Learning to Pray

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Teubner
Keyword(s):  
Christian Schools ◽  
Philosophical Dialogue ◽  
De Magistro

This chapter opens by reflecting on the prayer with which Augustine opens his incomplete Soliloquia. In this work, Augustine introduces the reflexivity of prayer: prayer is a desire to know God and himself, to know God through himself and to know himself through God. In De magistro this reflexivity is expanded to account for a spoken yet essentially silent form of prayer. In these two works that bookend his experiment with the genre of philosophical dialogue, prayer emerges as an activity that is bound up with Augustine’s lifelong pursuit of wisdom, which, in turn, is closely related to the practice of prayer in non-Christian schools of philosophy of this period (388–91 CE).

Le De quantitate animae d’Augustin, un dialogue philosophique ?

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-287
Author(s):  
Jérôme Lagouanère
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Dialogue ◽  
De Magistro

Abstract Saint Augustine’s De quantitate animae is a dialogue often neglected by scholars who have studied the question of Augustinian dialogue. This study aims to remedy this lack of interest and to show the strategic place of this dialogue in the Augustinian production of the years 386–390. Firstly, after stating the question, the article questions the genre of dialogue and shows that the De quantitate animae of Augustine perfectly meets the criteria defining the genre of the philosophical dialogue. Secondly, this study examines the stakes and the place of the dialectic in this work. In fact, our paper emphasizes, following the analyzes proposed by Giovanni Catapano, the importance of considering the kind of dialogue in Augustine by the yardstick of his epistemological presuppositions. In this perspective, the De quantitate animae appears as a work of transition, which is based on the epistemology of Contra Academicos and the notions of doubt and inconcussum, while announcing the epistemology of the inner Master developed in the De magistro.

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