Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Analytic philosophy of religion: retrospect and prospect
- 2 Is it possible and desirable for theologians to recover from Kant?
- 3 Conundrums in Kant's rational religion
- 4 In defense of Gaunilo's defense of the fool
- 5 Divine simplicity
- 6 Alston on Aquinas on theological predication
- 7 God everlasting
- 8 Unqualified divine temporality
- 9 Suffering love
- 10 Is God disturbed by what transpires in human affairs?
- 11 The silence of the God who speaks
- 12 Barth on evil
- 13 Tertullian's enduring question
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Suffering love
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Analytic philosophy of religion: retrospect and prospect
- 2 Is it possible and desirable for theologians to recover from Kant?
- 3 Conundrums in Kant's rational religion
- 4 In defense of Gaunilo's defense of the fool
- 5 Divine simplicity
- 6 Alston on Aquinas on theological predication
- 7 God everlasting
- 8 Unqualified divine temporality
- 9 Suffering love
- 10 Is God disturbed by what transpires in human affairs?
- 11 The silence of the God who speaks
- 12 Barth on evil
- 13 Tertullian's enduring question
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death. My own country became a torment and my own home a grotesque abode of misery. All that we had done together was now a grim ordeal without him. My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not there to be seen. I hated all the places we had known together, because he was not in them and they could no longer whisper to me, “Here he comes!” as they would have done had he been alive but absent for a while … My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest.
(Augustine, Confessions IV, 4; IV, 7)It is in passages such as this, where he exposes to full view the grief that overwhelmed him upon the death of his dear friend from Tagaste, that Augustine is at his most appealing to us in the twentieth century. We are attracted both by the intensity of his love and grief, and by his willingness to expose that grief to his friends and the readers of his Confessions. To any who may have experienced torments similar to those Augustine here describes, the passage also has the mysteriously balming quality of expressing with delicate precision the grief they themselves have felt.
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- Information
- Inquiring about God , pp. 182 - 222Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010