Interview: Dr. Catherine Zuckert on Augustine's Confessions | The New Thinkery Ep. 91

Welcome back to the new Thinkery. My name is David Barr. With me as always is my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg?

Happy Easter. Happy Easter, user. And should we Greg a quick question? I don't think so.

Which happy Easter to our Infidel friend Alex, Priu. I mean, I suppose it could call you maybe in the spirit of charity. We should. Yeah.

How are you Alex? Happy Easter. I'm doing it well. I'm very excited to talk about the Gusnitz Confessions.

Yeah. Have I told you about there's a new work of Confessions coming out? No, no, no. Tell me about it.

It's by a St. McBrayer of Ashland. Oh, it's him confessing to the ghost of Leo Strauss, his thin of never completing his translation of Xenophons Hellenica. He's in too much time doing Christian workouts at 4am in the park.

Are you talking about the translation of the Hellenica that Cornell University Press has been urging him to complete? Or is that one Alex? Yeah. Well, he's quite fallen.

The good news is tonight on the show, we have a scholar who does follow through with her promises and has written a great many books. Catherine H. Zukart, she is the Nancy Reeves Drew Professor, a Meredith of Political Science at Notre Dame and is currently a visiting professor at the Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Bot and Leadership. She has a number of books.

Most of our listeners are well aware of her scholarship. Our most recent book is Machiavelli's Politics. My most favorite book that she's written is Plato's Philosophers, the Coherence of the Dialogues. Though I do have to say, I learned a great deal from her postmodern Plato's, which is an excellent title that I encourage.

If you want to understand kind of how Derrida and a lot of the postmoderns fit in or don't fit in to this tradition of political philosophy, I'd urge you to read it. So with that, nice to have you here, Catherine. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much, Nathan.

So let's turn to Greg. You're the most fallen among the four of us. What are you talking about today? This was a special episode really to take care aspects of your soul.

So can you introduce it a little bit? Sure, I can introduce it. We thought for Easter and that we would turn to maybe something by standing up in your standing point and as luck would have it, we were in talks with Professor Zupert to be on the show. And this was one of the things that she suggested that she would be willing to talk about.

And so we're going to read what is, I guess, one of the first, and you talk about this in a little bit in the paper that you sent to us, one of the first real autobiographical works. And maybe even the first, it's kind, maybe Professor Zupert can correct us on that or not. So for folks who don't know it, St. Augustine was a saint to us from Northern Africa.

And he wrote this book called The Confessions, which is autobiographical as I mentioned. And basically, it's a recounting of his own life, his own search for God, his own search for self-knowledge, as Professor Zupert tries to lead us to see. And it's a series of, as the name implies, Augustine mentions a number of rather nasty things that he had done in his life, but also his intellectual searches and failures and ultimately his conversion to Catholicism Christianity, his mother's of great aid in that as well. I think a lot of folks will be very familiar with it.

He's probably either here or quinest, probably the most famous Christian thinker in the history of Western thought. And so we're very fortunate to have Professor Zupert on to talk about this book. And I thought maybe the first question we could ask her is, why did you turn to this book in particular? I mean, your political theorist, your work has been on Machiavelli and Plato, and now state Augustine.

Maybe Alex, I see he has a question, but I was hoping maybe you could give a brief account of why you turned to this book and how it's relevant in this larger work you're focusing on in the quest for self-knowledge. Well, for me, Greg, it's just shorter than city of God. It is shorter than city of God. I think just to piggyback on to the last thing Greg said, I also think it would be interesting to our listeners to hear about this larger project that it fits into and what other thinkers you're talking about.

You mentioned Sophocles and Plato, but I'd like to hear other thinkers as well. Okay, so maybe I should begin by saying that I'm not an Augustine scholar and most, but not all, most Augustine scholars are Catholics, but not all of them are. And I didn't really, well, I'm sure as one can be in this area and one can't be all that sure, that Augustine himself would be very pleased to have people talking about his confessions at the time of Easter. And then one of the things about the confessions is it's not confession as most of us have come to know that, whether thinking about the Freudian Ellis couch or thinking about the confessional in the Catholic Church, Augustine wrote his confessions between the time he had converted to just the Virgin Catholicism and had accepted an appointment as a bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa.

So he was going back from actually no longer Italy to Italy at the time, sorry, from it wasn't along to Northern Africa. And all these weren't written at the same time. But Augustine begins the confessions by emphasizing the fact that he's giving these confessions in public. And the publicity of them is really important from his point of view.

So he is writing and scholars think that he used the confessions. He originally read them to some of his congregants. But for Augustine, the confessions are first and foremost a prayer of Thanksgiving. He's giving his thanks to God for having helped Augustine come to see how dependent he is on God.

And so this is he doesn't never in all of the two professions ever presents himself as anything but a sinful man. But point isn't so much to confess his sins. He's writing before the rituals or the doctrines of the Catholic Church were as established as they are now. So there wasn't the practices we know enough from people going to a confessional and confessing to a priest in secret.

Augustine is doing this in the open. He's doing that first because he says, well, there's nothing he can tell God. God can see into his heart. But the point of doing it in public is because God can see into Augustine's heart.

This is a way of Augustine guaranteeing for its listeners that what he's saying is true. And so that's the first there's a he was a professional rhetorician and there's a great deal of rhetoric in that confessions. So this is a way of convincing other people that what he's saying is the truth. And then he is also laying himself there because one of the very important stages in his own conversion happened to be the example of others.

