Obtain Confessions Of St. Augustine: Spiritual Meditations And Divine Insights (Sacred Texts) Formulated By Edward Bouverie Pusey Mobi

“Amare amaban amare et amari dulce mihi erat”

Primera algunas pequeñas apreciaciones formales, digamos la parte de reseña mas pura.

El libro está escrito con un estilo dialéctico, Hay un constante juego entre interiorexterior, almacuerpo, tiempoeternidad, creadorcreación, etc, En lo que se refiere al estilo, el libro está muy bellamente escrito, se nota la formación en retórica del autor, que pese a renegar de la misma, tiene interiorizado el estilo.
En concreto ésta edición, el trabajo de Agustín Uña Juárez el traductor, escritor de la introducción y todo el apartado de notas es fascinante, el comentario del texto aporta valor, matiz, textura y profundidad al texto.
Esto nos aporta una comprensión mayor del texto sin ser una intromisión que en algunos libros resulta muy molesta, Me gusta mucho que se permita ser personal, le he acabado cogiendo mucho cariño a él también,
Hasta el libro X, el libro tiene un carácter de confesión del pasado, una reunificación de la disgregación llevada acabo por el dolor de la vida sin rumbo.
Los X diez primeros libros son los que se me han hecho más amenos y fascinantes, A partir del libro X coge el terreno del presente y el terreno de la exploración del yo cambia, El texto coge un formato más filosófico, Las reflexiones sobre el tiempo y la memoria las considero una autentica joya, Son fascinantes. A partir de ahí se entra en un terreno muy ensuciado por un optimismo teológico que nos deja un mal sabor de boca,
En general me ha pasado lo mismo que me pasa al leer a los “místicos”, empiezo bastante interesado, paso por un momento medio de pura fascinación y quedo totalmente prendido, para llegar al final de la obra, en este caso las últimaspaginas con un esfuerzo para no dejarlo.
Que se me ha hecho cuesta arriba vaya,
Con esto cierro la parte más de “reseña” para hablar de mi experiencia personal


Amén,


Para empezar, dejándolo claro, Las Confesiones se han convertido probablemente en mi libro favorito,
Durante el proceso de lectura, no se si me he proyectado o me identificado con Agustín, Me cuesta diferenciar el Desdoblamiento del hecho, pero honestamente poco me importa,
Éste es el relato, la historia, de una avidez de ser, De una vida de profundo anhelo, de ardor, de sentimiento, de fuerza pura, Citando a Rilke, Agustin es: “una existencia rebosante me brota del corazón”,
Creo que me fascina principalmente por un hecho, seguramente el mismo por el cual me fascina de Zambrano, Agustín buscó la verdad y encontró el amor, Y eso me duele, igual que me duele leer los versos de Dante del Paraíso, Me duele la luz que proyectan y que poseen, Me duele más cuando me cuentan la luz del amor, que las tinieblas de la soledad,
Agustín es volverse a si mismo, es un grito desesperado por entender quién se es y el porqué, Es auto conocimiento pura fenomenología del ser,
Durante la lectura, he sentido cosas que me aterrorizan, Me aterroriza la trascendencia, la herida metafísica, me aterroriza sentir la parálisis que sentí con Rothko pensando en la cruz y el Verbo hecho carne, me aterroriza el que mi alma mire arriba.
Me aterroriza porque la verdad se me escapa y no sé si puedo soportar encontrarme con el amor, Y aún así no puedo escapar de él,
Agustín es filósofo del tiempo y la memoria, Es recordar, es buscar constantemente eso recóndito que hay en nosotros que no nos permite cerrar el círculo de nuestro ser, de nuestra identidad, nuestro absoluto, ese por una puta vez llegar a ser el que se es.
Porque cada vez se me presenta como más cierto que la filosofía se resume a dos máximas coetáneas al nacimiento de la filosofía.

