CONTENTS
Preface
INTRODUCTION
PARALLEL LATIN TEXT AND ENGLISH TRANSLATION
COMMENTARY
Bibliography and Abbreviations
Augustine intended the Soliloquies and the Immortality
of the soul to form a single book. For those
who are unacquainted with Augustine it is a good book with which
to begin. It deals, as he says, with those matters about which
he most wanted to know at this time, i.e. between his conversion
in the summer of 386 and his baptism at Easter, 387. The matters
are the primacy of mind over things of sense, and the immortality
of the soul. These central tenets of Neoplatonism are not simply
theoretical questions for Augustine. He had been through a period
of intense strain, close to a nervous breakdown, and the Soliloquies
are the description of his most intimate feelings, a form of therapy.
The Soliloquies and the Immortality of the soul
are the finished and the unfinished parts respectively of the
same work. The latter shows us the raw material of a dialogue:
in the Soliloquies we have a piece of theatre, the dramatised
conflict between two personae. They are two aspects of
the one character (he invented the word soliloquies), and the
presentation gives us a picture of Augustine at this time which
is even more immediate than his self-portrait in the Confessions.
This early work gives us the first direct evidence on the temperament
of the man who created the Confessions: someone fascinated
with the mystery of the personality, and particularly memory,
a lover of puzzles and paradoxes, a rhetorician with a deep interest
in philosophy, a highly emotional human being, and above all,
a questioner concerned with knowing the truth.
Gerard Watson Professor of Ancient Classics, Maynooth College, Ireland. Other books include The Stoic Theory of Knowledge (Belfast 1966); Plato's Unwritten Teaching (Dublin 1973); Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway 1988).
224pp, (1990) cl 505 4 £35 / $59.99, pb 506 2 £16.50 / $28 (cl out of print)
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Preface INTRODUCTION PARALLEL LATIN TEXT AND ENGLISH TRANSLATION COMMENTARY Bibliography and Abbreviations |
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