Comments on: Augustine and Self-Constituting Narration

By: Brad A.

Brad A. — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:16:56 +0000

This is an excellent point, I think, and I’d love to think through how we reconcile these two perspectives, since I think they both have merit.

Of course, I don’t know how just yet, so I’ll shut up now.

By: Geoffrey Holsclaw

Geoffrey Holsclaw — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:49:52 +0000

I would like to register a dissenting voice. while on the one hand of course Augustine of writing an autobiography, and is therefore entering into an act of “self-narration”, but to say that it is a “constitutive act of self-narration” is to miss the point of the narration, which is that “God has converted me to himself!” The role of memory here is not the constitution of the self, but rather the retrospective acknowledgment that God had always been at work, even in those most forsaken places, in calling the self to the godhead.

By: Halden

Halden — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:05:04 +0000

It is: “Person as Confession,” in Persons: Divine and Human, edited by Christoph Schwobel and Colin Gunton (T&T Clark).

By: myles

myles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:11:44 +0000

Halden, what’s the reference for the Brian Horne work?

By: D. Jonathan Grieser

D. Jonathan Grieser — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:53:18 +0000

It’s important to place the Confessions in its biographical setting, Peter Brown, of course, is convincing and eloquent on this. To understand Augustine’s understanding of the self, one must also read de trinitate.

By: kim fabricius

kim fabricius — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:41:48 +0000

Questions of time, narrative, memory, identity have exercised me a lot in pastoral care with those suffering from Alzheimer's - and in time spent with my father, who suffered from an Alzheimer's related illness before he died four years ago. Appropriately, the American journalist David Shenk has an arresting book on Alzheimer's entitled The Forgetting (2003). In A Precarious Peace (2006), Chris Huebner also writes movingly on the subject, in connection with his maternal grandmother. He observes that "In a world in which we are schooled into a life of therapeutic forgetfulness, Alzheimer's is not so much a disease as it is a fitting conclusion to life." "But," he adds, "the church is not the world." And Huebner suggests, very importantly I think, that in the church, the community of faith, memory is a collective act, and that in cases of Alzheimer's, we must be there to do the "remembering for each other," vicariously (if you like). I must re-read the Confessions with this take on identity in mind. The term "introspection" certainly doesn't even begin to characterise what's going on in this supreme spiritual autobiography.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:32:04 +0000

As an English major who was first introduced to Confessions from a literary angle, I appreciate this post and the perspective you are exploring.

Thanks Halden.

That is all.

By: Halden

Halden — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:29:26 +0000

Agreed.

By: James K.A. Smith

James K.A. Smith — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:32:13 +0000

Sure, something like this is undoubtedly true (Brian Stock makes the same case in _Augustine the Reader_). Indeed, this is exactly how I teach the Confessions in my Intro to Philosophy class. However, it’s not either/or. We also can’t underestimate the fact that when the Confessions appear, he’s a bishop. And a bishop with a very public past. So this isn’t just a personal project. The fact is that he would have had all sorts of readers “interested” in his story.