From St. Augustine to Toyin Falola: On Yoruba Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality by AugustineTogonu-Bickersteth, London England 🇬🇧

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Not since  Saint Augustine  of Hippo,  born 354 AA has Africa  produced such a scholar  as Professor  Toyin Falola,  the Bobapitan of Ibadanland.

You can seek out the Toyin Falola  Network  on the web to read about his latest lectures, essays, books  and many interventions. 

 Falola is coming out with yet another book after over 200 books. This new book  is  Yoruba  Metaphysics:Spirituality  and Supernaturality. 

Pragmatism defines the USA . Empiricism shapes Europe and spirituality configures Africa. 

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

A fascinating conjunction.

Augustine is famous for his faith autobiography The Confessions.

Falola is bringing out a faith memoir Malaika and the Seven Heavens.

Augustine blends history and religion/ philosophical interpretation in The City of God from what I've read.

Falola might be moving in a similar direction since he has the cognitive tools to do so at the nexus of Yoruba Orisa, Islamic and perhaps Christian thought and perhaps other knowledge systems.

Augustine's Trinity develops a penetrating examination of the concept of the Trinity relating it to various phenomena, including the structure of the human mind.

Falola's work reaching such a level would require moving beyond giving an account of his subject to using his cognitive tools in exploring fundamental metaphysical concepts in relation to concrete realities, something he can do effectively at the level of individualized reflection as his range of public and private writings demonstrate.

Augustine worked at the intersection of Greco-Roman and Christian thought and became, from his African base, one of the most influential thinkers in Christian history and deeply impactful in Western thought.

Can Falola's work speak to such an intercontinental community?

Is it not doing so already?

Augustine was active when the Church and even the Western cognitive tradition was still shaping its fundamentals.

Is the African and pro-African cognitive landscape Falola's work is centred on in a similar state of flux?

Can the cognitive network Falola is working with be used in examining the human condition, as Augustine did?

Falola's contemporary Nimi Wariboko is doing something similar at the conjunction of Kalabari and European thought so it's possible.

Falola can also do something similar, as evidenced by his essay "Ritual Archives" which is globally  illuminative and by his Egugun dramatisation in In Praise of Greatness and by some of his poetry. 

It's so thrilling comparing thinkers. It enables scanning a vast landscape as if from the air, observing its contours and drawing inferences.

It may also inspire one to ask what one is doing with one's life.

Prospective Research Topics

Three African autobiographers at the intersection of personal history and the sacred:

 Augustine, Soyinka, Falola

( The Confessions; The Man Died; the Iya Lekuleja sections of Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tigers Teeth and Malaika)

Three African Thinkers of the Sacred and of Metaphysics: 

Augustine, Falola, Wariboko

( The Confessions and On the Trinity; Yoruba Metaphysics, "Ritual Archives"; Nigerian Pentecostalism, The Pentecostal Principle, Wariboko's acknowledgements pages, his collaborative Pneuma editorial essays and more- is it possible to select two representative Wariboko texts to match the no of selections from the other thinkers?)

Thanks 

Toyin

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