Name: ADRIANO CESAR RODRIGUES BERALDI
Publication date: 09/06/2026
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANDRÉS FRANCISCO CONTRERAS SÁNCHEZ | Examinador Externo |
| JORGE AUGUSTO DA SILVA SANTOS | Presidente |
| LUÍS GABRIEL PROVINCIATTO | Examinador Externo |
| MARCOS AURÉLIO FERNANDES | Examinador Externo |
| RENATO KIRCHNER | Examinador Externo |
Summary: Heidegger engages in an exclusive reading of Augustine at only two moments between
the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the interpretation of Books X and XI of the
Confessions. The first occurs in Augustine and Neoplatonism, a summer course from
1921, in Freiburg, where Heidegger turns to a hermeneutic examination of the facticity
of religious life as it emerges in Augustine’s confession in Book X. The second moment
concerns the 1930 lecture at the Abbey of Beuron, Quid est tempus? Confessions, Book
XI, and the winter course of 1930/31, again in Freiburg, Augustine, Confessions XI (On
Time). Both the lecture and the course focus on Book XI of Augustine’s work. This
thesis problematizes Augustine’s concept of time as presented in Book XI, understood
as a stretching of the human soul itself, the distentio animi, through Heidegger’s
hermeneutic lens, as a tension (tensio) that, according to our central hypothesis,
articulates two structural aspects of the experience of factical life as depicted in Book X:
on one hand, the movement of defluxus in multa, the dispersion into the multiplicity of
creation, in an improper loss of itself of the Self (das Selbst); on the other, the
continentia, the gathering of the dispersed, a counter-movement of the proper
containment of this Selbst oriented toward the Eternal. By identifying these core
categories, we aim to demonstrate the parallelisms existing between the two
Heideggerian interpretations of both Books of the Confessions. Thus, using the
Heideggerian hermeneutic effort of the Augustinian work as the guiding thread of the
research, this thesis argues that these movements of dispersion and containment can be
unveiled as the very mode of being of human temporal essence within the tension of
distentio animi, that is, as its own condition of possibility for existence in time before
eternity
