Category: Augustine
-
Is It Always Morally Wrong to Take One’s Own Life? Part I
A reader poses a question: A 45 year old lady wants to kill herself. This is not a view that she has come to lightly. She has been thinking about suicide fairly systematically for the last five years – ever since she turned forty in fact. She can think of reasons to live – her…
-
To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .
. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility. "He didn't have a…
-
Real Enough to Debase, but Not Real Enough to Satisfy
St. Augustine at Confessions, Bk. VI, Ch. 11, speaks of "a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." A paradox of pleasure. Certain pleasures madly striven after prove fleeting and unreal, yet not so fleeting and unreal that they cannot degrade and debase their pursuers. At the apogee of this…
-
Life Without a View Other than the Immediate One
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 202: Algerians. They live in the richness and warmth of friendship and family. The body as the center, and its virtues — and its [sic] profound sadness as soon as it declines — life without a view other than the immediate one,…
-
How Will Death Find Us?
We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used. We ought to heed the following lines from St. Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.: Let us put away these vain and empty concerns. Let us turn…
-
America Was
What did we celebrate on the 4th of July? An America that no longer exists. Should this trouble the philosopher? Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a). The rise and fall of great nations…
-
Living Beyond Praise
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 37: But to be without any praise whatsoever, and to test ourselves in this condition, how can we manage it?
-
The Discursive as Distraction
The search for the Real takes us outside ourselves. We may seek the Real in experiences, possessions, distant lands, or other people. These soon enough reveal themselves as distractions. But what about ideas and theories? Are they simply a more lofty sort of distraction? “Travelling is a fool’s paradise” said Emerson. Among lands certainly, but…
-
A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl’s Birthday
Edmund Husserl was born on this date in 1859. In his magisterial Augustine of Hippo, Peter Brown writes of Augustine, "He wanted complete certainty on ultimate questions." (1st ed., p. 88) If you don't thrill to that line, you are no philosopher. Compare Edmund Husserl: "Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben." "I just can't…
-
Augustine Against the Stoics
Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar. In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4: And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills,…
-
Dallas Willard (1935-2013)
I met Dallas Willard only once, at an A. P. A. meeting in San Francisco in the early '90s. I had sent him a paper on Husserl and Heidegger and we had plans to get together over dinner to discuss it. Unfortunately, the plans fell through when a son of Willard showed up. But we did…
-
On Light
Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert: Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21) Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low…
-
How Did We Get to be So Proud?
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." So inauspicious a…
-
Alypius and the Gladiators
The 28th of August is the Feast of St. Augustine in the Roman Catholic liturgy. The following post from three years ago bears up well: At the time of the Nicholas Berg beheading by al-Qaeda terrorists, a correspondent wrote to say that he watched the video only up to the point where the knife was…