And so what he wants to do in making his confession is to persuade his listeners that they should have hope making these confessions. He's reminded of how much God has helped him and God can tell other people and he is spreading the word when he was joining of the gospel. So, okay, I didn't. So I didn't even pitch off.

I was just pointing it back and say a little bit in answer to your question and Alex's. I did not come out of theologian. I did not and I'm not Catholic. I didn't come to Augustine primarily to study the story of his conversion.

I went to Augustine because he is known as one of you mentioned as the origin of autobiography as a genre. It's a little bit arduous to imagine, but he is thought to be the first one. And he singled out in Charles Taylor's study of the sources of the self as having been the source of the modern conception of self. So, I had decided before this that the next big project I wanted to understand was the study of the search for self knowledge, which I take it begins in Greece and the devil Delphi know yourself and there it means basically, or so people think recognize you're not a God, but it gets much more complicated earlier.

I take actually the beginning to be a Sophocles interpretation of the story. I then look at Plato's presentation of Socrates' search for self knowledge and the third major, at least as I take it, the case of search for self knowledge and antiquity is Augustine. If you wanted to put labels on them, I think ultimately Sophocles' presentation is political, Socrates' Plato's presentation is philosophical, and Augustine's presentation is theological. But Taylor points out two notable things about Augustine, which I think are in a limited way true.

So, the first why Taylor goes to Augustine is that he takes Augustine to have made a step to look for knowledge of the self inside the human being. So, if you think of it, Ettapus, you know, he holds a tribe to find out who he is. Socrates questions the opinions of others. Augustine writes a book in which he finally says in my search for God and to find out who I was, I had to turn inside myself.

So, Augustine is the source, I think, of the most common contemporary popular understanding of what the search for self knowledge is all about, and that is introspective. You could then say, ah, so you're supposed to be a political theorist, what are you doing studying introspection? And I would respond in my own defense the following, that we live in a world in which people talk about human rights and human dignity all the time. But if you ask them, what is this thing for the human?

They have a hard time answering that question. That's partly because of the spread of a modern scientific, natural scientific view of the world. But at any rate, my first interest was in pursuing the answers to the question, what is human? And then I secondly discovered that I did not agree with Taylor or with Aaron, or in this case with the source, Martin Heidegger, that the ancients only asked the question, what is human?

The species. And Martin's asked, who is human? The person or the individual? Because you all know these works.

He wants to know who he is, not just what human is. Socrates wants to know who he is, not just what's human. And likewise, Augustine wants to know who he is. So it's not true that there was this species, well, the search for the species human in antiquity and search for the individual in modernity.

What is true is that at least these three represented figures all end up giving a definition of the human in relation to something that's beyond the human, the superhuman or the transcendent. So that's how I got into it. I think that the moderns also can't just say who people ask the question, who you also have to answer the question, what kind of being are you when you're asking who? So that's too easy a contrast.

But the ancients have taken me a long time as far, so I haven't gotten into the moderns. A quick question, Catherine, before we get into the mutant potatoes of the book, I don't know the detail of the conversation too much, but the confessions is it comes early on in his corpus. And you know, the next week book, you know, that's the one that's highlighted in our Bible, the Purple History of Political Philosophy, the city of God. And so you talk very, very quickly, situating the confessions, what's the relationship between, is there a relationship between the confessions and then the city of God, not sure the pagans, which is his more overly political work, and it's totally, I mean, it's eight times the length.

Which is one reason why I went to, you know, I did study the city of God because I wanted to enter the course, and it's really hard to get a usable amount. But I think the relation would be as follows, as you say, the confessions is an early work of the customs. It's maybe the transitional work between the time when he was writing primarily as a rhetorician. And then just after he had converted, he wrote some dialogues because Plato was a very important part of this intellectual trajectory.

But then, as I said, since he thinks that he has been such a sinner or one might say in embodiment of the original sin, he declares in the confessions he would have preferred to withdraw to the desert the way the hermit Antibid did. He didn't want to full size his inner turmoil, but he had been asked to become Bishop of Hippo. And he felt it was his duty. And this is a part of his duty, turning from his own experience to helping others.

And when he's so in book 10 of the confessions, when he goes back and asks, well, so why I've been confessing to God knows everything that I've done, he says explicitly that he confesses in the first instance for his own sake, which is he gives him a different way to despair. If you think that you are evil and you are just never going to say that, it's easy to see how you would despair. But writing the confessions and seeing how God actually helped him without his knowing it encourages a custom to go on. And he thinks his story can encourage others.

And so it's easy to be read. It's helpful to read it prior to the, I mean, sorry to the city of God. Well, it does in this case, because at least in this way that Gus and then talks about the people to whom he's writing. So he's not just bearing his soul for people like me to read.

He is doing this for the sake of the people. He considers his fellow or shallow citizens. And then he says, and I don't know all of them. They aren't all here around me or with me.

But these are the people who are seeking for the right way. And I'm trying to help them seek the right way, the true way by writing this. And so he's looking to from his little emerging church then, and he says, what he wanted to do? But he feels that this is a duty God told him, love your fellows.

And this is an expression of Gus's love for his fellows as he understands it. And then because in the confessions, or I would say at least there's such an emphasis on original sin. And in fact, between the confessions and the city of God, Augustine gets involved in these controversies within the church about the heresies. And at least the Pelagian heresy and the Donistus sects both claim the human beings could be pure.

