Rape, Shame, and Guilt in Augustine’s City of God
Guilt and Shame It is, to this author's knowledge, a unique occurrence within the ancient world for a writer of stature to dedicate any significant volume of…
Augustine’s Confessions and Voegelin’s Philosophy
Though Eric Voegelin took his epigraph for Order and History from Augustine, he wrote little about the saint and published nothing about the Confessions.1 He linked his philosophy of history to…
Tempora et Mores
Augustine and the Problem of Power: The Essays and lectures of Charles Norris Cochrane. David Beer, ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017. If the modern barbarians…
On the Place of Augustine in Political Philosophy: A Second Look at Some Augustinian Literature
“Shall it (the happy life) be that of the philosophers, who put forward as the chief good, the good which is in ourselves? Is this the true…
Augustine and the Problem of Power: The Augustinian Prognostic
The problem of power is one of perennial interest and importance in human life, but at no period in history has it presented itself with greater urgency…
Augustine on Love, Justice, and Pluralism in Human Nature
Justice is an integral theme in Augustine’s political theology, and justice is directly correlated and contingent upon his theology of love. True justice, for Augustine, begins with…
Augustine: Memory as Sacrament
For Christians, rituals of sacrament are visible and affective signs of the presence of God. Augustine defines a sacrament as an outward sign of an inward grace.…
Reading Augustine’s Confessions in Dalian Labor Camp with Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo was the Chinese dissident writer and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who passed away this past June. He died of liver cancer while serving out…
Teaching for Cosmopolis: Authentic Human Subjectivity and the Liberal Arts Today
The foundational texts and practices of the liberal arts developed in a classicist culture valuing logic, universality, essentialism, and an unchanging human nature with its corresponding account…
From the Multiversity: The New Paradigm
What I have been proposing so far has been a paradigm for the multiversity to adopt for its students, faculty, and administrators: to pursue truth instead of…
From the Multiversity Cave: Augustine and Amare
In my previous two essays, I wrote about how the ideas of periagoge and phronesis could be incorporated into the multiversity’s understanding of itself: an emphasis on…
Narrative and Conversion: Voegelin and Jonas on Freedom in Augustine
The writings of Augustine analyzed by Voegelin and Jonas have to do with the transformative liberation of the human race from the disorientation and cupidity due to…
The Paradox of Consciousness in Augustine’s Confessions: A Voegelinian Reading
Although Augustine wrote several books that are dialogues his Confessions, composed as a prayer, does not at first seem to be one of them. It appears rather…
Platonism and Augustianism: Two Sources of Voegelin’s Vision of History
The question of history is among the most important, but also the most complex, in the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. I am not certain that he ever…
Rome and Christianity
St. Augustine and Varro's Civil Theology It is curious that both Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, while bitterly engaged in the struggle for existential representation of Christianity,…