La fecondità del pensiero di Agostino nella filosofia di Michele Federico Sciacca

This article examines the formative influence of Augustine of Hippo on the philosophical thought of Michele Federico Sciacca (1908–1975), the Sicilian thinker known as "the philosopher of Giarre." Rather than approaching Sciacca merely as a historian of philosophy who interpreted Augustine, the article traces the fecundity of Augustinian thought as a living source that shaped Sciacca's own speculative itinerary. The inquiry is structured around four pivotal Augustinian passages: Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum (Conf. I.1.1), Factus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio (Conf. IV.4.9), Cupio scire Deum et animam (Sol. I.2.7), and In te ipsum redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas (De vera rel. 39.72). Through close reading of these texts and their resonance in Sciacca's major works — including his monograph Sant'Agostino (1949) and its expanded Spanish edition (1955) — the article shows how Sciacca appropriated Augustinian themes to develop his own "existential spiritualism." Four philosophical nuclei emerge from this confrontation. First, the inquietudo of the human creature, which Sciacca reformulates as an ontological structure of the person oriented irreversibly toward transcendence. Second, the self as magna quaestio, an aporia irreducible to objectification, interpretable only within the mystery of God. Third, the Augustinian programme of knowing God and the soul (cupio scire Deum et animam) as the dual axis of philosophy itself — a quaestio animae that demands a quaestio Dei. Fourth, the Augustinian call to interiority (in te ipsum redi) as the condition of access to truth, understood not as narcissistic withdrawal but as a "communion of interiority" open to the Absolute. The article concludes by positioning Sciacca's reading of Augustine within the broader current of twentieth-century Christian Platonism, arguing that Augustinian thought functions for Sciacca not merely as a historical source but as a philosophical model — the bagno di agostinismo — that restores philosophy to its proper object: truth that founds and transcends reason.