oa De Confessiones herlezen

This article discusses two recent publications about Augustine’s Confessions: Brian Stock’s, Augustine the Reader (1996) and Heidegger’s lectures on Augustine (published in 1995). Stocks’s focus is on the construction and re-construction of the self as narrated in the conversion story and as discussed from a philosophical point of view in the last four books of the Confessions and in De trinitate. Heidegger takes as his point of departure book X of the Confessions, in particular Augustine’s description of his fight against the persistent temptations of the senses. In both cases it is the self as construed by memory which is at the centre of narration and meditation. It is argued tentatively that a further assessment of those problems ought to take into account the accomplishments of Stock and Heidegger while being more specific about the poetical nature of the Confessions.