His “staging” of truth’s manifestation is an essential condition for the personal drama of the search for wisdom. He has located the engagement of mind and reality within the interiority of the inquirer’s heart and mind, and he understands the truth as freely entering into the scene from without and above both the material world and the immaterial soul. It is a term whose ordinary meaning for us is distant from Augustine’s original intention. “ Confessio ” is the name for the way he makes his meaning clear, draws his hearers and readers into what he says, and appeals to them for their assent. The mode of discourse is not accidental to Augustine’s meaning. What stands out in O’Donnell’s parody, is the image of a man’s direct address to an unseen and unheard interlocutor, spoken with the conceit of other interested hearers listening off on the sides and out of the picture. 2 Commentary Books 1-7 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp 8-9. resembles a one-sided, non-fiction epistolary novel, enacted in the presence of the silence (and darkness) of God.” 1 O’Donnell, Augustine Confessions, Vol. ” O’Donnell continues, “as a literary text, conf. He gestures in our direction and mentions us from time to time, but he never addresses his readers. This opening can give rise to the disconcerting feeling of coming into a room and chancing upon a man speaking to someone who isn’t there. O’Donnell captures well its peculiarity: “It begins abruptly, with speech directed to a silent God- but speech chosen from the words of God himself. In comparison with the philosophical tradition, he is doing something new and unprecedented.Ĭonfessio -as to the character of his mode of discourse, James J. Augustine’s approaches in the genre and structure of his text are notably distinctive. A Reading of the ConfessionsĬonfessio – Augustine’s mode of discourseĪs an entry to the meaning of the Confessions, I shall begin with remarks on its mode of discourse. It is the overarching intent of the text as a whole that carries implications for understanding the meaning and practice of education.

Second, there is Augustine who is the mature, teaching bishop writing his confessiones and situating the biographical parts within the larger “speech act” of the whole of his work. First, there is the Augustine narrated, the boy and young man whose actions and thoughts and feelings are brought forth out of memory. He is just as concerned that his readers follow him in his present meditations on the Word of God as with their interest in how the Word brought him to where he now is. However, the Confessions is not primarily a book about the author’s past. At the time he composed and published the Confessions, some ten to twelve years after the last historical events narrated in it, Augustine was the bishop of Hippo. He situates moments of his personal story within the dynamic whole of the cosmos as he comes to understand it through his exegesis of the book of Genesis. In his Confessions Augustine fashions an account of the first thirty-four years of his life. I delighted in truth, in such little things and thoughts about such little things. We also, who are spiritual as to the soul, being turned away from you our light, were sometimes darkness in this life. Your best servant is he who looks not so much to hear from you what he wants to hear, but rather to want what he hears from you. Truth is loved in such wise that men who love some other object want what they love to be the truth. Nay rather, it speaks to all, but only those understand who compare its voice taken from outside with the truth within. It is silent to one, but speaks to the other. Without any lapse from its first creation, it has clung fast to you. –– On True Religion 36.īecause of its most sweet and happy contemplation of you, it firmly checks its own mutability.

Truth is that by which what is manifests itself.

Illuminations book augustine