Conybeare - The Routledge Guidebook to Augustines Confessions

The Routledge Guides to the Great Books

The Routledge Guidebook to Augustines Confessions

Augustines Confessions is one of the most significant works of Western culture. Cast as a long, impassioned conversation with God, it is intertwined with passages of life-narrative and with key theological and philosophical insights. It is enduringly popular, and justly so.

The Routledge Guidebook to Augustines Confessions is an engaging introduction to this spiritually creative and intellectually original work. This guidebook is organized by themes:

the importance of language

creation and the sensible world

memory, time and the self

the afterlife of the Confessions.

Written for readers approaching the Confessions for the first time, this guidebook addresses the literary, philosophical, historical and theological complexities of the work in a clear and accessible way. Excerpts in both Latin and English from this seminal work are included throughout the book to provide a close examination of both the autobiographical and theoretical content within the Confessions.

Catherine Conybeare is Professor and Chair in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College, USA.

THE ROUTLEDGE GUIDES TO THE GREAT BOOKS

Series Editor: Anthony Gottlieb

The Routledge Guides to the Great Books provide ideal introductions to the texts which have shaped Western Civilization. The Guidebooks explore the arguments and ideas contained in the most influential works from some of the most brilliant thin-kers who have ever lived, from Aristotle to Marx and Newton to Wollstonecraft. Each Guidebook opens with a short introduction to the author of the great book and the context within which they were working and concludes with an examination of the lasting significance of the book. The Routledge Guides to the Great Books will therefore provide students everywhere with complete introductions to the most significant books of all time.

Available:

Einsteins Relativity James Trefil

Gramscis Prison Notebooks John Schwarzmantel

Thoreaus Civil Disobedience Bob Pepperman Taylor

Descartes Meditations Gary Hatfield

Hobbes Leviathan Glen Newey

Galileos Dialogue Maurice A. Finocchiaro

Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations Marie McGinn

Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics Gerard J. Hughes

Heideggers Being and Time Stephen Mulhall

Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit Robert Stern

Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding E. J. Lowe

Platos Republic Nickolas Pappas

Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Sandrine Bergs

Mills On Liberty Jonathan Riley

Aquinas Summa Theologiae Jason Eberl

Machiavellis The Prince John Scott

Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling John A. Lippett

The Routledge Guides to the Great Books

The Routledge Guidebook to Augustines Confessions

Catherine Conybeare

First published 2016

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2016 Catherine Conybeare

The right of Catherine Conybeare to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Conybeare, Catherine, author.

Title: The Routledge guidebook to Augustines Confessions / Catherine Conybeare.

Description: 1 [edition]. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: The Routledge guides to the great books | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045353| ISBN 9781138847972 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138847989 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315726250 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. Confessiones.

Classification: LCC BR65.A62 C59 2016 | DDC 270.2092dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045353

ISBN: 978-1-138-84797-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-84798-9 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-72625-0 (ebk)

The past is a foreign country, wrote a British novelist, L. P. Hartley: they do things differently there.

The greatest books in the canon of the humanities and sciences can be foreign territory, too. This series of guidebooks is a set of excursions written by expert guides who know how to make such places become more familiar.

All the books covered in this series, however long ago they were written, have much to say to us now, or help to explain the ways in which we have come to think about the world. Each volume is designed not only to describe a set of ideas, and how they developed, but also to evaluate them. This requires what one might call a bifocal approach. To engage fully with an author, one has to pretend that he or she is speaking to us; but to understand a texts meaning, it is often necessary to remember its original audience, too. It is all too easy to mistake the intentions of an old argument by treating it as a contemporary one.

The Routledge Guides to the Great Books are aimed at students in the broadest sense, not only those engaged in formal study. The intended audience of the series is all those who want to understand the books that have had the largest effects.

AJG

October 2012

I have been reading and writing and thinking about Augustines Confessions for more than twenty years now; over that time, I have come to have strong feelings about how the Confessions should be read, so I was delighted when I was asked to write this Guidebook and impose my ideas on a wider audience. The invitation fortuitously coincided with a sabbatical from Bryn Mawr College, whose president and provost I should like to thank most warmly for their generous support of my time away.

I began writing the Guidebook in early 2015, while I was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge; I was back home in Philadelphia by the time I finished it. I was invited to Cambridge, and lavishly hosted there, by Simon Goldhill, the present Director of CRASSH; I also enjoyed the hospitality of Wolfson College, where I was housed, and in particular of its president Sir Richard Evans and his wife Christine Corton.

My intellectual debts are frequently on display in the books and articles that I have selected for further reading in the course of the Guidebook; here I should like particularly to mention Philip Burton, whom I also saw in Cambridge. Who but he would have given such sustained and serious attention to discussing exactly how the Confessions should sound?

I should like also to thank the readers selected by Routledge, whose reports were thoughtful and generous and altogether models of the genre.

Since coming to Bryn Mawr, I have had the joy of teaching the Confessions a number of times, in both English and Latin, and it was with my students in mind that I wrote this book. Many of them have had perceptive things to say about the work; but I think especially of three, with each of whom I associate a particular passage of the