Memory in Augustine's Theological Anthropology


Book Description

This book explores the theme of 'memory' in Augustine's works, tracing its philosophical and theological significance. It shows how Augustine inherits this theme from classical philosophy and how Augustine's theological understanding of Christ draws on and resolves tensions in the theme of memory.




Augustine on Memory


Book Description

Augustine of Hippo, indisputably one of the most important figures for the study of memory, is credited with establishing memory as the inner source of selfhood and locus of the search for God. Yet, those who study memory in Augustine have never before taken into account his preaching. His sermons are the sources of memory's greatest development for Augustine. In Augustine's preaching, especially on the Psalms, the interior gives way to communal exterior. Both the self and search for God are re-established in a shared Christological identity and the communal labors of remembering and forgetting. This book opens with Augustine's early works and Confessions as the beginning of memory and concludes with Augustine's Trinity and preaching on Psalm 50 as the end of memory. The heart of the book, the work of memory, sets forth how ongoing remembering and forgetting in Christ are for Augustine are foundational to the life of grace. To that end, Augustine and his congregants go leaping in memory together, keep festival with abiding traces, and become forgetful runners like St. Paul. Remembering and forgetting in Christ, the ongoing work of memory, prove for Augustine to be actions of reconciliation of the distended experiences of human life-of praising and groaning, labouring and resting, solitude and communion. Augustine on Memory presents this new communal and Christological paradigm not only for Augustinian studies, but also for theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and interdisciplinary scholars of memory.




On the Trinity


Book Description

The following dissertation concerning the Trinity, as the reader ought to be informed, has been written in order to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith, and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason. Now one class of such men endeavor to transfer to things incorporeal and spiritual the ideas they have formed, whether through experience of the bodily senses, or by natural human wit and diligent quickness, or by the aid of art, from things corporeal; so as to seek to measure and conceive of the former by the latter. Aeterna Press




In the Self's Place


Book Description

In the Self's Place is an original phenomenological reading of Augustine that considers his engagement with notions of identity in Confessions. Using the Augustinian experience of confessio, Jean-Luc Marion develops a model of selfhood that examines this experience in light of the whole of the Augustinian corpus. Towards this end, Marion engages with noteworthy modern and postmodern analyses of Augustine's most "experiential" work, including the critical commentaries of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Marion ultimately concludes that Augustine has preceded postmodernity in exploring an excess of the self over and beyond itself, and in using this alterity of the self to itself, as a driving force for creative relations with God, the world, and others. This reading establishes striking connections between accounts of selfhood across the fields of contemporary philosophy, literary studies, and Augustine's early Christianity.




A Theological Anthropology


Book Description

Originally published in 1967 (the German title of the original volume translates to The Whole in the Fragment), A Theological Anthropology is described by the author as "an essay." Indeed, it is man's history of theology, without firm conclusions, but brilliantly written by one of the foremost theologians of his time.




Augustine and Wittgenstein


Book Description

This collection examines the relationship between Augustine and Wittgenstein and demonstrates the deep affinity they share, not only for the substantive issues they treat but also for the style of philosophizing they employ. Wittgenstein saw certain salient Augustinian approaches to concepts like language-learning, will, memory, and time as prompts for his own philosophical explorations, and he found great inspiration in Augustine’s highly personalized and interlocutory style of writing philosophy. Each in his own way, in an effort to understand human experience more fully, adopts a mode of philosophizing that involves questioning, recognizing confusions, and confronting doubts. Beyond its bearing on such topics as language, meaning, knowledge, and will, their analysis extends to the nature of religious belief and its fundamental place in human experience. The essays collected here consider a broad range of themes, from issues regarding teaching, linguistic meaning, and self-understanding to miracles, ritual, and religion.




Knowledge, Faith, and Early Christian Initiation


Book Description

Presents a new history of the rise and development of catechesis in Latin Patristic Christianity that foregrounds core questions of knowledge, faith, and teaching. This book focuses on the critical relationship between teaching and epistemology




Early Christian Writers in the West and the Classical Literary Tradition


Book Description

Early Christian prose writers of the Latin West (2nd–5th c. AD) have long been studied predominantly from theological and historical perspectives. Hence, there is a conspicuous scarcity of comprehensive studies approaching these texts from stylistic and literary angles. This volume will be an important step towards filling this substantial gap in recent scholarship. It will include chapters on selected Latin Christian writers such as Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, Firmicus Maternus, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. It aims at investigating, on the one hand, ways in which these texts can be appreciated as literary texts in their own right, by exploring the style and imagery employed in them; and, on the other, the intricate and meaningful modes in which these writers interact, develop, and transform phraseology, topoi, concepts, and techniques found in Classical literature. This volume will offer a paradigmatic overview as to the usefulness of approaching early Christian writers through a literary lens, thus opening up new paths of research across various disciplines including Classics, Literary Studies, Theology, and (Social) History.




The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church


Book Description

Uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church. It contains over 6,500 cross-referenced A-Z entries, and offers unrivalled coverage of all aspects of this vast and often complex subject, from theology; churches and denominations; patristic scholarship; and the bible; to the church calendar and its organization; popes; archbishops; other church leaders; saints; and mystics. In this new edition, great efforts have been made to increase and strengthen coverage of non-Anglican denominations (for example non-Western European Christianity), as well as broadening the focus on Christianity and the history of churches in areas beyond Western Europe. In particular, there have been extensive additions with regards to the Christian Church in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Australasia. Significant updates have also been included on topics such as liturgy, Canon Law, recent international developments, non-Anglican missionary activity, and the increasingly important area of moral and pastoral theology, among many others. Since its first appearance in 1957, the ODCC has established itself as an essential resource for ordinands, clergy, and members of religious orders, and an invaluable tool for academics, teachers, and students of church history and theology, as well as for the general reader.




The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy


Book Description

Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, literature was read with the ear as much as with the eye: silent reading was the exception; audible reading, the norm. This highly original book shows that Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy--one of the most widely-read texts in Western history--aims to affect the listener through the designs of its rhythmic sound. Stephen Blackwood argues that the Consolation's metres are arranged in patterns that have a therapeutic and liturgical purpose: as a bodily mediation of the text's consolation, these rhythmic patterns enable the listener to discern the eternal in the motion of time. The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy vividly explores how in this acoustic encounter with the text philosophy becomes a lived reality, and reading a kind of prayer.