LECTURES

Standing Under Suffering: Augustine on Assault, Suicide, and the Integrity of Victims

In his City of God, St. Augustine offers a uniquely influential reading of the most important headline of the early fifth century A.D.—the sack of Rome. The Bishop of Hippo consoles those who suffered the horror of living through a military siege, reflecting at length on questions of the integrity of victims, the nature of consent, the discipline of deprivation, and the realities of suicide to avoid shame as a Christian descendant of classical Rome. The lecture will illustrate how Augustine embodies a deep appreciation of the Hebrew Psalms, drawing together three continents as he offers counsel on the complexity and hard beauty of suffering and human interiority.

Grant Holbrook (VCU class of 2006) is a teacher of Theology, Rhetoric, and Hebrew at Veritas School. A longtime Richmonder, Dr. Holbrook’s graduate work at Union Presbyterian Seminary focused on the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Hebrew poetry of the Psalms. Teaching Christian Scripture and Theology, he has filled the past nine years reading St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God with high school students. Currently, he is writing a book on the life and insight that spring up from teaching City of God to high school seniors. He and his family live happily on Richmond’s north side.

This talk will propose that the work of celebrated 20th century American novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor “shows” what Thomas Aquinas “tells” regarding God’s nature and the operation of Grace in creation.

O’Connor’s work is characterized by its use of violence amid the grotesquerie of the American South, so much so that it was initially mistaken as a literary nihilism and O’Connor a “hillbilly nihilist.” O’Connor herself, however, wished to be understood as a “hillbilly Thomist” whose stories were as they were “the only way to make people see.”

In describing her own work, O’Connor was known to say often that while her stories are violent, and her characters often killed, nevertheless, “no one gets hurt.” This is because in her work violence is in service to apocalypse: God breaks through to perfect her characters one way or another. In this way, O’Connor’s apocalyptic vision reveals the fundamental insight of Aquinas about Grace’s restorative (rather than destructive) effects. For O’Connor, God is always already “there,” and what she hoped to help people “see” was nothing less than themselves in relation to God.

Danny is an Anglican priest and Vicar of All Souls Anglican Church in Richmond, which he helped plant in 2022. Before Richmond, Danny was a chaplain to students at the University of Wisconsin along with a brief stint in the corporate world. A native midwesterner, he holds degrees from Wheaton College (BA), Covenant Theological Seminary (MDiv), Nashotah House Theological Seminary (STM) and is currently a PhD candidate at Durham University. His academic interests are broad but include 20th c. Catholic theology, philosophical theology, apocalyptic theology, political theology, as well as poetics and aesthetics. Also Flannery O’Connor.