And Augustine fought very hard to see that they, these were declared to be heretical doctrines. Human beings have to recognize our problematic nature, because you can't be saved without that recognition. Now just recognizing it won't save you. Augustine is also very firm on declaration or the affirmation that human beings have no right to judge other human beings.

We can't judge because we can't see inside. Only God is a judge. So what follows from that with regard to the city of God is the city of God or the fellowship to which Augustine addresses his works isn't the same as the church. It's not the same as any earthly institution.

Earthly institutions are necessary. He's organizing, protecting, teaching, and a church. But that's not the same as the community, which is a community with God, to which human beings should aspire, to which he is, and to which he's trying to encourage his readers or listeners to aspire as well. So I think there's a basic continuity between his first discovery of his duty and then the comfort again.

You see he's in the city of God. I said sorry I called him. It's been a while since I've read it. What Augustine is doing is trying to comfort the Christians in Rome, after Rome has fallen, and to say this isn't the end of the world.

It may feel that way, but it's not. This isn't what's really important. This was in fact an unjust empire. So we have to trust in God.

It's again recognizing the limits of the worldly, but especially the human in order then to see your desire for. Because what Augustine says he has learned at the end of the Confessions is he doesn't know God, but he knows God's love and this is what he desires. And that's what he thinks everybody else desires to and that that's a character of human happiness. And so he wants to bring people to it.

Hey Greg, let's dig a minute. So I don't want to talk about our sponsors. All right. Have you ever wanted to read ancient Greek Latin or biblical Hebrew?

Well, yeah. But you know, I already know Greek and I don't really want to just sit down and translate isolated sentences with a dictionary. I really want to sit down and read in that language with ease and also enjoyment. It is possible to learn this.

The ancient language institute is teaching people to do you remember our old friends at the ancient language institute? Yeah, of course. What they do their classes? No, I don't.

Media class is an ancient Greek Latin biblical Hebrew. And this term begins in May shut the front door. Yeah, they're closing their sign up soon. So you gotta go check it out.

Sorry. I'm going to go right now. I will bone up right now. Yes.

So they have a five online courses with I'm a very I'm a very busy skit. Oh, all right. It's very flexible. Yeah.

Okay. We say you go to the ancient language institute. Where would I go to find that? Ancientlanguage.com.

That's good. You guessed your ancient language on and now back to the show. Yeah. This is a related and related to something you said a moment ago, I suppose, but it's being the first autobiography.

I sort of imagine, I don't know if you speak to what how an audience would have read this, but I can imagine this would be quite shocking. You mentioned this isn't him confessing to sort of get absolution that the but it was it's him admitting to some pretty unsavory things, right? He admits that his love of honor, he admits this for trying to pursue wisdom, but he's confused on whether or not that's was a pretend. That's honor.

That's an honor. Yeah. Jameful. I actually had to scandalize Greg, but then his sexual desires, which he goes into some detail about.

So I guess I'm just wondering if I don't know, maybe this I can see how this would be persuasive to an audience, right? He's trying to draw people in and to show them that they're you know, he's no better than they are or something like this. I don't know what's going on there. But I mean, when this has been shocking to folks, I mean, to someone to make this public announcement of these very CD sort of, I just find it very strange that that he would, so there's nothing like this before.

We don't we don't get anything like this in Socrates or in earlier philosophers or certainly not the Soviet, you know, even Christians, by the way, which are downblading things. So, I don't know. What's possible additions to that is maybe the foresocratically narrated dialogues or the theatetus even where Socrates composed, but that's very different. I think it's not really writing of your life story, but there is a kind of personal quality to those dialogues.

There's definitely personal quality to the Socratic dialogues. And that's one of the easy reasons why I don't think there's this individual species difference in the search for knowledge. And Socrates emphasizes, I mean, not only in the narrative bounds, I think of the court because he says, I don't care if I look ridiculous. So he's willing to ignore sort of public respect.

That's not important to him. And he's, I think, and he's urging, what Plato was urging as readers that they actually should understand as Socrates did, that honor is not that important, Tom, they're much more important things in life. But maybe this is to cynical reason. I don't know what the immediate reaction to Augustine's confessions.

I haven't come across anybody who says, people were so shocked by this. I mean, maybe some of the people in Hippo who've referred this might have been. And Augustine also, I mean, I just argued for the consistency of his thought, but you know, he modified it and reconsidered things. And so I would go back to say that if you read the beginning of the confessions, it begins with the greatness of God.

And then the greatness of God is contrasted with the littleness and the lowness of this human being who's writing to him. Isn't it presumptuous? You know, Socrates goes out and asks other people, Augustine's talking to God. He wants to have a conversation with God.

So he isn't this presumptuous. And then he says, no, and I mean, it just happens that I guess Michael is teaching, so is Emil tomorrow. And we're talking about the pear tree and I guess the subscription of it's not just Augustine babies. Babies are terrible.

We were just talking about this before we're recording. Little tyrants, he says, and Emil, like if they only think God, they didn't have more strength. I remember that so long. I think children are the future guys.

I don't know what you're talking about. Who basically have more of them. Can I pick up on a point we were just discussing and maybe this I'll get us back to some of the confessions in particular. I'm really struck by this notion that Augustine shows his love of God and love a man at the same time in this work by showing his confession, doing it in public rather than in private and creating a model.

He's laying out a series of experiences that he's had that somehow get him to this self knowledge and I guess a sort of knowledge of the right way of life. And just as like a historical matter of fact, I hear people who are just, they're not Christians at all, they're alone Catholics and they get such inspiration from this work by this sort of intellectual honesty, the openness. There's so many virtues that I think go beyond just a sort of, whereas there's some of theologically, it's going to be very much more canonical in that respect. So I think there's something to this.

