Augustin`s Confessions and Bavli Berakhot: A Commonality of Ideas

The paper analyzes the systems of ideas that underlay Augustin’s Confessions and Bavli Berakhot. The collection of ideas that holds Confessions together includes suffering, love, time, eternity and praising. According to Augustin, evil prevents man from praising God. Augustin would not have accepted the idea that evil comes from God. Evil derives from perverted human will and poisons a soul. Instead of being distended between the past and the future, a soul should forget the past, concentrate on the present, and extend the present as much as possible. By concentration, the present extends and approximates eternity, which is the messianic future. The idea of making a moment linger is salient in Bavli Berkahot as well. The close correlation between redemption and ritual presumes the lingering of time. A man makes time linger by prolonging the recitation, by concentrating on the text, and by merging the blessings. Prolonging halakhic time at any cost will hasten the coming of the ultimate meta-historical event. R. Aqiba’s protracting of the word ehad brings him into a meta-historical context, into the future world. The moment of reading the word ehad lingers amidst torture, spasm and ecstasy. That ecstasy is the consummation of love with God. A man should love God even if God takes his soul. To solve the aporia of suffering and evil, the framers of the Talmud as well as Augustin combined the idea of love for God with the notion of making the moment linger.