Parting Knowledge

There are forms of knowing that seem either to come from a parting or to require one. Paradigmatically in Genesis, Adam parts from God in order to join in knowledge with his partner, the flesh of his flesh, and the result is a bereft but not unpromising knowledge, looking like a labor of love. Saint Augustine famously--some would say infamously--reads the Genesis paradigm of knowing as a story of original sin, where parting is both damnable and disfiguring and reuniting a matter of incomprehensible grace. Roughly half the essays in this collection engage directly with Augustine's theological animus and follow his thinking into self-division, perversity of will, grief, conversion, and the aspiration for transcendence. The remaining ones, more concerned with grace than with sin, bring an animus more distantly Augustinian to the preemption of forgiveness and the persistence of hell, morality and its limits, sexual piety, strange beauty, and a philosophy that takes in confession. The common pull of all the essays is towards the imperfection in self-knowledge--a place of disfigurement perhaps, but also a nod to transformation.

""In this collection, Wetzel gives readers the sense of being in a series of leisurely conversations with a wise and learned friend who refuses to simplify life's joys, mysteries, and sorrows, but still manages to shed light on them.""
--Jeffrey Stout, Princeton University

""These are indeed 'essays after Augustine'; steeped in Augustinian scholarship, but not content with mere erudition, they remind us of the self-involving character of true philosophy and lure us into its pursuit. Wetzel loves the Augustine who is more certain of having received than of what he knows, and these pages invite us to walk with and after this Augustine.""
--Jennifer A. Herdt, Yale Divinity School, Yale University

""No one approaches a 'theology of heart' with more chemistry and tact than James Wetzel. In the Catholic tradition, he discovers implacable insights that join freedom to love and wisdom to grief. This volume showcases Wetzel's exacting yet beautiful essays on Augustine, Anselm, Wittgenstein, and Kant.""
--Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, University of Richmond

""In these deep and often beautiful essays, James Wetzel teaches us how to be Augustine's student, how to become better readers of our particular griefs, how to acknowledge the good that comes as beauty. There is no better interpreter of Augustine working today.""
--John Bowlin, Princeton Theological Seminary


James Wetzel is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and the first permanent holder of the Augustinian Chair in the Thought of St. Augustine. He is the author of Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (1992) and Augustine: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), and the editor of Augustine's City of God: A Critical Guide.