Augustine's Confessions (undergraduate)

2019

Aim: Our aim is to understand the structure, argument, and purpose of Augustine’s Confessions. Essential to this is uncovering the dialogue with philosophy, especially that with the Stoics, Skeptics and Platonists, embedded in the text, seeing how fundamental philosophical-theological forms, especially the Trinity, are present and determinative throughout, how Scripture is the assumed medium of knowledge and love and address to God, and how its interpretation is a crucial goal of the work. At present I am particularly interested in the role the two kinds of matter and body play in Augustine’s cosmos as exhibited in the Confessions, in how the self changes in the course of the work, and in the interplay between these selves with their perspectives and their objects which is constant in the book and that by which the work moves.

Course description: The course is designed as an upper-level Latin reading seminar. We will focus on reading Christian Latin texts of the fourth to the sixth centuries CE, including such authors as Augustine, Jerome, John Cassian, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great. The reading of the original texts will be combined with the analysis of the literary and historical contexts out of which those texts emerged. The suggested topics for the discussions and the bibliography are provided below. The course invites the students to think about the challenges of working with the religious narratives as historical sources, on the importance of proper contextualization of these texts, and on their subsequent reception. We will start the course with the discussion of the term "Christian Latin, " and at our final meeting we will summarize the stylistic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features of the texts we read. Course Objectives In this course, students will be introduced to: • extensive readings of Latin prose • the term “Christian Latin,” and the stylistic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical features associated with it • the challenges of working with the religious narratives as historical sources

2000

2017

By looking at the similarities between various philosophies which influenced Augustine's life - e.g. Platonism, Valentinianism and Manichaeism - and Augustine's developing theology, we will develop a preliminary hypothesis as to how Augustine came to his views on time and predestination. In this essay we argue that Augustine had been influenced by extra-biblical sources, rather than by biblical sources to form his blueprint theology.

The details of the mission of Manichaeism—a religion that rose out of a Jewish-Christian milieu in Roman Babylonia in the 3rd century CE—emerge from both polemical sources and genuine Manichaean sources, the latter of which have been greatly expanded in the past century with a number of discoveries. This thesis presents a comparative study that critically evaluates the sources for and identifies the practices of the Manichaean mission in the Roman West between the 3rd century CE, when the religion was founded, and the 6th century CE, when the religion was persecuted off the face of the Western Roman Empire. By comparing the corpus of Augustine (who was himself a Manichaean for 9 years) and Manichaean sources, the thesis identifies a total of eight Manichaean practices that can be tied to the Roman West: (1) the undertaking of polemical treatises and doctrinal debates; (2) the command of a broad range of languages; (3) exegesis of the New Testament to unearth Manichaean beliefs; (4) the comparison of Old and New Testament passages (= disputations) to demonstrate the falseness of the Old Testament, which no true Christian should believe in; (5) missions in the guise of merchant trade; (6) the appeal to similarities with the disciples of Jesus; (7) sensationalist appeals to the appearances of poverty and association with women; and (8) the donation of children by lay Manichaeans to become missionaries. Among those identified here, practices (6)–(8) seem to be unique contributions to the field; chapter 3 furthermore reconstructs the theological underpinning of practice (8). Previous scholarship has not focused specifically on a critical examination of the Manichaean mission. In using a comparative method, this thesis compares attestation of Manichaean missionary practices internally (i.e., within, for instance, Augustine’s corpus to see if he is consistent in his attestation of the same practice) and externally (i.e., to see if polemical reports match up with genuine Manichaean reports). When making external comparisons, if attestation is found in Augustine but not in Manichaean sources, it is surmised that the practice is likely a heresiological invention; if in Manichaean but not in Augustinian sources, then perhaps a missionary practice that was not used or else simply not attested in the Roman West. The standard is generally, at any rate, to seek attestation in both sources and thus to verify that the practice was indeed used and witnessed in the Roman West. Finally, the appendices present the first English translation of a recently discovered sermon by Augustine (Serm. 350F) and two tables compiling Manichaean disputations.