Browsing by Author "Hannan, Sean"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Augustine's time of death in City of God 13
    (2019) Hannan, Sean
    "Only a living person can be a dying one," writes Augustine in De ciuitate dei 13.9. For Augustine, this strange fact offers us an occasion for reflection. If we are indeed racing toward the end on a cursus ad mortem, when do we pass the finish line? A living person is "in life" (in uita), while a dead one is post mortem. But as ciu. 13.11 asks: is anyone ever in morte, "in death?" This question must be asked alongside an earlier one, which had motivated Augustine's struggle in Confessiones 11.14.17 to make sense of time from the very beginning: quid est enim tempus? What is at stake here is whether or not there is such a thing as an instant of death: a moment when someone is no longer alive but not yet dead, a moment when they are "dying" (moriens) in the present tense. If we want to understand Augustine's question about the time of death in ciu. 13, then we have to frame it in terms of the interrogation of time proper in conf. 11.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Knife-edge and saddleback: Augustine & William James on the Psychology of the specious present
    (2019) Hannan, Sean
    In the late nineteenth century, William James raised the possibility that an ill-defined notion of ‘the present time’ might cause problems for future psychologists. This line of inquiry ultimately took James in a sanguine direction, as he convinced himself and many others that, even if our notion of the now remains fuzzy, we should proceed on the basis of whatever vague sense of the present seems appropriate for our clinical or experimental purposes. Almost fifteen hundred years before James, this same question of a specious present was asked by the Christian author Augustine of Hippo as part of an introspective interrogation of time in his Confessions. Augustine’s findings were less sanguine. The present, it turns out, is hard for us to define because it has no proper definition. In other words: the ‘now’ is not natural to time. And if that is the case, then time-bound animals like human beings would also be subject to a time without present. To try to describe the human psyche and diagnose its maladies while relying upon the idea of a specious present could cause us to mis-describe and misdiagnose the very phenomena we seek to explain or even heal. We thus find Augustine and James at odds over the specious present. In order to adjudicate their dispute, we should proceed by sketching out James’ psychological remarks and then positioning Augustine’s philosophical account against James. Once that has been done, we can try to nod in the direction of a way forward by introducing a third perspective, here tentatively termed ‘phenomenological,’ but originally rooted in the empirical psychology of James’ contemporary from the continent: Franz Brentano.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Learning in a digital age
    (2017) Capstick, Shirelle; Hannan, Sean
    I will endeavour to express my view that using digital media has helped me in my studies. Using digital tools alongside typical techniques of study allows for a broader range of view on a subject. Not only does it allow a greater research base for information but it also offers different points of view that can be used for clarification or clearer understanding.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Nineveh overturned: Augustine and Chrysostom on the threat of Jonah
    (2020) Hannan, Sean
    Both John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo find in the story of Jonah and the Ninevites an invitation to reflect upon the moral and political challenges undergone by cities facing the possibility of disaster. While Nineveh was threatened with destruction at the hands of the divine, cities like Constantinople and Rome were instead threatened with disaster of a natural or military kind, ranging from earthquakes to invasions. Regardless, both Chrysostom and Augustine thought the lessons of Jonah could be applied to contemporary crises. The two pastoral preachers did so in quite different ways, however. For Chrysostom, the repentance of the Ninevites in the face of a divine threat served as a model for his own congregation. For Augustine, however, the divine was incapable of uttering threats, and so Jonah’s prophecy had to come true: Nineveh had to be overturned. In order to make this case, Augustine reconfigured the meaning of the word “overturning” (euersio), so that he could make the case that the repentance of the Ninevites was driven not by their fear, but rather by the combined agency of divine grace and political coercion.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The camp of God: reimagining pilgrimage as migrancy in Augustine’s City of God 1
    (2021) Hannan, Sean
    Following the Sack of Rome in 410 CE, African Christians like Augustine welcomed migrants pouring onto their shores from Italy. This was part of a trend of catastrophic human displacement that anticipated—albeit in an inverted manner—the Mediterranean migrant crisis of the twenty-first century. It was in this context that Augustine wrote, in his City of God, of a civitas made up of peregrini—not merely ‘pilgrims,’ but ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees.’ The vision of community corresponding to Augustine’s sense of peregrinatio was thus not the city, but the camp: the civitas that plays host to the migrant. As Agamben has reminded us, the prevalence of camps, in addition to embodying violence against the encamped, tells us something about the regime of law conditioning even those who supposedly live ‘outside the walls.’ In light of Agamben’s insight, this article makes the case that Augustine’s political theology of peregrinatio and civitas is best understood in terms of migrancy and the refugee camp.