ABSTRACT
On the face of it, St Augustine’s and Michel Foucault’s intellectual worlds seem incommensurable. They are not only separated by 15 centuries, but by discordant beliefs, values and loyalties. Whereas one examines finitude in order to help us recognize our creaturely limits and the need to be absolutely dependent upon God as sovereign creator, the other explores it as the key to opening up possibilities for incessant change and novel self-creation. The flourishing of human freedom for one means subordinating ourselves to the constraints of an extrinsic ultimate design, while for the other it means challenging every conceivable limit so as to escape extraneous constraints and definitions and to author one’s own creative purposes and direction. Can the works of thinkers with such disparate aims and allegiances be relevant to one another?
