Augustine's Confessions

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2018

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss St Augustine of Hippo's account of his conversion to Christianity and his life up to that point. Written c397AD, it has many elements of autobiography with his scrutiny of his earlier life, his long relationship with a concubine, his theft of pears as a child, his work as an orator and his embrace of other philosophies and Manichaeism. Significantly for the development of Christianity, he explores the idea of original sin in the context of his own experience. The work is often seen as an argument for his Roman Catholicism, a less powerful force where he was living in North Africa where another form of Christianity was dominant, Donatism. While Augustine retells many episodes from his own life, the greater strength of his Confessions has come to be seen as his examination of his own emotional development, and the growth of his soul. With Kate Cooper Professor of History at the University of London and Head of History at Royal Holloway Morwenna Ludlow Professor of Christian History and Theology at the University of Exeter and Martin Palmer Visiting Professor in Religion, History and Nature at the University of Winchester Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:30.0	His youth be sorted by sex. His years are blibbing with a woman unmarried and their son.
0:34.4	His embrace of the mannequin religion and other philosophies.
0:37.3	And famously, the time he stole powers as a child. Not because he wanted to eat them,
0:41.6	but because he wanted to steal. These are also confessions of his faith in the god of the Catholic
0:46.9	Church. Just one of the competing Christian churches at that time. They were a demonstration of how
0:51.6	he's so developed, showing a way that others might follow. And it's argued that his experience of
0:56.3	life influences his ideas on marriage and a regional sin. We'd need to discuss our
1:00.8	Guston's confessions are Kate Cooper, Professor of History at the University of London,
1:05.5	and Head of History at Royal Holloway, Moena Ludlow, Professor of Christian History and
1:10.2	Theology at the University of Exeter, and Martin Palmer, Visiting Professor in Religion,
1:14.6	History and Nature at the University of Winchester. Kate Cooper, we place a Guston in Hippo,
1:21.4	then part of the Roman Empire. What state was the empire in when he was a young man?
1:26.1	When he was a boy? It's very much the decline in fall of the Roman Empire. I mean, to take a
1:31.2	benchmark, 410 is the year of the sack of Rome, which is one of the great moments of the fall of
1:37.2	the empire. A Guston is writing about the period of his childhood in use from 354 to 387. So it's
1:45.2	the years that are the run-up to the sort of cataclysm, and it's a period in North Africa of
1:51.1	constant civil war. What sort of background did he have? He comes from what seems to be a Roman
1:58.4	citizen family with a kind of mixed Roman barber background. Sorry, Berber. Berber, yeah.
2:04.6	The mother was a Berber. Yeah, his mother's name Monica. Because this is Algeria,
2:08.4	but of the present Algeria. Yes, exactly. So in that sense, there's a tradition being carried
2:18.4	through her name of the Berber background of her family. And if you look at a Guston's own name,
	...

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