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 | | | Portrait of Saint Augustine by Benozzo Gozzoli. (source) |
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St. Augustine's Confessions
On this day in 430, Saint Augustine died at the age of seventy-five. He was Bishop of Hippo (now Annaba, Algeria) for thirty-four years, during which time he became the patriarch of Christian Africa and one of the most influential leaders of the Latin Church; from a literary viewpoint, his Confessions is seen as one of the first major contributions to the genre of self-disclosure. |
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Augustine of Hippo
This academic resource features an introduction to Augustine's life and works, research materials and essays, including discussions of City of God, Confessions, and de doctrina christiana. Links to electronic texts in English and Latin are also provided, complete and abridged.
"The zeal for philosophy led first in what may seem a strange direction. Fired with the love of wisdom from his reading of the quintessential Roman politician, Augustine immediately joined a religious cult from Persia that had planted itself in the Roman world as a rival of Christianity: Manicheism. This sensual but sensitive young man, brought up around but not exactly in Christianity, took his Ciceronian enthusiasm with the utmost seriousness on the moral plane. He knew his own life did not in fact match his noble ideals. He was torn between the conventional pleasures of adolescence and the conventional rigors of philosophy. For this tension, Manicheism offered soothing relief. Augustine was not to blame that he felt this way, the Manichees told him, for he was only the pawn of greater forces that could, because Augustine was lucky and clever, be propitiated. Security could be had without sacrifice, and guilt removed without atonement...." |  | John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
Find a scholarly essay examines Augustine's views on theology, politics, securlar writing and poetry, language, teaching, and other subjects, as found in City of God, On the Teacher, and On Christian Doctrine.
"Ever one to separate the sheep from the goats, Augustine distinguished between two societies, the heavenly and earthly, in his City of God (De civitate dei), a work of monumental importance to the theology and political thought of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Members of the City of God are pilgrims on earth, where they find themselves among the vain and idolatrous denizens of the earthly city. In this comprehensive attack on pagan culture, Augustine sets forth an austere predestinarian theology, in which, according to the inscrutable will of God, some individuals are saved and others damned. Not surprisingly, Augustine's theory of the two cities was adapted frequently by rulers, theologians, and intellectuals over the next millennium in order to justify various political enterprises." | | Online Books Page
Find electronic texts of The City of God, Confessions, De Dialectica, Enchiridion, Expositions on the Book of Psalms, and On Christian Doctrine. | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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