by James J. O'Donnell

Augustine's letters are not commonly treated as literary texts but as sources: they are empowered to speak on matters of biography, history, or doctrine, but in so doing often lose their own identity as texts. The practice of modern editorship has created this status, by taking the letters out of their medieval corpora and arranging them in chronological order. The two editions of Augustine's letters still in use, the Maurist (from the seventeenth century, reprinted in Patrologia Latina) and the CSEL (by Goldbacher, spread over four volumes (34, 44, 57, 58) and 28 years [1895-1923]), have essentially the same chronological arrangement, itself a creation of the Maurist text. Such an arrangement creates an allusion of stability, order, and transparency -- though some letters must perforce be inserted in sequence more or less arbitrarily when they are less securely dated, and other letters are depreciated by falling outside the chronological order in a relatively undifferentiated mass at the end of the collection. It has been shown how this process of turning letters into chronologically-arranged source materials is a humanist innovation.

This study seeks to reawaken the letters from their dormant and compliant slumber by taking a single text for study and commentary. The hypertextual arrangement permits a hybrid of "article" and "commentary" not economically feasible in print, and allows us to place the text itself, cult object par excellence of the humanist tribe, at the center of our attention.

After this brief introduction, the reader will be led to the Latin text itself (any kind reader wishing to supply an English translation is welcome to contribute), which is accompanied by hyperlinked running commentary designed to elucidate the main points of interest.

The addressee is Caecilianus, a Roman grandee on service in Africa in the year 414. He was in Carthage a few months earlier, in September 413, when his senior colleague Marinus was charged to restore order to a province lately unsettled by rebellion. Heraclian, the murderer of Stilicho, served in the wake of that signal service to the throne as imperial commander in Africa (comes Africae); advanced to the empty but proud dignity of consul in 413, he rebelled and seems to have set himself up as emperor. He invaded Italy with a fleet, but was beaten by Marinus, who pursued him back to Africa, hunted him down, and put him to death. Remaining in Africa, Marinus hounded those found in complicity with Heraclian.

Among Marinus' victims were two brothers, Apringius and Marcellinus. The older brother, Apringius, was the senior official, serving as proconsul (civil governor) in Africa in 411, but the younger brother attracts our attention more firmly. Marcellinus held the high rank of tribunus et notarius and had been sent to Africa in the same year in which his brother was proconsul on an important commission. He was charged with investigating and settling the long-seething Donatist controversy. He called and presided over a lengthy conference at Carthage in June 411, at which hundreds of bishops representing each side in the controversy appeared and, through a handful of designated spokesmen on each side, debated their cases. Marcellinus, as the emperor's representative, found for the orthodox (this was scarcely a surprise) and undertook the genteel brutality of imperial repression of the schismatics.

Marcellinus and his brother remained in Africa. Marcellinus in particular fell into a close friendship with Augustine. This friendship takes the form of a remarkable set of Augustinian texts. The backbone of the collection is a series of letters in which Marcellinus was involved:

• epp. 128-9: Two public documents, addressed to Marcellinus in the name of all the Catholic bishops of north Africa, the first accepting the terms of debate with the Donatists set forth in an edict by Marcellinus, the second deploring reluctance on the part of the Donatists to do the same. Though printed with Augustine's letters traditionally, these two documents come down to us only (1) recorded in the formal gesta of the Conference at Carthage and (2) in the case of ep. 128, quoted in its entirety in the proceedings of a debate Augustine held in 418 with the Donatist bishop Emeritus.
• epp. 133-4: In these two letters, Augustine addresses first Marcellinus, the commissioner, and then his brother Apringius, the proconsul, seeking clemency for Donatist thugs convicted of murdering one orthodox clergyman and mutilating another savagely. If we read these naively as personal letters from Augustine to his friends, we may be impressed by his magnanimity. But these letters were surely public in some sense, and a closer reading suggests their purpose. First, in order to have been of any use, in the swift career of Roman justice, the letters must have been written while Augustine was still in Carthage in late summer 411 (see O. Perler, Les voyages de saint Augustin [Paris 1969], on Augustine's movements through this period). The purpose of writing in such a situation is to publicize. What is Augustine publicizing? (1) That it was not orthodox spies who turned in the guilty, but a formal accusation from the regularly constituted authorities (134.2: qui disciplinae publicae inserviunt); (2) that Augustine, the orthodox bishop, wants those who had committed horrible crimes treated leniently, in the interests of reconciliation (leniency in this case means sending them to the mines instead of killing them); (3) that Marcellinus had already acted with remarkable restraint (133.2: M. had not used the ordinary instruments of torture [hooks and fire and the rack] but had only had them beaten with rods to extract a confession); and (4) that Augustine wanted the records of the case publicized (134.4: legenda sunt gesta) in order to horrify Donatist sympathizers (at the thought of what Donatist hard-liners were doing) without encouraging the hard-liners to commit further atrocities. In the wake of the conference of June 411, Augustine has the look of a man worried about an escalating cycle of terror, if judicial restraint is not imposed and publicized.