I thought maybe you could speak to that a bit. You've already talked a bit, I was right, he's not in a confessional, he's out in public and how this is a sort of love of man. But they even go into a little bit these experiences and how in a way they're meant to generate some kind of sympathetic conversion or some sort of, not like an instruction booklet, but a kind of testament that shows people, you know, I'm struggling for words, so you take it off and tell us what's happening. So what's really marvelous about the Confessions in some way is that it's this very complicated combination.

On the one hand, I grew up in the South, so it's a kind of witnessing. Augustine is coming to declare his faith and his experience to others, so it's the truth telling. But on the other hand, this is a kind of preaching that isn't preaching. You see, he's not holding himself up as exceptional or not as exceptionally good.

Instead, he's holding himself up as an example of the misery of human beings who don't appreciate God's problems. And so he's going to take himself as being number one example of somebody who was going wrong from the very beginning. And he didn't start with any special knowledge, in fact, he starts by saying, well, you know, I don't know my origin from his perspective to know his origin would be to know God, but he doesn't know God. And he says, you know, I don't remember what I was like, it's an infant.

They tell me that they were my parents, but you know, I don't really know that they were my parents. How we know that's hearsay. So the origins of human life are mysterious to human beings, in general, but also for each one of us as a particular human being. And then he says, okay, I don't remember my infancy, but I look at the other babies.

And I see that we think they're innocent, but they're crying all the time, they're demanding human beings are needy, desirous. And he says, even I can remember this before, I went back to it, India's a baby who sees another baby trying to suck at his mother's breasts, get away. And I actually saw my grandson who was stuffing like that. So he's telling his listeners, or asking them to think about how bad and miserable human beings really are, but not as somebody who's better than they, and talking them down.

But as somebody who's number one, you know, I know this, how do I know this because I was like this, and I'm willing to admit that I was like this. And I think that's a powerful kind of rhetoric that most people, so, you know, like the listeners, Socrates, they didn't want to be laughed at. But also people don't want to be consumed, you know, you'd rather, you know, to hide your body laundry, not throw it out for display in public. And the interest of driving is a little closer to the Platonic parallel.

Is this at all similar to what Socrates says in apology, when he says that God used me as a paradigm model or an exam bar or something like that, but that in a way he sees, and when you read Augustine's confessions, I often sometimes I forget it's written so long ago. It's got such a contemporary field because of the professional aspect of it. But he does employ all the powers of rhetoric that he's clearly cultivated. I mean, it's hard not to read this and say, oh, you're still using those same tricks.

And so it reminds me, at least a lot of what Socrates says in the apology. Do you think there's a sense in which he sees himself as having a kind of a place where he can set up this model of his misery, right, and his own sort of waywardness and then coming around and this is he has this sort of unique decision, maybe. So picking up on your comparison to the ecology, when Socrates tells the story of clarifon going to the oracle and asking whether there's anyone wiser than Socrates and the oracle says no, and then Socrates reports that to the George, you know, they start, because that sounds like that ended writing. And Socrates goes on to say, well, I don't know, but I'm better than all the rest of you because I know that I don't know.

Augustine's is self-effacing in to the extent to which he presents himself as having been driven by a lot of conflicting desires, but the desires are sensual. The desires are for praise, the desires are for respect or honor, he cheats the games, he steals from his parents, he steals pairs along with his friends. They weren't good parents, he's so long. But it's a fake of dating.

You know, we don't like anybody ordering us around. And he also says he wouldn't have done that with us as his fellows, but human nature is rebellious. We have a lot of things that we want. Augustine had a lot of these things, and he thinks he's still subject to these temptations.

He's talking about them partly to protect himself, but he offers the road or the path or the community he offers is a principle open to everyone. I think he so indeed talks about Christianity as being blatant for the people. There's something very, very democratic about the Christianity that Augustine is putting forward, because this is available to anybody who will believe. I mean, so it's appropriate for Easter.

It peaks in the incarnation because you need a mediator between God and man. But if you come to recognize your own sinful nature and what you want more than anything else, so this is the doctrine of the loves and the gussim and the careers elsewhere, what you want more than anything else is to be loved despite your faults. And the only being in the world, that's going to satisfy that, to make you happy is God. No other human beings will have the knowledge requisite, no other human being will really have the generosity.

But our creator, the creator, does, and that's the wonderful discovery. And some people will come to that by giving a very sort of vital school level of reading of the creation of the story. Don't imagine God as being a great big father who hugs his children. Other people can come to this only the way Augustine did, which is through Platonism and understanding the difference between cell of body, corporeal and intraporeal being.

They're different levels. But the end is the same. And what's needed is to rouse that love or desire. We have lots of them.

They're in conflict. And the whole, what the gussim is promising is that if you really believe, you will find happiness because this is a positive claim. What he's claiming is what all human beings really want is this kind of unconditional love. I mean, that's the psychological part of this.

So you mentioned, and you draw this out in your short piece on the confessions here, that there are these multiple levels for a gussim. And I was really interested in, and I found convincing the idea that scriptures are written on these different levels. And you mentioned, and he does an example of this, right? He goes into Genesis and interpretation, the first couple of chapters of Genesis shows multiple interpretations.

I think a lot of folks will be familiar with this, a literal and more allegorical or figurative reading. But what I'm interested in is, does that doubling also in the realm of love? You mentioned that some people will find God in sort of this very charitable account of God and Genesis as his father figure. And then some will go through Platonism.