“Llegar a ser el que se es” y “aprender padeciendo”, Espero de veras equivocarme y que la luz no me duela, Porque la trascendencia y la herida metafísica al mismo tiempo que te eleva, te hace agarrarte, como a un clavo ardiendo, a las manos que te ahogan.
Todo para poder respirar y ver, ver con claridad, eso es todo,
En este autor, amor y verdad se identifican, Ambas son Dios

Agustín es amor y cierro con alguna cita:
“ Y aquí un buen día mi infancia murió, pero yo sigo vivo” “Con qué dolor se entenebreció mi corazón, y todo cuanto miraba era muerte.
Y la patria me era suplicio et erat mihi patria supplicium, y la casa paterna, infelicidad extraña, Y cuanto había departido con el se tornaba, sin él, crudelísimo tormento, Mis ojos le aguardaban por doquier y no comparecía, Y odiaba todas las cosas porque ellas no le tenían, ni tampoco podían va decirme: Está para venir, como en vída, cuando estaba ausente.
Me había convertido para mí en un gran problema magna quaestio y preguntaba a mi alma porqué estaba triste y por qué me turbaba tanto y no sabía qué responderme.
Y si le decía: Espera en Dios, ya no me obedecía y con razón, porque aquel amigo carísimo que había perdido era más real y meior que aquel fantasma en el que se le ordenaba esperar.
Sólo el llanto me era dulce, y él había sustituido a mi amigo en las delicias de mi alma, ”
It was slow, it was dense, and it was militantly Christian, So why is that The Confessions is such an unavoidably fascinating work Augustine appears here as a fully realized person, with all the good and the bad that that implies it's as if the book was a conversation with God and a flyonthewall was taking dictation.
Since God obviously would have known Augustine's transgressions before they even occurred, Augustine thus has nothing to hide in this personal narrative, or at least makes it appear that way.
The prose of this translation must be incredibly different from its Latin source, but it's obvious that Augustine has a force of personality that appears through his work that few writer have matched in the centuries that have followed this original Western autobiography.
The power and beauty of his writing was no doubt aided by his devotion not only to The Bible, but to Cicero, Plato, and especially Virgil.
It's also an incomparably fascinating window into the culture of the time: the Manicheans, Astrologers, Christians, and Pagans are all interesting studies through the eyes of this saint.
His contributions to philosophy in this text cannot be ignored even today, Bertrand Russell not exactly a churchgoer admired his work on time, and it's still an enlightening experience to read these thoughts, And of course the story of spiritual awakening is an inspiring and beautiful one, a story that is not altogether dissimilar to that of the Buddha centuries before Augustine.


Although, especially at the start, it can be slow and cold reading, The Confessions more than justifies its position as one of the most important books ever written.
Are you there God It's me, St, Augustine. As a firstsemester college freshman needing an elective, I signed up for a speedreading class, I never adopted any of the techniques the course touted, although I got an A in it but the classroom had a paperback rack with various donated books we could practice on, and this was one I read.
It turned out to be the most lasting educational benefit of the class, and did make a genuine intellectual impression on me, Other than Lightfoot's translation of the Apostolic Fathers, which I read a few years later, this is the only reading in Patristics that I've ever done.


AugustineA. D. was, of course, one of the major theologians in Christian history, and probably the most influential of the Latin Fathers, at least on the development of the church in the West.
This is far from his only writing, and not his most important one most scholars would give that accolade to The City Of God which is on my toread shelf.
These two, though, are probably the two most widely read of his works, This one is not extremely long a bit overpages, and is divided into“books,” each divided in turn into short, numbered chapters with numbered paragraphs.
The chapter numbers were added to the early printed editions of thes ands, and the paragraph numbers in theth century, As the title implies, it's partially autobiographical the first nine books telling the story of his early life, leading up to his Christian conversion at the age of, and continuing through his mother Monica's death a couple of years later, in.
By the time he wrote, he had already entered the priesthood and become a bishop, but this book doesn't continue his story that far, Rather than being autobiographical, the last four books are mostly theological reflections, and so seem somewhat disconnected from the preceding nine,

Of course, I read this in English translation, but I no longer remember anything about the edition or the translator, The copy I'm referring to now is of thetranslation by British scholar Henry Chadwick, a wellrecognized authority on Augustine, published by Oxford Univ, Press. Besides a short bibliographical note, brief list of important dates in Augustine's life, and a bit

over fourpage index, it has apage introduction, which would have been very helpful to me if the copy I read had included it.
It should be admitted that at the time of my life that I read this, I wasn't at the optimum place for appreciating it, either intellectually or spiritually I'd become a Christian in high school, but still had no serious conception of discipleship and wasn't very familiar with the Bible.
Also, as an intellectual who both studied and subsequently taught in the schools of that day, where teens and young men learned rhetoric and philosophy, Augustine was well versed in the classical Latin literary style, which can often come across as dry and ponderous, especially in the later “books.
” Then too, a particularly odd stylistic feature here is that the whole book is ostensibly addressed to God, not the reader, as though it were apage prayer.
Though his attitude no doubt was prayerful in places, the fact that he's obviously writing this to be read by others makes the strictly Godward address seem somewhat dishonest and gimmicky.
Although I did engage with the text, there's a good deal that didn't brand itself on my memory, And the reactions to various parts of the book that I do remember were both positive and negative,

