uncover a variety of themes, from Augustine’s act of reading (Marc LePain and Bercier), his emphasis on memory (Roger Corriveau), and his choice to reveal to the world his “hi