{"product_id":"so-ancient-and-so-new-st-augustines-confessions-and-its-influence-9781587318191","title":"So Ancient and So New – St. Augustine`s","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe study of any masterpiece can change one’s life, but the \u003ci\u003eConfessions\u003c\/i\u003e of St. Augustine, like Plato’s\u003ci\u003e Republic \u003c\/i\u003eor Dante’s \u003ci\u003eCommedia\u003c\/i\u003e, has the almost uncanny power to enact in the reader what it describes. Plato’s book reconfigures the city of the soul by freeing it from enslavement to the tyrannical passions and making it answerable to reason in its pursuit of the good. For Augustine, who shares many of the same ends, the pursuit of the good is not the rectification of philosophical reason, but (as it was for Dante) an intensely personal and consuming love: the encounter with the living God. Oddly, it may seem, that encounter comes for Augustine through the act of reading. Unlike Plato, who depicts the process of reasoning toward the truth, Augustine finds the truth revealed in another, immeasurably greater book that cannot be read in its true sense without the help of its author.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The essays uncover a variety of themes, from Augustine’s act of reading (Marc LePain and Bercier), his emphasis on memory (Roger Corriveau), and his choice to reveal to the world his “hidden and unworldly activity” (Daniel Maher), to the way Augustine’s own education might serve as a corrective to contemporary understandings of “assessment” (Gavin Colvert). The vast wake of Augustine’s work includes writers from Dante and Montaigne to Nabokov, but three representative figures were chosen to show his influence: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the \u003ci\u003eConfessions\u003c\/i\u003e (Rick Sorenson), James Joyce in the whole range of his work (Eloise Knowlton), and T.S. Eliot in the \u003ci\u003eFour Quartets \u003c\/i\u003e(Glenn Arbery). The most direct engagement with Augustine is obviously Rousseau’s. In his essay comparing and contrasting the pivotal moments of the two \u003ci\u003eConfessions\u003c\/i\u003e, Rick Sorenson explores major differences between the way of faith and the path of reliance on reason. Joyce might be said to have taken Rousseau’s path (at least in rejecting revelation), whereas Eliot took Augustine’s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In its sophistications and anxieties, the late antiquity Augustine inhabited feels a great deal like the late modernity we inhabit now. Certainly, the barbarians of materialist thought long ago sacked the civilization our ancestors inhabited. When Eliot published\u003ci\u003e The Waste Land \u003c\/i\u003ein 1922, he already saw the old order of antiquity and Christendom as “stony rubble,” “a heap of broken images.” As one of his speakers puts it, “Dry bones can harm no one.” This old book, the \u003ci\u003eConfessions\u003c\/i\u003e, might seem to our contemporaries as dry and dead as those bones, but it is not so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Without being a defense of Christianity (as the\u003ci\u003e City of God \u003c\/i\u003eis) or a work of catechesis, the \u003ci\u003eConfessions\u003c\/i\u003e might be the greatest counter to the materialist creed in Western literature. It recounts Augustine’s central, intensely personal, and ultimately liberating struggle to conceive of spiritual substance, an intellectual achievement without which he cannot even hope to accommodate his understanding to the reality of God. This book of essays has one primary end, which is to entice the reader to reopen Augustine’s book, to look over his shoulder and see what the act of reading means to him and what it has accomplished: the world-changing encounter with the substance of the Word.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"St Augustine's Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51041524613463,"sku":"9781587318191","price":18.58,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781587318191.jpg?v=1750950634","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/so-ancient-and-so-new-st-augustines-confessions-and-its-influence-9781587318191","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}