Are the two levels there? Are there two levels there? Like one's a sort of, I just use Uranian and Damien or something like this. But is one sort of, I mean, I don't ask this question, is Augustine's love more intellectual and supersonacy discovers it through Platonism?

And it's more emotional for the rest of us or something like this? Or is that dualism only corresponds to the readings and the love is the love? Augustine's doctrine of the love is often compared particularly to Platon Platon and which Socrates argues that all human beings are animated by a love of eternity, but that has different levels. So the first generation, the second is honour and the third is philosophy.

Or Augustine, there are the three temptations. So the first kind of love, which is the desire, is corporeal and takes sexual form. But like all corporeal things Augustine observes, these loves are transitory. They end.

I mean, one of the very moving parts of the contestants is when he talks about his experience. When he has to stay home for a year in Africa at a certain point in his education and he makes a very good friend and they're friends because they're both anti-Christians or maybe even atheists together and they mock the religion. And then that friend dies or comes close to death. And when he's close to death, he converts.

So Augustine thinks, oh, well, after he survives, he's going to be back here mocking with me. And instead, no, he becomes a believer, but then he dies. And Augustine is inconsolable. So you first learn about the desires, you said, learn about how useful associations have confirmed the way where it desires and they include the desire second for praise.

So first love, because there are beautiful things in the world, is for corporeal things, but that's for transitory things. Second desire is for knowledge. And that's where he goes, for knowledge of something that isn't transitory that exists above and beyond the transitory. And so he thought he'd learn that from Cicero, he wanted to become a philosopher.

And he thought, oh, and so then, and he thought, in fact, at a certain point that he had achieved knowledge, he knew that God was everything, some kind of super matter. And he was just a part of it. That is the peak of pride for Augustine, because it's taking credit for what you are. And it's thinking that you can really satisfy all these desires you have with things, no, with knowledge, no.

So I guess to go back to the Socrates comparison, Augustine testifies, though I'm not accusing him of anything. Contrary to Socrates, his love of the truth didn't prevent him from, or save him from vice. It wasn't strong enough. Philosophy wasn't enough to provide him with a happy way of life.

He just didn't feel satisfied. And the reason he didn't feel satisfied or happy was because he kept feeling pulled by his desire for this old sexual pleasure. So he became a man of king for a while, because he thought they had the philosophical truths, but they also kept the Christian truths. And they could explain the origin of evil.

And so here's a man who feels himself torn towards the good, but also towards the bad. What's the truth then about the world? Well, it was very appealing to say, oh, well, here's the truth. There are two opposing powers.

The final play is lost for that matter. The fraction of the good, but also the attraction of the not good. And he only overcame that with or through Ambrose, first the allegorical reading of the Bible, because he just thought, well, these beautiful stories are, you know, they're not what written and not believable. And then second, by reading the books of the Platonists and discovering that God was non-cricorial, pure soul, spirit, and eternal.

But that wasn't enough, because that's too intellectual. And so I would say that, going back to the question of Alice's earlier, I think a lot of the power comes of Augustine, comes from his contention that human beings are not truly intellectual, will never be ruled solely by intellect. And we have to deal with these strong passions that rack us, and recent are intellectually enough for that. And I think many more people can relate to that kind depiction of human life.

So it's very poetic, but it's not delivered in Oh, it reads still in prose. So, so, so Alex raised this moment ago, and you mentioned it as well, that you mentioned he was trained as a rhetorician. And Alex mentioned that this book is rhetorical. So I'm asking, I guess the question I have is, is this book rhetorical?

And I wonder then, I'm reminded of Paul's letter that Corinthians raised, he won't engage in rhetoric, but then employees like half a dozen rhetorical devices in the chapter where he disavows it. So, is that maybe this is connected to your sort of its overly intellectual and so you need this poetic sort of side, but he uses prose. So I'm wondering, is this book rhetorical? Does he employ sort of fairly common classical devices from rhetoric?

Is the structure rhetorical? You focus on the structure of the confessions in what you had us read. So, I don't know. Okay, I wish I had better knowledge of classical rhetoric.

So Augustine studies this role was a great admirer of this role. So, I'm sure you can find the tropes there. On the other hand, then I, and I believe Alex has to speak for himself, have been using rhetoric in a kind of loose sense. Because Augustine would say at least bridle that the suggestion that the conventions is a work of rhetoric of the kind that he studied, because he studies his role.

It's closer to what we would consider legal training. Now, Cicero was a lawyer, or a case, likewise Augustine describes his study of rhetoric. What he's probably wanting him to learn was to learn how to speak and beat people in court. So, he could rise in the Roman bureaucracy.

So Augustine described his study and teach him. I think this is one of the many things he's guilty of. He's teaching as learning how to deceive other people. So, he's trying to do the contrary of that.

So, the intention is different. But then if you say, oh, what is the confessions artful? Oh, yes, it's very artful. But again, artful in a sort of strange way.

I mean, so there are scholarly disputes about whether it really is a whole book. You sound as if you're convinced as I was convinced that it is a whole book, but the parts are distinct that is the first nine books tell the story of his coming to his conversion and then going to Africa book 10 summarizes what he's learned in a more quickly academic, but in any way philosophical order. And then book 11 is very famous, particularly modern times because it's an investigation of meaning of time. And 12 and 13 are two readings of the beginning of Genesis.

