A CiRCE Institute Partner Feature

released 1/27/2026

In this July 2025 lecture, Andrew Kern takes his listeners along an “interlinear” reading of a portion of St. Augustine’s Confessions that explores the differences between how God makes and how we create. As Kern reads and translates the Latin phrases, a startling and wondrous truth emerges: God gifts human souls with an “inward eye” that is able to search out and perceive the order and wonder of His cosmos, and we are then able to “translate” those truths into material form. St. Augustine explains that God created us to apprehend visions of truth that we can then embody in form. Unlike God, however, we have the capacity to make things badly — in other words, we can create forms that do not accord with truth.

This lecture is provided courtesy of the CiRCE Institute.

38 minutes

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