The Journey toward God in Augustine's Confessions: Books I-VI

Notes

Notes NOTES TO PREFACE 1. All references to the Confessions and Augustine’s other writings are given in parentheses in book, chapter, and paragraph form. The purpose of this convention is to permit readers to find the references in any Latin edition and in any translation. 2. Carl G. Vaught, “Theft and Conversion: Two Augustinian Confessions,” in The Recovery of Philosophy in America: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Smith, ed. Thomas P. Karsulis and Robert Cummings Neville (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 217–249. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 113. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963), 16. 3. Francis Petrarch, Petrarch: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, ed. and trans., James Robinson (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1898), 316–318. 4. I use the familiar phrase from Paul Tillich, not because it is to be found in the Confessions, but because it expresses Augustine’s fundamental intentions. It is not by accident that Tillich locates himself within the Augustinian tradition. See “Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 10–29. 5. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, F. J. Sheed, trans. (Indianapolis and Cambridge : Hackett Publishing Co., 1993), xxvii. 6. Ibid., xxix. 7. Augustine makes all these dimensions explicit without ever binding them together in an overarching framework. He does this with respect to time by distinguishing 155 156 stages of the life cycle. He does it with respect to space dˇ describing the communities of which he is a part in the course of his development. And he does it with respect to eternity by pointing to the ultimate significance of many of the experiences that he undergoes. By holding all of these dimensions together, I am pointing to ways in which they intersect at various stages of Augustine’s development. 8. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), (1.1.11). Augustine never uses the more familiar Anselmian phrase, “fides quarens intellectum” Cf. Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion, with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. with an intro. Thomas Williams (Indianopolis and Cambridge: Hackett Co., 1995), 93. However, Augustine’s motto and Anselm’s formula are related closely, not only because Anselm is an Augustinian monk, but also because both thinkers insist that in religious matters faith must always precede understanding. 9. The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Gogan (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968), (2.32). 10. Colin Starnes, Augustine’s Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I–IX. (Waterloo, ONT: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 1990), xi–xii. 11. Erik H. Erickson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980), 52. 12. Ibid., 60, 66. 13. Ibid., 68–69, 78. 14. Ibid., 87. 15. Ibid., 119. 16. Robert J. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 5 and John J. O’Meara, The Young Augustine: The Growth of St. Augustine’s Mind up to his Conversion (New York and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1954), 131–155. 17. Genesis 2.8. 18. Mark 14.32; Luke 22.39, 22.44; John 18.1. 19. Luke 23.43; Revelation 2.7. 20. The garden that Augustine enters is analogous to the biblical account of Jesus’ prayers in the garden. In order to find privacy, Jesus would often rise early in the morning or spend all night in prayer. The garden of Gethsemane at the Mount of Olives was one of Jesus’ beloved places (Luke 22.39). It is apparent that Augustine also found solitude and refuge in a garden. Like Augustine, Jesus also falls to the ground in distress and displays fear and anguish in the garden of Gethsemane as he commenced his prayers (Luke 22.44; Mark 14.35). Courcelle goes on to note that the fig tree in the garden can be identified with the fig tree that Christ saw Nathanael under (John 1.48), and he also identifies the tree with the darkness of human sin. (See Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de S. Augustin. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950), 193). NOTES TO...