Why This Text Matters | Augustine's Confessions | Richard Miller

Augustine's Confessions is an autobiography written as a prayer. In it, Augustine recounts his early life, his restless movement through Manichean thought and Neoplatonic philosophy, his conversion to Christianity, and the relationships that shaped who he became: with his mother Monica, with friends he loved too much, with God. But Confessions is also something stranger and more searching than a memoir. It is a meditation on desire, memory, time, and what it means to be a creature who cannot find rest except in God. In this episode of Why This Text Matters, Richard Miller of the University of Chicago Divinity School walks viewers through the structure, themes, and enduring significance of the Confessions. He traces Augustine's three senses of confession (praise, admission of sin, and testimony of belief), explains the theology of ordered and disordered desire at the heart of the work, follows Augustine through his encounters with Manicheanism and Neoplatonism, and guides viewers through the three epiphanies of Books Seven, Eight, and Nine. He also reflects on what Augustine's treatment of friendship, grief, and memory asks of its readers across sixteen centuries. Richard B. Miller is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Part of the Why This Text Matters series, in which University of Chicago Divinity School faculty introduce essential texts in the study of religion.    • Why This Text Matters   #Augustine #Confessions #ChristianTheology #Philosophy #WhyThisTextMatters #UniversityOfChicago Chapters: 0:00:00 Introduction 0:00:26 About the Confessions: an intimate conversation with God 0:01:28 The central question: traversing the gap between creature and Creator 0:02:45 Teaching the Confessions for 35 years 0:03:03 The layers of a classic text 0:04:18 Augustine's life: bishop of Hippo, prolific author 0:05:39 Why Augustine wrote the Confessions 0:06:49 A narrative of conversion: Manicheanism, Neoplatonism, Christianity 0:09:25 Conversion as pilgrimage, not clean break 0:11:09 The structure of the Confessions: Books 1–13 0:13:30 Parts and wholes: an Augustinian key 0:14:45 Creation as witness to God 0:16:00 The challenge of humanity: rightly ordered desire 0:17:36 Confession as process, not achievement 0:19:21 Desire as ontological condition: our hearts are restless 0:22:00 Time, eternity, and the ever-passing present 0:23:48 Three kinds of death in Augustine 0:24:56 Grief and inordinate attachment: the death of a friend 0:26:39 From having a friend to being a friend 0:28:14 Memory, prayer, and the need for God's assistance 0:31:06 The taxonomy of sin: three earthbound faculties 0:32:19 Humility as the distinctly Christian virtue 0:33:56 The pear scene: sin without motive 0:35:03 The Manichean foil: matter, evil, and two realms 0:39:25 How Neoplatonism liberated Augustine from materialism 0:41:01 Three epiphanies: Books Seven, Eight, and Nine 0:42:23 The first epiphany: intellectual illumination and its limits 0:43:47 Romans 7 and the divided will 0:45:17 Conversion: the light of certainty, a healed soul 0:46:37 What all three epiphanies share 0:48:00 Memory as self-integration, properly ordered 0:49:27 Recommended reading on Augustine