One important aspect of the book that struck me is that this is very much a window into the mindset of ancient Platonic philosophy in the Hellenistic world, and its influence in shaping postapostolic Gentile Christianity in its early centuries.
As I was learning in my early college years, this is a strand of philosophy which has prePlatonic roots in the thought of Pythagoras, and ultimately in the Hindu worldview of the sages of India, with whom Pythagoras studied as a young man.
This was basically a worldview that glorified the noncorporeal “spiritual” and disparaged the physical world and the body, It reached its most extreme form in the Gnostic and Manichean heresies of Augustine's time though these had precursors already in New Testament times, which Paul and other NT writers warn against, with the idea that the physical world is evil and not of Divine origin at all, and that salvation consists of the soul ridding itself of the evil body.
As Augustine frankly discusses here, he was a committed Manichean as a young man and he explains the reasoning and influences that led him eventually to reject that system, and to embrace Christianity with its belief in God as creator of the world and of Christ as truly incarnate in a human body.
But despite his conversion, he didn't wholly jettison all of his Manichean attitudes, In one revealing passage here chapter, paragraphin Book, which had me rolling my eyes bigtime, he speaks of God teaching him that food should only be taken like medicine, in the quantity just necessary for the sustenance of the body, which is always less than the quantity which would actually give “dangerous” pleasure in eating, which he seriously speaks of as “an insidious trap of uncontrolled desire,”and which he speaks of as a daily struggle against temptation.
The contrast of this attitude with Scripture texts like Ecclesiastes:“Go, eat your food with gladness, ” couldn't be more marked we see here a glorification of asceticism that would express itself in things like monasticism, and the whole tradition of the “if you enjoy it, it's a sin!” school of pseudospirituality.
Augustine himself would become the founder of a monastic order, the Augustinians, We can also see Platonic and Manichean roots for the penchant he displays here in a number of places for adopting allegorical interpretations of the Bible rather than straightforward readings of the text.


Despite his theoretical deploring of bodily impulses, Augustine is also frank though never titillating in his admission that, in his teens, he indulged in quite a bit of promiscuous sex.
At the age of, he settled down to faithful cohabitation with a lowerclass “concubine” whom he never names, which struck me as sort of dehumanizing!, with whom he lived for aboutyears.
She bore him a son, Adeodatus, though sadly the boy died in his teens, The year before his conversion, he dumped her in order to get engaged to an upperclass woman who could provide a dowry though that marriage never took place, since he subsequently broke the engagement when he decided to enter the priesthood.
He kept custody of his son, though it's not explicit in the book whether or not that arrangement was what the boy's mother wanted, Even granting that the long illicit union wasn't based on love at least on his part, and that he was not yet at that time a Christian, his treatment of his partner impressed me then, and still does, as shabby.
He deplores his own behavior in indulging in unmarried sex, but he never evinces much feeling of guilt about unkindness to a fellow human and I'm inclined to see that blind spot as also related to his Manichean attitudes.


On a more positive note, a major takeaway from this book was the insight into the nature of eternity: that God, as the eternal creator, created time itself along with the universe, but Himself exists outside of time, and experiences all time as something like an infinite, omniconscious present, rather than sequentially, the way that we do.
As I've recently learned, this idea wasn't original with Augustine he derived it from Plato a more constructive contribution than some of the latter's other ideas!.
But nonetheless, it makes considerable sense to me and explains some Biblical concepts in a way that I've found immensely helpful, I'm glad to have read the book on that account, even if it hadn't been illuminating in other ways, There are some other deep philosophical concepts dealt with here as well,

Although Augustine is perhaps best known as the first Christian theologian to explicitly advocate the doctrine with which I personally disagree vehemently of unconditional double predestination of humans to either salvation or damnation, with no volition on their part, a view which later greatly influenced John Calvin, he doesn't go into that at all here at least, not that I can recall.
He describes his own conversion and the leadup to it in considerable detail and his was a fairly dramatic conversion experience but as he tells it here, there's no indication that its climax was anything other than a voluntary turning to God through Christ.
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