In the Suburbs of Babylon: Augustine's Confessions I-III | Professor Russell Hittinger

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on June 12, 2023 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. as part of the 2023 Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship: "Friendship, Happiness, and the Search for God: Aristotle, Augustine, & Aquinas" For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: https://thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events Speaker Bio: Russell Hittinger is a leading scholar of Catholic political and social thought. From 1996-2019, Dr. Hittinger was the incumbent of the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he was also a Research Professor in the School of Law. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Fordham University, Princeton University, New York University, Providence College, and Charles University in Prague. In January 2020, Dr. Hittinger gave the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford. Since 2001, he is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, to which he was elected a full member (ordinarius) in 2004, and appointed to the consilium or governing board from 2006-2018. On 8 September 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Dr. Hittinger as an ordinarius in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, in which he finished his ten-year term in 2019. He is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, where he also serves as the inaugural co-Director of the Program in Catholic Political Thought.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	What I need to do basically for four days is teach you how to read the confessions.
0:08.1	Because, well, it took me about 40 years to figure out how to do it.
0:14.4	I mean, you can do it on your own, and everyone should try it once or twice on their own.
0:19.9	But I want to teach you how to read it.
0:22.6	And because Augustine is an ancient writer,
0:28.2	to know how to read it is to know the content as well.
0:49.5	So, he lives 354 until 3.30, I mean, 430.
0:56.2	He dies in Hipporegius with the vandals having already surrounded its city.
1:03.2	The first thing to know is that the confessions from the first sentence until the last is a continuous prayer.
1:07.0	Question, had anyone ever done this before?
1:10.4	Probably not. It's a continuous prayer from the first
1:16.7	sentence until the last. It's done so well, and it's so beguiling that most readers, after a paragraph or two, forget that they're essentially eavesdropping
1:32.6	on Augustine's prayer to God. Has anyone even pulled this off since the confessions?
1:40.4	It's a good question. People have pulled off long prayer, but a long prayer that tries to solve is many different
1:52.9	philosophical and theological problem.
1:56.3	Not sure.
1:57.0	It is sui generis.
1:58.9	The closest thing we have in antiquity to something like the story of the
2:04.6	confessions is Olympius is the golden ass, also called the Transformations of Lucius.
2:13.7	Olympias was a fellow North African, but about 175 years earlier than Augustine,
2:19.9	who wrote a story about someone who was inquiring into occult things and got turned into a donkey
2:33.2	and spends most of the story, most of the book, as a donkey
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.