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Document Details : Title: Resting on Tears Subtitle: The Trinity, the Sacraments, and Grief in Augustine's Confessions Author(s): FINN, Douglas Journal: Augustiniana Volume: 67 Issue: 3-4 Date: 2017 Pages: 171-197 DOI: 10.2143/AUG.67.3.3275097 Abstract : Scholars have long noticed the connections between the two episodes of grief recounted by Augustine in Confessions 4 and 9. What has received less attention is the way that Augustine’s reflections on the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist condition both of those experiences of grief. What is more, in each account of sadness and death, Augustine articulates his treatment of the church’s sacraments in Trinitarian terms. This article thus reads the narratives of grief in Conf. 4 and 9 in light of one of the more neglected books of the work, Conf. 13, a figurative exegesis of Genesis which Isabelle Bochet has shown to have its origins in the baptismal liturgy of the Easter vigil. Conf. 13 depicts the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church. There Augustine describes how, through the sacraments, the Spirit affords Christian believers an anticipatory glimpse of the eschatological vision of creation as a whole. That vision of creation, seen as an expression of God’s goodness and love, sheds important light on Augustine’s understanding of the status of grief in Christian life: grief over the loss of what is rightly loved as God’s good creation – in this case, Augustine’s tears over the loss of his beloved mother, and not just over her sins – can be the source of anticipatory rest, when conformed to the Eucharistic memory of Christ through the love of the Holy Spirit. |
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