Now comes the three-way exchange with Marcellinus and Volusianus. The five letters in this set formed a unit that regularly led off medieval collections of Augustine's letters and that nearly always appear in MSS together and in the same order, first three letters from and to Volusianus, then two from and to Marcellinus.

• epp. 132, 135, 137: In these three letters, Augustine first (132) approaches Volusianus with deference, performing the ritual dance of epistolary acquaintance. He encourages V. to devote himself to the study of "litterae sanctae", especially the writings of the apostles, from whom he will be driven excitedly to the prophets. He invites V. to write back with questions, for both men are much too busy for the delights of face to face conversation on serious subjects, and likely to be distracted by other participants in such a conversation, men "qui plerumque non sunt apti tali negotio magisque linguae certaminibus quam scientiae luminibus delectantur" (132.1). (Already, there is a curious parallel here and throughout this correspondence between A.'s presentation of Volusianus and his repesentation of his younger self at Milan on the verge of conversion. So here, the bishop too busy to talk echoes Ambrose, famously in Conf. 6.3.3.)
  --Volusianus' reply to Augustine (ep. 135) is polite but restrained. It reports a confabulatio among men very much like those for whom Augustine's letter expressed disdain; the representation of such a gentlemanly, lettered conversation in the Saturnalia comes to mind. Topics raised included all the philosophical schools (so cf. Conf. 6.16.26, where Augustine and Alypius are similarly canvassing the contenders). The specific questions raised for Augustine's attention are thus (1) the anomaly of incarnation and virgin's birth -- how the lord of the world spent ten months in a virgin's womb (and was there virginitas post partum?) and a lifetime in a weak and mutable body; (2) the value of Christ's miracles (a few cures, a few resurrections seem like paltry stuff for the lord of the universe). Volusianus represents the group as stymied by ignorance and reverence, and so V. comes to A.: (135.2) "interest famae tuae, ut quaesita noverimus. utcumque absque detrimento cultus divini in aliis sacerdotibus toleratur inscitia, at cum ad antistitem Augustinum venitur, legi deest, quicquid contigerit ignorari." This is a Christian-friendly conversation, well enough, but even in the way V. approaches Augustine, it is clear that the frame of reference is traditional. Christianity is under scrutiny as one more "agreeable possibility" (Auden).
  --Augustine's reply (ep. 137) is lengthy and circumstantial. Its tone may well have been difficult to grasp even in that time. He flatters the "magni cuiusdam dialogi specimen" reported in V.'s letter, and goes on to say what an honor, privilege, and obligation it is to instruct V. and his learned friends in the doctrines of Christianity. The letter proceeds by quoting V.'s letter item by item at length and then responding. He impugns the curiositas of this assembly as gently as possible and proceeds to discuss the substance of the questions. There are numerous parallels in both the problematic and in Augustine's response to the Confessions again (even a quotation from Cicero's Tusculans used here at 137.2.4 in just the way it had been used in Conf. 7.17.23) and the ubiquitous presence of God, regardless of incarnation is emphasized. On the topic of miracles, he scoffs at "pagans" (pointing out the anomaly [137.4.13] that Apuleius was at pains to defend himself in court against a charge of doing magic, but his enthusiasts in A.'s time think it a kindness to argue that he was a magician -- at the very least, A. hopes this undermines their claims for the power of non-Christian magicians.
  --The correspondence with Volusianus himself goes no further, though a few years later, Augustine would cite it (and therefore attest to its publication) in ench. 34.10, "lege si placet de virginitate sanctae Mariae meas litteras ad illustrem virum quem cum honore ac dilectione nomino VOlusianum." The three letters travel in medieval manuscripts together, accompanied by two others from and to Marcellinus:
