Abstract
In dialogical form, the book entitled Be, Know, and Love. Augustinian Dialogue offers to open-up the realm of thought of Aurelius Augustine.
Rather than supplying a kind of entertaining introduction to Augustine, who has been among the greatest thinkers of all time, the aim of the book is to gradually experience the fruits of dialogue and lead to an ever more substantial dialogue with the inner Teacher through whom Truth can enter this world. Both of these goals come about on a path of thought-searching, questioning, and conversation with the genuine other 'you'.
The reader can thus verify for himself/herself whether, through dialogue with a human partner, we learn to accept otherness and discover new perspectives as well as if a transformation that belongs to the essential possibility of human life is thus made possible. Primarily, the book is addressed to readers not yet familiar with Augustine's life and work.
The Introduction provides a basic insight into Augustine's biography. The dialogue itself, then, is written in the native languages of the two authors, that is, Czech and Slovak.
The book consists of seven chapters. The first (Being-Knowing-Loving) opens Augustine's trinity of being, knowing, and loving, which he saw as God's trinitarian trace in us, created in His image and likeness.
The chapter Listening Together to the Speech of Life reflects on friendship and its importance in the search for truth. The necessary interrelationship of essentially being passive, which precedes activity in the same way as the bestowal of grace precedes life from God's gifts, is the theme of the chapter Passivity and the Activity of the Indifferent.
The fourth chapter (Fear and Trust) confronts the question on the nature of fear and seeks the roots of a trust relationship. The theme of the next chapter (Being on the Threshold) is the reality and necessity of human life on a threshold, which is the natural boundary and/or border between home that symbolizes the inner world on the one hand and the outer world on the other.
The sixth chapter is entitled Source and Dialogue with the authors pointing to the importance of searching for meaning and meaningfulness as phenomena associated with human life. They draw the reader's attention to the fact that, quite naturally, we tend to resist the hollow void, and yet we are bequeathed kenosis.
The last chapter, seventh in row, entitled Bearing Witness to Truth in Love, is a search for ever new beginnings of inner dialogue with the inner Teacher, which are and should be reflected in our dialogues with others and with the world. It also poses the question on the essence of what the ancient Greeks called paideia, what is education, ultimately meaning cultivation through dialogue opening us up to freedom and responsibility.