St. Augustine and the Quest for Self-Knowledge | Prof. Michael Foley

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2022

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 21, 2022 at the University of Texas at Austin. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Dr. Michael P. Foley is a Professor of Patristics in the Great Texts Program at Baylor University, a Catholic theologian, a mixologist, and the author or editor of over a dozen books and around 400 articles on topics including sacred liturgy, St. Augustine of Hippo, and contemporary film and culture.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.4	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.5	So what I'd like to do today is talk to you about one of Augustine's main themes in his writings.
0:20.5	You could even call it an obsession of his, self-knowledge.
0:26.3	And I'll give you a couple examples of this, why I call it an obsession. Although I did see a
0:31.3	great line, I think it was on your floor, the fourth floor. I saw a sign tacked on somebody's office door.
0:40.7	Obsession is the word lazy people give for dedication.
0:46.8	And that may be true.
0:49.2	So a couple examples of Augustine's dedication to self-knowledge.
0:55.3	In one of his first dialogues, the soliloquies, which depicts Augustine and his own
1:01.2	reason as sort of separate characters in a conversation, reason asks Augustine what he wants
1:08.1	to know, to which Augustine replies, God and the soul.
1:14.5	Nothing more, Reason persists, nothing whatsoever, Augustine exclaims.
1:21.4	These are the twin obsessions of his life to know God and the soul.
1:26.4	Later, when Reason asks Augustine to come up with the briefest and
1:30.2	most perfect prayer that he can, Augustine prays this, O God, ever the self-same, may I know myself, may I know
1:40.5	thee, amen. May I know myself, may I know thee, amen.
1:47.3	One can understand Augustine's preoccupation.
1:51.5	The injunction to know thyself is at least as old as the oracle of Delphi, and it essentially
1:57.7	became the cornerstone of classical philosophy as evidenced in Socrates's
2:03.1	famous aphorism, the unexamined life is not worth living.
2:08.6	Despite their differences, the one thing that all the myriad schools of Socratic and
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