How should we live? This question lies at the core of what it means to be human. In volume I we explore the “best which has been thought and said” from the dawn of civilization through the fall of Rome. Today’s session is on Augustine’s Confessions:

Saint Augustine (A.D. 354-430) wrote his Confessions around 400, even as the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was in motion. Augustine finds the flourishing of human personality in a constant dialogue with the divine ground of each moment and of all history. We end semester with his meditation on memory, a concept into our presence to ourselves and to God. Do I desire God? Do I desire happiness? How can I pursue what I do not already have a grasp of? In my end, do I return to my beginning? “Late have I loved You, Beauty ever ancient, ever new.”