Augustine's Confessions: Labor, Rest, & the Meaning of Life

Seminar Enrichment Series

Few books speak as honestly about the human condition as Augustine's Confessions. Written in the late fourth century, this work defies easy classification—at once a memoir, a prayer, and a philosophical reckoning with the deepest longings of the human heart. Augustine lays bare his pursuit of pleasure, status, intellectual mastery, and professional success, only to discover that none of these could quiet the restlessness within him. His famous cry—"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you"—has echoed across sixteen centuries because it names something most people recognize but struggle to articulate: the sense that our desires always outrun their objects, that what we think we want is never quite what we need. The Confessions asks whether the meaning of life can be found by accumulating experiences and achievements, or whether it requires something more radical—a turning of the whole self toward a truth we did not invent and cannot control.

With Colin Redemer

Related Seminar text: Augustine, Confessions (SEM 150)