God in St. Augustine's Confessions | Fr. Andrew Hofer, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2020

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's Quarantine Lecture series. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org.

About the speaker:

Father Andrew Hofer, O.P., grew up as the youngest of ten children on a Kansas farm. He entered the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in 1995 and professed simple vows the following year. He made his profession of solemn vows in the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, and was ordained a deacon in 2001 and a priest in 2002.

His assignments have included serving as a parochial vicar in Rhode Island, a missionary in Kenya, a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame, a formator at the Dominican House of Studies, and a member of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. He is finishing a book titled The Word in Our Flesh: A Return to Patristic Preaching, whose research the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship funded through its Teacher-Scholar Grant.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise.
0:07.0	This is how St. Augustine begins his masterwork, the Confessions.
0:12.0	He's echoing the Psalms. Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise.
0:18.0	Some people call the Confessions the first autobiography in Western history,
0:24.0	and there's a good case that can be made for that. Besides being an autobiography, it is primarily,
0:31.3	though, theology. God is the star of the confessions. God is the creator of Augustine's life, the creator of all the
0:43.5	world, of all things seen and unseen. God is the one who has inspired the sacred scriptures,
0:51.8	which are woven throughout the confessions. God also stirs Augustine's own
0:58.5	heart, and at times in the confessions, it may be unclear. Are these God's words or Augustine's
1:04.0	words? Because he blends the two together. God is the audience, to whom Augustine most especially
1:10.5	speaks in the confessions. God is the one to whom Augustine most especially speaks in the Confessions.
1:12.8	God is the one with the most dramatic and pervasive of roles in the Confessions.
1:19.2	God is the one who wins the victory in the conflict described in the Confessions,
1:24.7	and God is the goal for the victory in us, the readers, of the confessions, and God is the goal for the victory in us, the readers of the confessions.
1:32.1	So the confessions should be read, I think, primarily as theology.
1:36.9	But if you want to read it as autobiography, that's fine too.
1:41.7	St. Augustine says in his soliloquies that he wants to know only two things.
1:46.9	God and the soul. A lot of people today are interested in identity. You know, what's your identity? Who are you?
1:55.6	Well, Augustine in the Confessions is able to tell us something about his identity because he has come to know the living God.
2:05.7	We then as readers, as people who pray along with Augustine, can come to know who God is and each of us can say then who I am in the presence of God.
2:20.8	Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise.
2:26.9	Praise.
	...

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