As a young student in Paris, O'Connell was first enamored of the intriguing artistic imagery of Augustine's works. The imagery continued to impress him as his scholarship continued. Now, after many years of research and regarding study on the topic, a thorough treatment of Augustine's image clustersis revealed in this volume, Soundings in St. Augustine's Imagination. That St. Augustine's writings are empowered by use of poetic imagery is of interest to readers of philosophy, theology, as well as language. In this work, Augustine's imagery is used as a basis to shed light on some of his...

In his preceding work, Soundings in Augustine's Imagination, Father O'Connell outlined the three basic images Augustine employs to frame his view of the human condition. In the present study, he applies the same techniques of image-analysis to the three major conversionsrecounted in the Confessions. Those conversions were occasioned, first, by Augustine's youthful reading of Cicero's Hortensius, then by his reading of what he calls the books of the Platonists, and finally, most decisively, by his fateful reading in that Milanese garden of the explosive capitulum, or chapterlet, from St....

The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has been characterized as metaphysics, poetry, and mysticism-virtually everything except what its author claimed it was: a purely scientific mmoir.Professor O'Connell here follows up on a nest of clues, uncovered first in an early unpublished essay, then in the series of essays contained principally in The Vision of the Past. Those clues all point to Teilhard's intimate familiarity with the philosophy of science propounded by the celebrated Pierre Duhem. It was Duhem's central claim that science, to remain true to itself, must aim at...