Eternity's Ennui

M.B. Pranger, Ph.D. (1975), University of Amsterdam, is Professor emeritus at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the literary aspects of monasticism (Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought (Brill, 1994), The Artificiality of Christianity (Stanford, 2003).

"Engaged with both the philosophy and the theology of Augustine’s thought, without being beholden to either discipline [...] it is an incredibly cultivated, capacious book [...] Pranger is bringing Augustine into conversation with Proust, into conversation with Samuel Beckett, into conversation with Henry James. And he also comes back to music. Every now and then he engages the most unbelievably revealing metaphor from music."Catherine Conybeare, "The Best Augustine Books", on https://fivebooks.com/best-books/augustine-catherine-conybeare"Pranger has written a dense and difficult book of striking originality [...] this is a book that richly deserves to transform the disciplines it so tactfully subverts." James Wetzel, The Journal of Religion Vol. 92, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 143-145.

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: Rambling1.Time, Focus and Narrative in Augustine’s Confessions1.1.Introduction1.2.Meijering, Sorbabji, Ricoeur1.3.Time, narrative and emplotment1.4.Long expectation, long memory2.The Unfathomability of Sincerity: on the Seriousness of Augustine’s Confessions 2.1.Pawn, lease and promise: Stanley Cavell and the arrogation of voice2.2.John Henry Newman: conversion and the exclusion of the non-serious2.3.Augustine’s Confessions: the arrogation of voice and the promise of conversion 2.4.The promise of conversion and the return of voice2.5.Jokes and poetry3.The Gift of Destiny and the Language of Dispossession3.1.Introduction: the aporias of Augustinian predestination3.2.The holy sinner3.3.Calvin’s decretum horribile3.4.The language of possession: Calvin continued3.5.The language of dispossession: Dante on sloth as sin3.6.The language of dispossession: Henry James3.7.Dante’s cantos on the moon and Belaqua’s lobster4.The Sustainability of Voice 4.1.The epiphany of Scripture4.2.A grief observed4.3.Politics and finitude4.4.The human condition as nature morte5. Eternity’s Ennui 5.1.Distentio animi and the hinterland of grace5.2. The logic of terror: jokes and poetry revisited5.3.The desire to become an Indian5.4.Late style: sero te amavi5.5.Non-perseverance and the boundaries of love’s lateness5.6.Endgame BibliographyIndex of Names