Livro XI das Confissões de Santo Agostinho (Book XI of the Confessions of Saint Augustine) is one of the most emblematic books of the so-called second part of the Confissões (Books X-XIII). There, the author’s perspective is not memorialist and autobiographical, but genological, i.e. on the present act of narrating the past in the first person and the commitment to truth possible with this narrative or confession, considering the complex workings of memory and the courage and foolishness of speaking about ourselves to those who know about us and everything else, and essayistic, i.e. centred on the internal debate of theological and philosophical questions.

In the case of Book XI, Augustine struggles with two interrelated questions: what is this moment that gathers and contains all times and things and is condensed in the act of creation, and what is time? Regardless of the answers to these questions, what emerges from the author’s text is the progression of a discourse whose coherence and beauty come not so much from its systematic character, but from a methodology of hesitation that doesn’t give up asking new questions when it seems to have reached the hermeneutical consolation of a truth.

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Confissões of Santo Agostinho – Conversation with the translators
14 June
Saturday, 5pm
Sala Bernardo Sassetti

With: Arnaldo do Espírito Santo, Maria Cristina de Castro-Maia de Sousa Pimentel, David Antunes and Jean Paul Bucchieri