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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Images of Conversion in St. Augustine's Confession

Images of Conversion in St. Augustine's Confession

O'Connell, Robert J.

Hardcover

Philosophy

ISBN10: 0823215989
ISBN13: 9780823215980
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Jan 1 1996
Pages: 327
Weight: 1.36
Height: 1.01 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.31
Language: English
In his preceding work, Soundings in Augustine's Imagination, Father O'Connell outlined the three basic images Augustine employs to frame his view of the human condition. In the present study, he applies the same techniques of image-analysis to the three major conversions recounted in the Confessions. Those conversions were occasioned, first, by Augustine's youthful reading of Cicero's Hortensius, then by his reading of what he calls the books of the Platonists, and finally, most decisively, by his fateful reading in that Milanese garden of the explosive capitulum, or chapterlet, from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Dissection of Augustine's imagery discloses a chain of striking connections between these conversions. Each of them, for instance, features a return to a woman - now a bridal, now a maternal figure, and finally, a mysterious stand-in for Divine Wisdom, both bridal and maternal. Unsurprisingly, conversion-imagery also provokes a fresh estimate of the sexual component in Augustine's religious biography; but the sexual aspect is balanced by Augustine's insistent stress on the vanity of his worldly ambitions. Perhaps most arresting of all is Father O'Connell's analysis showing that the text that Augustine read from Romans consisted of not only two, but four verses: hence the dramatic procession of images which make up the structure of the Confessions, Book VII; hence, too, the presence, subtle but real, of those same image-complexes in the Dialogues Augustine composed soon after his conversion in A.D. 386.

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