St. Augustine and the Western Literary Mind
Instructor: Eugene Vance, Prof. of French, Comp. Literature and Comp. Religion.
(Eng 599a, CL596c, FR590, REL 590. Wed. 1:30-4:30)

The greatest writer of early Christian culture in the Latin West was St. Augustine (354-530, C.E.). More than any other single writer, he laid the cultural foundations for vernacular literature and critical thought that endure even now. As he rewrote the legacies of the Greek and Latin classics, Augustine pursued an ongoing search to understand and express the meaning of the created world and its history, and to relate it to the dynamics of individual selfhood. He constantly draws his readers, too, into his search for personal form and meaning.

From the middle ages to modern times, every successive major phase of European religious, scientific, and literary culture has had to reckon with some aspect of Augustine’s thought, which was never “merely” theological. Rather, it was radically experimental—and, just as often, problematical and disturbing, even in his mind. Augustine was his own harshest critic.

Why are all humans born sinners? If humans are predestined, how can they have free will? Why is sexual desire evil? Can humans know even themselves or each other? or can they love anything that they cannot know? What is the value of human art? What is the relation between language and the mind? What “is” time? What is the structure of the human soul and what is its place the whole of created being? Can impossible things truly happen? And how will it all end?

The Confessions will serve as a center-piece of this seminar, which we will then situate in the context of other of his writings that, together, have sustained Augustinianism as a catalyst of self-contradicting renewal in western religion, literature and critical thought.

Each participant will be invited to identify and develop, according to some disciplinary perspective, a specific dimension of Augustine’s writings that directly or indirectly shaped the beliefs, literary practices and critical doctrines of their chosen field, author or national culture.

Students will be evaluated according to their ongoing participation in the discussion (20%), an oral presentation of their chosen topic (30%) and on a final paper (50%).