• epp. 136, 138: Marcellinus takes up the epistolary baton. He is doubtless one of those with whom V. engages in his philosophical talking parties, but his own position is closer to that of Augustine, and so he intervenes. In his letter (136), Marcellinus reports that V. has indeed read letter 132 to "plures" and the conversation has gone on from there. In Marcellinus' version, Volusianus is a man "qui a verae fidei stabilitate multorum, quorum in hac urbe copia est, persuasione revocatur"; not, n.b., a "pagan" pure and simple, despite his father's allegiance, but a man of some imputed Christian allegiance [he may very well have been formally a catechumen, at his mother's instance, as Augustine was -- this would increase the parallel with Augustine and help explain the resemblances to the presentation of Augustine in the Confessions noted above -- who is backsliding. V. would surely have written back to A., did he not fear "litterarum prolixitatem". Volusianus is particularly interested in hearing from Augustine in the appropriate style (satis . . . culto accuratosque sermone et Romanae eloquentiae nitore perspicuo). The question of magicians is raised again, Apollonius and Apuleius cited for the non-Christian side. Other queries of an analogous nature are brought in as well (why God spurned the sacrifices of the Old Testament in order to accept those of the New, and how the sermon on the mount can be reconciled with the good of the republic). M. ends by showing a side of the conversation that did not come through in V.'s version, asking A. urgently to respond, "maxime quia, cum ista gererentur, eximius Hipponiensis regionis possessor et dominus praesens aderat, qui et sanctitatem tuam sub ironiae adulatione laudaret et sibi, cum de his quaereret, minime satis factum esse contenderet." Nothing suggests that the Hippo grandee was not a Christian in outward conformity, only that he found pleasure also in the ironic detachment and skepticism of philosophical conversation.
  --Augustine replied (ep. 138) in detail. He makes a fine distinction at the outset between "book" and "letter" and confines himself to responding in the latter mode, though is happy to have the letter read to others. If this set of answers does not suffice, then A. and Marcellinus can discuss how better to handle the issues: that seems to be the germ of de civitate dei. There are more echoes of the atmosphere and content of the Confessions (the long-ago proconsul and physician Vindicianus who appears in Conf. 4.3.5 and 7.6.8; even a discussion of the "beautiful" and the "fitting", echoing Augustine's earliest, pre-Christian book described at Conf. 4.13.20). By now, much of what he says is unremarkable, but it is worth lingering over his defense of the sermon on the mount. Augustine instances no less than Cicero in defense of no less than Julius Caesar ("quod nihil oblivisci soleret nisi iniurias" [138.9]) as evidence that the same morality was recognized among pre-Christian Latins. The Christian view is defended by denying its novelty! --Finally, ep. 138 elaborates a strategy that will achieve its culmination in de civitate dei. The friends of Volusianus had spoken discreetly in praise of the vernacular "paganism" of their class and time, with their respect for the likes of Apollonius and Apuelius. Augustine will hold them to the ex professo "paganism" of their literary tastes, so while he scoffs at their praise of magicians, he laughs to scorn their imputed association with the Olympian deities and the unspeakably vulgar mythological shows of the late Roman theaters. He must have perceived that they could not frankly disown that mythological past, however little it meant to them in practice.

With that exchange, the brace of letters that traveled together, apparently in Augustine's time and certainly in the middle ages, comes to a close. From shortly aftewards, two more letters to Marcellinus survive that had a much more limited circulation.

