Forthcoming Guest Lecture on Augustine’s Confessions

One week from today, I will be giving the first of two guest lectures at the Catholic Church of Saint Paul in Ham Lake, Minnesota. This first lecture is titled “Sts. Augustine and Monica, the Head and the Heart.” Those familiar with my work — especially my former students — will find no surprises here. In fact, I must thank those students who undertook a semester long study of the Confessions at the Wabash College Newman Center during the Fall semester of last year.

In preparation for the talk I’ve composed an annotated outline of sorts, posted below. If you’re in the area, the talk starts at 7 pm and I’d love to see you there. For the rest, the talk will be recorded and posted here afterwards.

“Sts. Augustine and Monica, the Head and the Heart”

I.

This talk will introduce St. Augustine’s Confessions by making a somewhat bold claim: St. Monica is the sine qua non of the book, the thing without which there is nothing at all. This claim asks us to imagine Augustine confessing to Monica, a story of a son confessing to his mother. Framing the Confessions in this way, we encounter Augustine as a son; not only a son of God and the Church, but, a son in the simple, (extra)ordinary sense of having a mother. This particular approach to the Confessions will be of use to us in the sections to follow, but, first and foremost, this picture of the book—a story about a son confessing to (and through) his mother—cannot be lost. It must remain our starting and ending point. Hopefully it renders the book into a narrative we might more readily relate to our ordinary, daily life.

II.

This opening claim about the book brings us to a parallel concern about life: the relationship between the head and the heart in the life of the human person, and the proper order therein. At this point, whether we realize it or not, we—you and me, in other words—enter the story: we are human persons, made in the image and likeness of God, living in the era when the imagus Dei has been discarded for the ego cogito, the human person as a purely cognitive being, the Man of reason and knowledge, the modern Man. One result has been this: our sense of what life is (and who we are) is in a state of serious disrepair. I think anyone with religious sensibilities can feel this reality, even if we lack words to describe it. We understand that things are unbalanced and out of tune, even though we may not know much more than that. Augustine’s complex struggle to reconcile his head to his heart—in tension with, and emulation of, his mother—shows us mirror-like images of our own present-day predicament and the true image of the human person, ordered by the ordo Amoris, the order of Love.

III.

“Nemo est qui non amet”—“I am nothing without love.” This dictum from Augustine shows the final point: the head and the heart are not equal or competing aspects of the Confessions or the person. Love, the fruit of the heart, is primary, superior, and sufficient. Augustine’s Confessions reveal a man of reason, kin to our modern selves, struggling to submit his head to his heart. Fidelity to love: submitting reason and intellect to the ordo Amoris, the order of Love—knowing because we believe, not the other way around. Consider these concluding, contrasting quotes from Augustine and Monica: in the opening paragraphs of book one, Augustine prays, “‘Grant me Lord to know and understand’ (Ps. 118: 34, 73. 144) which comes first—to call upon you or to praise you, and whether knowing you precedes calling upon you. But who calls upon you when he does not [first] know you?” In book nine, the book dedicated to the death of Monica, we hear her final, dying words, “Nothing is distant from God, and there is no ground for fear that he may not acknowledge me at the end of the world and raise me up.” Amen.