John J O’Meara

Augustine As Aeneas

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In these and other particulars it can be seen that both the Aeneid and the Confessions approach a usual pattern and to one another. Aeneas in his flight from Troy has many shattering personal experiences, many a trial, and a visit to the underworld from which he emerges regenerated, with a clear vision of his destiny and the strength and confidence to fulfil it. Augustine, likewise, pictures himself as the Prodigal Son fleeing back to the Father (an important related motif in the Confessions), has equally shattering personal experiences and trials, ‘dies to his old self and puts on Christ in a mystic calling from which he emerges regenerated. There are differences of emphasis between the one work and the other – in particular the Confessions stress the ‘flight’ in terms of the Neo Platonic flight to the Fatherland and the way thither. But broadly speaking each is the story of Everyman in his journey through life.”

From “Virgil and Augustine: The Aeneid in the Confessions” by John Ó’Meara, in The Maynooth Review / Revieú Mhá Nuad , Vol. 13, (Dec., 1988), pp. 30-43 [available on JSTOR, limited free access]

The Irish philosopher John J. O’Meara on the parallels between Augustine’s Confessions and Virgil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, recounts the tale of Aeneas, a Trojan who wandered the Mediterranean after the Fall of Troy. He eventually arrives in Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans.

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The Appeal of NeoPlatonism to the Irish

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After Yeats’ death I bought for a Jesuit library some of his fine volumes of Classical texts and secondary literature in Greens bookshop in Kildare Street. I do not remember if Stephen MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus On Beauty (1.6), which Yeats used extensively in his discourses to duchesses in London, was among them. […]
[Sean O’Faolain] was frustrated however, by his inability to “lay his hands”, so to speak, on Plotinus and neoPlatonism, for the very good reason that, apart from MacKenna’s inspired but not wholly reliable translation, modern scholarship had not yet done its duty to them. Padraic Colum had already told me of how moved he was by what he gleaned of Neoplatonism from my “Young Augustine” (which treated of the influence of the Neoplatonists on Augustine’s conversion): the mystic in him wanted more. Since the times of Yeats, Colum and O’Faolain both a reliable Greek text and an English translation have become available, and there is now much secondary work on Neoplatonism – some of it done by scholars connected with Ireland. And the interest in Neoplatonic themes endures – as is to be seen, for example, in Thomas Kinsella’s “Out of Ireland”. I have myself been curious about the appeal of Neoplatonism for the Irish throughout the centuries, and notable since the very Neoplatonist Irish scholar, John Scottus Eriugena in the ninth century.

John J. O’Meara (1915-2003), “On the Fringe of Letters”, Irish University Review (Vol. 27, No. 2, 1997, pp. 310-324) available on JSTOR (limited free access on registration).

John O’Meara, one of the great scholars of St. Augustine of Hippo and an early translator of Gerald of Wales muses on the appeal of neoPlatonism to the Irish, focusing on anecdotes about writers O’Meara encountered.