Course
ASI110
Semester
Fall
Instructor's Name
Anthony Smith
Year
2023
Writing Process
Editor's note: This paper was selected to receive the 2024 Father Jack McGrath, S.M., Award for Research in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.
St. Augustine was one of the many monumental thinkers we studied in ASI 110. His eloquent writing, contribution to church doctrine, and conversion story all captured my interest. Following a close reading of Augustine's Confessions and Plotinus' Enneads, I constructed a storyboard to help visualize the nuances in Augustine's argument for what he found within the Platonist books and what he found lacking. I turned to Henry Chadwick's Augustine: A Very Short Introduction to help me contextualize Confessions, and I revisited Athanasius' On the Incarnation to better understand the theology Augustine engaged with. Ultimately, the writing process led me to consider Augustine’s contemporary relevance, and I work to present him as a model for how faith and reason may be brought into fruitful synergy.
Recommended Citation
O'Connor, Zachary
(2024)
"'When Would the Platonist Books Have Taught Me That?' St. Augustine’s Dance with Neo-Platonic Reasoning,"
Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing: Vol. 10:
Iss.
2, Article 12.
Available at:
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/lxl/vol10/iss2/12