We have just started working on Book 2 of Augustine’s Confessions
in my upper level Latin prose course. My choice of this text was sort of
the result of a perfect storm last spring. I was teaching a course, Intellectual
Traditions II – Medieval to Renaissance, for the Honors Program here at the U
and the Confessions was one of our common texts. I also had a student in
my second year Latin poetry class who was interested in working on Augustine.
We’re just a week into the text, but it is one of the best
things I have read in Latin in quite a while. I'd read bits and pieces of
Augustine over the years, but I'd never really sat down and worked through a
big chunk like this. His language is viscerally descriptive and his style is
clear and straightforward. The biggest difficulty for my students, and myself
too, is the vocabulary. We spent the first ten weeks of the semester reading
Cicero's Pro Caelio. Augustine uses words that often seem familiar at
first glance, from English derivatives, but they are Latin words that aren't
encountered in Cicero or have unexpected nuances. It's a great read for someone
who likes to pour through dictionaries, because the definition one needs is
often near the bottom of the entry.
The real draw back to reading the Confessions with
undergraduates, who have essentially studied only Latin texts from the late
first century B.C.E., is that there is not a good student commentary. O’Donnell's text and commentary is great for tying the text into the traditions of early
Christianity and the philosophical context, as is Gillian Clark's Cambridge
edition, but they aren't of much assistance to a student who is still mastering
grammar and dealing with the overload of new vocabulary and idiom. So over the
weekend I started thinking about what a good student commentary would consist
of, and today I proposed to my students that we could develop a commentary on
Book 2 for students like themselves.
We did a little brain storming in class about what a good
commentary should look like. I took in half a dozen commentaries of various
sorts and had my students flip through them and identify the things they liked
and didn't like. Perhaps not surprisingly they were very much in favor of those
texts that included a bit of Latin, vocabulary notes, and grammar explanations
in separate sections on facing pages, like Cerutti's Pro Archia (2006)
published by Bolchazy-Carducci or Steadman's self-published Plato's Symposium
(2009). Besides the obvious convenience of this layout, one student pointed
out that since there is relatively little Latin text on each page it makes you
feel like you’re really making progress on the text. They were also in favor of
diagrams of complex sentences. Specifically for Augustine we agreed that it
would be nice to have a vocabulary that included definitions that would be appropriate
for the specific context of the confessions, but also include a follow
up of basic or classical definitions that one might have encountered, or will,
in reading other texts as they continue their studies. We're working largely
from O’Donnell’s commentary via stoa.org and we also decided we’d like to have
more on the Roman side of things in terms of cultural content. These are
students who are not exposed much to material from the later Roman Empire due
both to the research interests and scholarly strengths of the faculty and also
the design of our curriculum. So some contextual essays would also be helpful.
I left them to ponder this ideal commentary until our
meeting on Wednesday. I offered to substitute working toward creating such a
commentary for their planned translation final. In addition, I suggested that
we could do this work with the aim of publishing an open access student
commentary on Book 2 of the Confessions, with all contributors getting
publication credit to add to their CV. I really like this idea for a number of
reasons. First and foremost it will get them working with their dictionaries
and grammars and then making the hard choices about meanings of words and types
of constructions. Depending on how we break down the work, they will also have
the chance to think and write about the cultural context of the text.
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