You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hi, and welcome to Form Now. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein, here with my colleague, Dr. John Seahorn.

We teach here at the Augustine Institute, and thank you for joining us for our series on the Confessions.

We're in our fifth session, and we are going to talk about the Confessions as Prayer.

So in a previous episode, when we are talking a lot about the Confessions as

autobiography, we mentioned the opening line and that there's kind of an anti-autobiographical

quality to the opening line. You know, Augustine is not talking about himself. He's not talking

to his audience, but directly to God. And so I wanted to kind of look at that opening line again

and just talk about some other aspects of it that give us a key to the genre of the confession.

So just one-one, the very opening line. Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise.

Your power is immense and your wisdom beyond reckoning.

So something that's additionally interesting about this line beyond what we already said is that

not only is Augustine not talking about himself, not talking to his audience, but to God, but he's not

even speaking in his own words. He's using the words of the Psalms. And so if you're trying to kind of figure out

a genre for the confessions, at least one good candidate is prayer. I guess then spends a lot of

the confessions praying to God and the entire thing is addressed to God. And he often does it

in the words of the Psalms, which is of course the chief language of the church, as we talked about

in our last episode, another sign that this is an ecclesial text, is the language of the church,

and the language of prayer that Augustine knows sort of most deeply. And so if we think about,

you know, kind of arguing, yes, the confessions, the genre confessions is prayer, that might

seem a little bit weird. I know, why would you choose to write your confessions as a prayer? And Augustine, of course,

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