So, that all the parts are not the same. But I think they follow, actually from what he says, he's, you know, what he was sinful. What he is, someone who feels that he's come to learn his dependent song, not just his independence on God, but his love for God and that that's where his happiness lies. And finally, what he's going to become as at the end of his summary of what he's learned, I guess it says about God, the only thing he knows about God is that God will never be contented because God is perfect, a perfect spirit and eternal.

But Augustine doesn't know that he's ever going to be able to overcome the temptations. So he's writing continually rethinking of what is the nature of God, what is it that I love? How do I understand the world? How should I live?

What are my duties to others? So there's a high degree of anxiety. I mean, there's a promise satisfaction, their momentary experiences and happiness. But much of the time, he's worried that he's going to, this is what's a glimpse that he's going to lose it.

So I think we've got a pretty good sense of what's happening in the confessions. We've compared it a little bit just kind of loosely to Plato that you also have this part on Sophocles that you're interested in. But then of course, there's modern coilers, the biggest obviously is Rousseau. But you know, one can also think of Descartes' meditations or just something like that.

But the meditations has a much more Christian traffic to it. That other Frenchman? Who's that? The other Frenchman that at least I have been studying since Augustine is Montin, who that's right.

That's right. That's the subject of Augustine. Somebody calls Augustine out. I can't remember if it's Rousseau or Montin says, yeah, yeah, he says he confesses a lot, but it was just posturing.

But I can't recall. I think that that's true. So but but Montin also, I actually take Montin to be the dividing point because Montin declares himself to be a skeptic and he declares himself to be the sole subject of his essays. It hasn't common with Augustine.

Augustine's always trying to overcome his temptations. Montin is always trying to get it right. So the essays are trials and little looks, etc. But and it's all about, yeah, and he has some of the same modest beginnings, so the letter to the reader at the piece says, well, I wrote this so that my relatives could remember me after I died.

You know, if you don't think it's important, you know, don't read it. The status changes if you do read it almost immediately. But here are my thoughts on a monstrous child. God.

So yeah, so you talked about Oedipus as political, right? And Socrates philosophical, Augustine, theological, and then yeah, I don't know. Maybe you want to put some of these modern thinkers into sort of categories or give us another paradigm for thinking about that because I think that's very helpful. I'd like to.

I would just worry. I want to go, but I haven't gotten there yet for sure. So the modern thinkers cut off the connection to the transcendent. Montin is very explosive about that.

He says, I'm a Catholic, why am I Catholic? Because that's the law of this country and I'm a law abiding citizen. But do I know the truth? No, I mean, he repeats kind of argument that's actually sounds sort of pious that no human being can actually know the eternal.

So it's actually sounds very much like a best. But he then turns himself like a best that he looks at the contents of his mind. Descartes claims that he's starting with Montin. The Montin he starts with is Montin's observation that G Montin, the only thing he claims to have is his judgments.

But he's just like everybody else because we're all willing to admit some are more beautiful, others are smarter, better mathematicians, better musicians, better artisans. But we all think we're the best judges of what's in our own interest. And so that's what Montin claims. That's where the discovery is.

But that is, you know, that's not at all what Descartes does. And now I have to rely on a student and maybe you can correct me on this because I haven't studied Descartes efficiently. The definition of the most jeffon in French, but of the I or the cocadotos, most people know it. I mean, that's completely emptied out.

So in many ways, it's the opposite of what Augustine's doing in his inner turmoil, which he is revealing and trying to overcome. And it's also in some ways the opposite of what Montin is doing because what is what is one can, what is his self? These reflections, these essays, his thoughts, that's his real life. And in one of the essays, he says, we human beings are equipped to entertain ourselves.

We don't have to be lonely. We can talk to ourselves. So there's a kind of self-sufficiency by turning inward, but this still has a conflict. For Descartes empties it out, Locke fills it with our memories.

And I take a lot to be in this respect, the beginning of the more historical understanding of the self, which is what are you? Well, in a way, Augustine is a model for this, but without the tide of God. You are, he says, your memory, your experiences, which you can recapture and draw out for Augustine. You can do that only because you have an eight idea, somewhat kind of like the platonic ideas.

But for the moderns, and I guess I associate this more in fact with Bercum, we are changing beings, both individually and as species. And because we change our self definition is the way we construct the story of our own experiences. We look to the past, but we also project into the future. So there's a part of it that's done, I think, kind of, well, there's a big part that's carried into hyper, for example.

So it becomes very, very contemporary. But it certainly doesn't have the same goal that is the love of or the same understanding of good life, happiness, et cetera. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, just to pick up on the big heart thing, I mean, it's interesting how he uses the sort of Christian meditation, looking within, and what does he find as he finds this purified self cleansed of all interests and desires out of this overweening will, right, to attain certainty. So I always think of it as a kind of extreme version of when, you know, Dr.

Puts on a lab code, and you don't even see their face, you just see their little name tag thing and the code you think, oh, there's sciences before me, right, or, you know, medical art. This is great. Do you guys have any lingering questions? I think that was an excellent summary.

And I think that if you don't mind Professor Zukrud, we are on Twitter, which is a fun social media thing to do for us. And we throw out questions to our listeners. And some of them had some interesting questions for you about the confession. So if you don't mind, we can ask you a couple of those questions.

And if you're interested, you can answer them if not, you just pass and we'll say, sorry, next time. So, Dave, you want to go? Okay, go. You want to go to shot?

This first question is from Chris Hoffman. He says, I sense that there's a esoteric nature to Augustine's writing. I can't quite put my finger on it. Can you explain?

