The autobiography as a genre has had numerous notable entries, among them The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, and its sequels, and Churchill’s My Early Life. But these and sundry others stand in the shadow of the first autobiography, written at the end of the fifth century by the African bishop Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine’s Confessions, however, is more than an autobiography. It is a work with long-standing status in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and psychology. All these strands together make a single and singularly moving work by and about a soul first fleeing, and then seeking, its proper home.

This seminar will journey with Augustine as he confronts the highest questions as well as the basest human desires; as he explores speculative theories of time and memory as well as intimately personal struggles with family, honor, and loss; and as he strives to overcome his restless self by coming to know his very self as a creature of God.

Image: Fra Angelico, Conversion of Saint Augustine, 1430

Dr. Rosenthal on humanism and the Western tradition

Faculty

Alexander Rosenthal

Alexander Rosenthal is a lecturer in political thought at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Advanced Government and cofounder and director of the Petrarch Institute. His work spans political philosophy, classical humanism, European intellectual history, religion and politics, and liberal democracy.

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