Book Section
From opening books to read them, through the continuous effort at opening one’s heart to God, to the eventual disclosure of God’s mysteries to human beings, Augustine seems to trace an implicit conceptualization of openness in his Confessions. The words of Matthew 7. 7–8 underlie Augustine’s engagement with openness up to the very last sentence of the book, which ends with a sequence of verbs in the passive voice that culminates with the desired manifestation of the divine. The entire endeavour of opening oneself up undertaken in the Confessions aims at this final passive openness, which is (always) yet to come as much as human opera are (always) yet to come to completion.
Keywords: openness; Augustine; work; love; reading; interpretation; attunement
Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of Openness in Medieval Europe Containing:
Introduction / Manuele Gragnolati, Almut Suerbaum
An Interminable Work?
What Was Open in/about Early Scholastic Thought? / Philippa Byrne
Speech-Wrangling / Brian McMahon
Interrupted and Unfinished / Nicolò Crisafi
Medieval Denmark and its Languages / Alastair Matthews
Merlin’s Open Mind / Monika Otter
Enclosure and Exposure / Annie Sutherland
Unlikely Matter / Johannes Wolf
Including the Excluded / Almut Suerbaum
Openness and Intensity / Manuele Gragnolati, Francesca Southerden
Highest Openness / Damiano Sacco
The Monastic Enclosure / Benjamin Thompson
The Openness of the Enclosed Convent / Edmund Wareham
The Book Half Open / Oren Margolis
Title
An Interminable Work?
Subtitle
The Openness of Augustine’s Confessions
Author(s)
Francesco Giusti
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23_02
Description
From opening books to read them, through the continuous effort at opening one’s heart to God, to the eventual disclosure of God’s mysteries to human beings, Augustine seems to trace an implicit conceptualization of openness in his Confessions. The words of Matthew 7. 7–8 underlie Augustine’s engagement with openness up to the very last sentence of the book, which ends with a sequence of verbs in the passive voice that culminates with the desired manifestation of the divine. The entire endeavour of opening oneself up undertaken in the Confessions aims at this final passive openness, which is (always) yet to come as much as human opera are (always) yet to come to completion.
Is Part Of
Openness in Medieval Europe
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
19 April 2022
Subject
openness
Augustine
work
love
reading
interpretation
attunement
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
23
page end
43
Source
Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 23–43

References

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Cite as: Francesco Giusti, ‘An Interminable Work?: The Openness of Augustine’s Confessions’, in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 23-43 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23_02>