You can reject his premise, of course, Catherine. You want? Let me see. I'm not going to reject his premise.

I am going to give a caveat or apology, as I said, I'm not an Augustine scholar, but I will refer to a man who's no longer alive. His name was Frick Crossen, about it at Notre Dame, who was an Augustine scholar. And he pointed particularly to the statements and the confessions, but not only the confessions, when Augustine says of scripture and then of readings of scripture, there are different levels. And so, that are more or less true.

And I guess if one accepts as I tend to, on the proposition that an author who reads other works and says there are different levels of understanding of a particular writing and suggests as he does with scripture that it's intentionally so because people have different levels of understanding, then one goes back and thinks, well, yeah, that's probably going to be true of the author himself. And I think as, so Frick Crossen was convinced that Augustine was an esoteric writer and understood esotericism. Excellent. We have one more.

This is from an anonymous user. Can you please name Michael Zubert's your favorite book by Michael Zubert and your least favorite book by Michael Zuber? I just personally want to make sure that I leave the fifth on that one. I got to warn you, this anonymous user also comes in when we had him.

He didn't complete the fifth with yours. I don't know if you heard. Sorry, Greg, I was going to, I thought maybe this would be a nice transition to hearing, learning a little bit about Catherine's intellectual journey and how it started to sort of your path on the road of political philosophy and how you got there. And if you have any reflections and contemporaries who, you know, aside from Michael, of course, but who have helped you on your journey and great teachers that you've had anything that just comes tomorrow.

Okay. You know, it's obviously, except if there are some things I think in my intellectual and other journey, I don't particularly want to make public stuff like that. But I would say that the teacher who helped me the most was most encouraging and maybe from whom I learned most, that's hard to say, was just a prophecy. It's, well, it's a me, not no.

For reasons having nothing to do with political philosophy, actually having to do with my mother's prejudices and thoughts, I went to Cornell University as an undergraduate. And she thought it would be good for me to go there because I had an aunt who had been a home economist and Cornell hadn't had a school of home economics, but she even thought that it would be easier for me to get into the school of arts and sciences than homework. And the dean told me when I suggested transferring that I break the computer, so I should say in our sciences, I think. That's fastness.

Wow. So I, and my father was a journalist, so I grew up in a household in which politics was discussed all the time. I thought I was going to nature in English or chemistry because I go to life and buddy ended up being government nature. And as government nature, I took courses from Walter Burns and also I took two courses from Alan Bloom.

And they, I think sort of weathered my taste for liberal philosophy to the extent to which I applied to the University of Chicago and went to the University of Chicago. Where are you from, Catherine? You mentioned you're from the South. Where are you from originally?

Well, you're from the South, you won't count it as the South, but I was born in Miami, Florida. Oh, I see. No, yeah. Lovely town, lovely town.

I love Miami. Well, I, you know, so it's so long ago that I was born there. It was primarily people either by well, almost everybody came there. It's like California, you know, they're very few native 40s, but they come either from the southern states or from Georgia, the count of Carolina, Alabama, or Jewish from New York.

So kind of strange. By the time I was in high school, well, and then there were all kinds of Latin Americans who came fleeing various revolutions that are really huge flow from Cuba and this result, Miami and then Florida as a whole change massively. So that's anyway where I came from. It's kind of weird, next background.

And my parents came there from my father's health. So we're now Chicago. What I was going to say was Michael and I were fortunate enough to study at Chicago the last year as the Australia was teaching there, but he had already had a series of heart attacks. So he was very careful with his time.

He usually taught Tuesday's and Thursday's an hour and a half each time he would arrive right before class, right in the elevator. He would sit down and give the class and then he would leave right after class. He had a driver because he was a driver when we were there. So I feel extremely fortunate to have had a personal experience of his teaching.

It was kind of a shock actually at the beginning. Because my experience of students of Strauss were Walter Burns and Alan Loom and although they were very different, they were still these massive personalities in front of a room. Strauss was a little bitty man. He walked in, sat at the desk, and went to lecture course.

So I guess he stood for that. He had these long, very white, long fingers hands. It was clear he thought was just and he sat here. He had his notes on the fourth of a piece of yellow, you know, yellow pads with striped paper and these little bitty pencils because apparently he and Coachete have had a bat on who was going to have the most money.

And so he was saving his stuff on paper and pencils. And then he would, he was kind of hard to initially to understand him because he spoke so softly and with a German accent, as I guess you can hear from the transcripts. I do remember my first reaction was he produced them. That's something else.

Wow. Do you remember what the first thing you read at Cornell was that sort of you thought to yourself, Oh my God, this is this is so much right in chemistry. No, the other way. So when I was a sophomore, I liked history, but I thought to the horror of my TA, that history is narrative, you know, this happens.

So I was really taken by my comparative politics course, where you got to think about things. So I thought, Oh, well, sorry to be able to do government. So I took the introduction to local theory with the man whose name was Stephen Mueller. And we had these kind of texts that were selections from the great authors.

Of course, the first one was from Plato. I was a good liberal kid. I read Plato and I thought, this is everything I can believe in. And also, this is too abstract to me.

So nice to be in a field where some people do this. I'm not going to be able to do this. How about that? So I did I are in comparative actually, as an undergraduate, so I took these theory courses and then I got, you know, I'd like to study that.

And I got a particular place where I could like a lot of Cornell as well. Yes. Okay. But that's interesting.

