Fall Mountaineering

Our Fall meetings will center on Dante's Purgatorio. We'll be using Allen Mandelbaum's translation, which includes the original Italian.

We'll meet Wednesdays from 10 to 11:30 a.m. on October 11 and 25, November 8 and 29, and December 13, at the Fruitville Library.

It would be a good idea to review the Inferno. For our first session, please have prepared Inferno cantos 1, 4, 26 and 34, which we will discuss as a springboard to the Purgatorio. We'll be using the Mandelbaum translation of the Inferno as well. Please have also read Purgatorio 1 and 2 for the first meeting.

You might wish to check this blog from time to time. As we become aware of online resources for Dante, we will link to them.

Have a very fine summer.

tolle lege

One question to consider is the recurrent image of reading that occurs in The Confessions. What significance might attach to those salient moments depicting Ambrose reading without moving his lips, and of course the famous "tolle lege" scene?

Augustine online

Some further online resources on Augustine. Here is an edition of the Confessions in Latin with commentary in English by noted scholar James J. O'Donnell. He offers further resources, including an introduction to Augustine's life and works.

Augustine and Manichaeism

I still thought that it is not we who sin but some other nature that sins within us. It flattered my pride to think that I incurred no guilt and, when I did wrong, not to confess it... I preferred to excuse myself and blame this unknown thing which was in me but was not part of me. The truth, of course, was that it was all my own self, and my own impiety had divided me against myself. My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner.

Our next session will address the first nine books of Augustine's Confessions. Early on, Augustine describes his involvement with Manichaeism. For some background on this sect, which was declared heretical by the early Christian Church, go here.