St. Augustine’s Confessions & the Interior Altar of the Heart | Professor Chad Pecknold

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on October 16th, 2023, at The College of William and Mary. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events About the speaker: Dr. Chad Pecknold received his PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK) and since 2008 he has been a Professor of Historical & Systematic Theology in the School of Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He teaches in the areas of fundamental theology, Christian anthropology, and political theology. Pecknold is the author of a number of scholarly articles and books including most recently, Christianity and Politics: A Brief Guide to the History (Cascade, 2010) and The T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology (Bloomsbury, 2014). Dr. Pecknold is also a frequent contributor to debates in the public square, writing regular columns for First Things and National Review on a range of topics related to the importance and impact of Church teaching on social and political questions. Dr. Pecknold is frequently sought after for his opinion on current events, and has been quoted in hundreds of news outlets around the world such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. A self-described "Augustinian-Thomist," Pecknold is an Associate Editor for the English Edition of the international Thomistic journal of theology, Nova et Vetera, and co-edits with Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., the new Sacra Doctrina series at Catholic University of America Press. Dr Pecknold is currently writing a book on Augustine’s City of God. Dr. Pecknold resides in Alexandria, VA with his wife, Dr. Sara Pecknold (who teaches Music history at CUA) and their five kids.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tomistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:26.6	I am actually delighted to be here and I am writing a book on Augustine's politics, which is key to the city of God, but right now I'm finishing up a book on Augustine's anthropology, on his understanding of the nature of the person.
0:49.2	And the book is called Fire on the Altar.
0:55.1	And I'm going to talk about that tonight, about Fire on the Altar. And I'm going to talk about that tonight about fire on the altar.
1:00.2	Hopefully by the end of it, you'll know what I mean by fire on the altar with respect to the human person.
1:07.1	It's ironic that we associate one of the greatest intellectuals in the history of Western civilization with the phrase, restless heart.
1:16.0	It can sound to us like a pietistic affirmation of a personal relationship with God, which is basically a private matter of feeling, or as the Germans would say, Geffoul Schleiermacher's term. The great Protestant
1:30.3	theologian Friedrich Schlaiermacher thought of all of theology this way, that all of theology is just an expression of your inner experience of things, your feelings.
1:40.3	More romantic than Roman.
1:47.7	The obvious truth is that Augustine is not this way.
1:49.4	Augustine is not a romantic.
1:51.0	He is Roman.
2:04.7	Augustine can sound sometimes like he's sounding out the romantic poetic depths of individual longing, sensuq. But rather than think of Augustine this way, when we approach him, we should not approach him as moderns. We should
2:09.0	approach him in a sense through an ancient approach to religion. We must enter into Augustine's confessions,
2:20.4	not as if it's some 19th century novel about relationships.
2:27.1	Not saying anything bad about that.
2:30.5	Just we shouldn't treat Augustine that way.
2:32.6	It's not an autobiography. It's not a novel about relationships, except in one sense it is about a relationship to God.
2:43.0	In this sense, confessions is surprise, surprise, fundamentally about religion. It's about our religious nature, that we are made religious by God
	...

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