He was, I think this is still true. Although you guys can tell me a day or day that in study of politics, what do you call a policy school of science or if you still government, there are people who do American and there are people who do IR and comparative and then there are maybe a few now that probably mythologists are a theorist. So that's right. So for now, he was in the American group.

He was the only undergraduate I knew who had already started to get great care. And that's bad. I knew him. And, you know, I hung out with the comparative and IR people.

To the point that I think was the last term, my senior year ago, I was going to take a seminar in law with Walter Burns, but I went to the wrong room, which was for comparative course. And I didn't know what's the wrong room until the instructor came in and started talking because I knew all the guys in it. I mean, they were all doing comparative. Something else.

So, yeah. Well, go ahead. But this is your part of the show. No, no, I was going to switch to lightning round.

So you tell me, oh, lightning round? Okay. Well, welcome to the lightning round. You made this far.

This is a we like to ask some of our guests, we call them last round because they take a long time. But these are sometimes they're hard. Sometimes they're easy, but just don't overthink it. And you could pass a course.

And we should inform we should inform Jan Blitz, occasional, listen, he thought that we were talking about him. Did he really say any mail? No, no, he brought it up. Yeah, he we're not.

It's not you, Jan. It's not you. But it's some yon someone else, someone else. His name starts.

All right. It's first name starts at the big rally. We're all. Okay.

So we'll start easy. Who is your favorite philosopher? Oh, that's easy. And you know, we know.

We know. Yeah. All right. We're all.

What's your favorite work of philosophy? That's my favorite work of philosophy. Yeah. That's much harder.

I mean, I, so you're making me feel guilty. Somebody, I think said about you can confess if you need to, you know, never found a philosopher. He didn't like. Yeah.

We got this question from Harvey Mann. I mean, the answer to Harvey Mann's field's life is whoever I'm currently reading. Yeah. That's your assumption that they're in the pantheon.

Valki also say the same thing. He's like a philosophic egalitarianism. It's a very exclusive club. But within them, they're all equal.

The works are equal. Refused answer. Yeah. I think that's one of the one answers in practice.

So, and it's changed this over time. But it's clear to me as I look back over my life, you know, I prefer the thinkers, maybe one should say, who write in more literary forms to the, to the very abstract. I actually, the one time that I thought it, I like the cards, meditations a lot. And I actually in some ways, I like the sophists better than I like the apology.

I think the apology is one of the most frustrating works I have ever read. I agree. It's office. It's just clear arguments.

You know, it's just logic. It's beautiful. But so mix and match. I'm somewhat of the tribe who thinks, you know, I'm in gross than who ever I'm studying at the time.

And my word has been enraged with things from him. All right. We'll flip it around. At least favorite philosopher.

Think or book that just for any of the frustration other than the apology course, where you say no, I'm more than on the other end. Long, long ago when Michael and we spent a year at Vermont, I decided that I needed to be Hegel's logic. And I got the worst headache of my life. So I have not gone back to be Hegel's logic.

And I guess that's the, you know, effective answer. I appreciate your honesty. I agree. I find Hegel very frustrating.

I came to terms during grad school with the fact that I'm just not, I'm not going to have a reading of Hegel. I'm not going to have him in my history of thought. I just can't. I try again.

I just can't. It's too difficult. It's too hard. What about a favorite work of literature?

That's really hard. I mean, so I could say Sean Ron, he's so my husband is a great lover of poetry. I think I have a more prosé love of novels. But then I also, I just like a lot of them.

Anything that's interesting, readily. You know, it's this thing that's just used to say, or contrast, you know, there were the people who liked Jane Austen and so they should read Xenophon and then people like to see S.K. and I always thought, well, so I don't even both. Yeah.

Yeah. Me too, actually. I bet you're really, yeah. Maybe.

Yeah. All right. What about your first car? First car was an empty nitch.

Oh, that's nice. First first job. My first, well, any kind of job. Any job or first job?

No, no, first job. Okay. First job was a temporary sales. No, actually, my first job was a two week substitute receptionist at the Miami Herald where my father had worked.

And that was kind of a give away for, you know, a nice kid. And then I worked as a temporary summer sales girl at Jordan Marsh at the department store. That's very nice. Who is the best politician in your lifetime?

That is really hard. I guess, I'm sure I wouldn't have said this at the time, but maybe coming off the celebration is that maybe maybe Ronald Reagan. Well, we get that frequently. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, we won't tell you which guests that Marjorie Taylor Greene really. All right.

We'll have the last question. Have you heard any nicknames? I'm sorry. What?

Have you ever had any nicknames? Yeah. When I was when I was young, my mother named me Catherine, so she could call me Cathy and people did for many, many, many years afterwards. Okay.

Well, very nice. Alice, you look like you had something to say. I was just going to say your husband went by Zooks. You calling that?

No. No. Yeah. And just, you know, but did he tell you that he went by being Zooks?

No, he did not tell us that. Big Zooks. Yeah. And quotes little brother who was three inches taller and 50, 200 pounds heavier than Pete.

That's hilarious. That's good. That's good. I got some dirt.

I got some dirt. That's good. Well, Professor Zooker, thanks so much. It was a treasure to Ivan read the confessions in college.

It was nice to return to that book. And I really enjoyed your account. But I found it persuasive and we hope the folks have a happy Easter and we hope you'll come back some time. Anytime you like.

You're welcome back here on the new thing. Okay. Well, thanks very much. Good to see you all and good to meet you David.

Likewise. Okay. All right, folks. We'll see you next week.