Authentic Freedom in the Novels of Graham Greene | Prof. Frederick Bauerschmidt

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Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2019

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., on November 13, 2019.

For more events and info visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1.

Dr. Frederick C. Bauerschmidt is Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland and a deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He has published a book on the theology of Thomas Aquinas and the Christian mystical tradition, as well as numerous articles on Catholic life and thought.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So thank you to the Thimistic Institute and to the Catholic Information Center.
0:07.0	This is a pleasure to be with you all tonight, and I hope we'll have plenty of time for
0:15.0	conversation and questions, both maybe formally right after the talk, but then maybe more informally.
0:23.7	So my topic tonight is freedom in the novels of Grand Green, and I'm not presuming that everybody
0:32.3	here will have read the novels I'm talking about, so part of what I'll do is give you the basic outline of the
0:40.4	plots, and I hope this doesn't degenerate simply into storytelling, but I hope that we'll learn
0:46.9	something about the nature of Christian freedom. Now, when Christians in the Western tradition, at least, seek guidance
0:56.4	on the matter of human freedom in relation to divine grace, it might make sense to begin
1:04.0	our search with the Dr. Gratzier himself, St. Augustine of Hippo. We might think to look for Augustine's definitive statement on
1:13.6	grace and freedom in his late and occasionally dispeptic controversial works directed at the Pelagians.
1:20.6	But I think a better starting point is Augustine's confessions. In this work, Augustine more or less
1:30.4	invents the genre of memoir in order to show the interplay of God's grace and human freedom
1:38.8	in a single life. He achieves this by a narrative display in which the freedom that the human actor exercises
1:50.1	prospectively, making this or that life choice, is seen retrospectively as always already
1:58.6	unfolded within the workings of divine grace.
2:01.6	The richness and complexity of what is shown via the narrative rendering of Augustine's life is, I would argue,
2:08.6	somewhat flattened out under the pressure of controversy in his late anti-Pallagian writings,
2:16.6	seeming at least at times, in some people's eyes, to
2:20.1	resemble a distinctly unattractive determinism.
2:24.8	Now, I don't actually think Augustine is a determinist, and I don't think his position
2:29.9	on grace and freedom is significantly different in the confessions than it is in the
2:37.5	anti-Pallagian treatises. But what is different is the genre. The relationship of God's grace
	...

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