On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self

by Clausen, Ian; Hollingworth, Miles

• ISBN13: 9781501314209
• ISBN10: 1501314203
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-10-05
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars.

Ian Clausen's On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self describes Augustine's central ideas on morality and how he arrived at them. Describing an intellectual journey that will resonate especially with readers at the beginning of their own journey, Clausen shows that Augustine's early writing career was an outworking of his own inner turmoil and discovery, and that both were to summit, triumphantly, on his monumental book Confessions (AD 386-401).

On Love, Confession, Surrender and the Moral Self offers a way of looking at Augustine's early writing career as an on-going, developing process: a process whose chief result was to shape a conception of the moral self that has lasted and prospered to the present day.

Author Biography

Ian Clausen is Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow at Valparaiso University, USA. He is a former British Marshall Scholar and has published widely on Augustine and ethics. He participates as Research Associate at the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics and with the Center for Bioethics and Culture in San Francisco, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Hardest Thing in the World
Chapter 1: Locating, Directing, and Questioning Love
Chapter 2: Engaging Scepticism: The Threat of Despair
Chapter 3: Escaping Manichaeism: The Folly of Rationalism
Chapter 4: Entering the Fall: The Problem of Evil
Chapter 5: Embracing Confession: The Deceit of Desire
Conclusion: The Long Surrender: Augustine's Moral Self
Index