Spending Easter with Augustine, Part 3
My third session was intended as a less chewy version of my forthcoming paper in Augustine’s Confessions: A Critical Guide: “How great a debtor: Grace and providence in the Confessions.” (Or at least I hope the paper is forthcoming. The whole volume has been sitting at Cambridge University Press for four months now, undergoing “clearance review,” whatever exactly that is.) I think it was mostly successful, though I didn’t get to the material in the final section of the paper, which talks about grace and providence in the exegetical books. Since we haven’t read any of the exegetical books yet, that’s probably just as well.
My fourth session, yesterday, was about Augustine’s encounter with Platonism in Book Seven, along with a bit of general reflection on the contested relationship between Christianity and philosophy. That one definitely went well, and the lavender-lemon sugar cookies were a hit.
Apart from preparing for next week’s session, this week has to be all about John Duns Scotus. I am in the middle of writing a chapter on the moral attributes of God—love, justice, mercy, all that stuff—and putting together a prospectus for a volume of translations (title TBD, but probably something boring like John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Metaphysics, Language, and Cognition, or even John Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings). According to my work schedule for April through September, that prospectus will be done by the end of April.
That prospectus will not be done by the end of April.
Today is the Feast of St Catherine of Siena. Thanks in large part to Christina Van Dyke’s A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-Knowledge, Reason, Persons, Love, and Immortality, I have come to love Catherine. I taught pretty extensive chunks of her Dialogue in my undergraduate Global Seminar last spring. For that course I got to take my students to Italy; we saw Catherine’s tomb in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome . . .
as well as her head, which is in the Basilica di San Domenico in Siena. (Mummified heads are no picnic to look at, and just because I had to look at it doesn’t mean you should have to, so I’m not posting an image.) I’m also planning to do a week or two on Catherine in the “Philosophy outside the universities” unit in my graduate seminar on medieval ethics this fall, along with the brilliant, if impossible-to-spell, Hadewijch.
Or Hadewych.
Or Hadewig.
My Brabantian Middle Dutch is not what it used to be.
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