• epp. 139, 143: The first of these (139) falls sometime late in 411 or more likely early in 412, and takes up the public issue from epp. 133-34, the punishment of Donatist terrorists. Following 134.4, it expresses A.'s eagerness to get his hands on the gesta of the trials for public display and recommends (in response to an inquiry from Marcellinus -- some intermediate letter from M. must be missing, presumably with which M. has returned a copy of A.'s pecc. mer., to A.'s puzzlement (is the copy defective?), at a time when A. is immensely busy with literary work, including his abridgment of the gesta of the preceding summer's conference at Carthage (A.'s breviculum collationis). Finally in this letter, A. commends to M.'s attention various items of church business conveyed by the bearer and in attached commonitoria. This last note, not at all uncommon in late Latin letter writing, reminds us again of the cultured and deliberate nature of the formal epistulae that we read, and hence of the serious attention they deserve as literary artifacts.
  --Finally, ep. 143 both returns to the themes of the interchange with Volusianus and adds a new concern. On the former point, there is more about Pharaoh's magicians (the most biblically authentic wonderworkers not empowered by the Jewish/Christian God) and the virgin birth, adding an argument in case earlier ones have not been persuasive (evidence that they were not?). Meanwhile, M. has relayed to Augustine a question about A.'s de libero arbitrio, which evokes from Augustine a long discussion of his own fallibility and how he never claims to be perfect. The contrast between the young and the old Augustine was already an issue, and here at the outset of the Pelagian controversy, A. already had in mind to review all his literary product and itemize his failings (ep. 143.2): he did not get around to this chore until he took up the retractationes in the last years of his life fifteen years later. Clearly M.'s relayed question, meant to be friendly, has touched a nerve; the issue of the origin of the soul is not far to seek either:

  haec autem vera tam caute a me posita, ut nulli de animae exortu quattuor illarum opinioni rationive praescriberem, hi tantum reprehendant, qui reprehendendam putant eandem ipsam de re tam obscura cunctationem meam

  .

The exchange of letters with Volusianus was, morever (as noted), the preliminary round of "pagan"/Christian discussion that culminated in the writing of City of God. The opening paragraph of that work is a dedicatory epistle to Marcellinus. Books 1-3 seem to have been written together and presented to Marcellinus before his death; the rest of that work was written over the next ten to fifteen years, carrying out the plan undertaken in the face of the impulse provided by Marcellinus and his acquaintances.

But Marcellinus was also instrumental beyond ep. 143 in the making of the anti-Pelagian Augustine's textual posture. Both the de peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum and the de spiritu et littera were written in response to specific questions that Marcellinus raised. The last we see of Marcellinus carries this theological interest forwards. In what is printed as Augustine's letter number 165, we have a letter of Jerome to Marcellinus and his wife Anapsychia, written unwittingly after the executions, replying to an inquiry from Marcellinus. It is one of the famous places in which Jerome exclaims over the disasters of barbarian invasions, both at Rome and in his part of the empire; the irony is that Jerome wrote this to the recipient of Augustine's massive dismissal of those invasions as irrelevant to a true Christian's concerns! In another way the letter runs at cross-purposes with Augustine, though unintentionally. Marcellinus has pressed the question on the origin of the soul, a question that Augustine himself evaded fiercely all his life, and in this letter Jerome both refers Marcellinus to his own books against Rufinus (in which Jerome holds that souls are created afresh for each new child born) and to the magisterial authority of Augustine. (Augustine himself responds to this letter to Marcellinus with two long letters to Jerome, the first, Aug.'s ep. 166, inquiring on the question of the origin of the soul.) As a matter of evidence for textual practices, it is significant that this letter from Jerome in Bethlehem to an imperial commissioner in Africa who happened already to have been executed, did reach Augustine in Hippo and have sufficiently public status to be the object of Augustine's inquiry in response.

Proceed to the text of epistula 151.

L. Jardine, Erasmus: Man of Letters (Princeton 1993).

There is a complete English translation of A.'s letters in the series "Fathers of the Church" in numerous volumes, mainly by the hand of Sister Wilfrid Parsons.

See S.I. Oost, "The revolt of Heraclian", Classical Philology 61(1966), 236-42.

It is hard to write this phrase about a missing letter without seeming to use the traditional regretful rhetoric of the historian noting the absence of a source from a notionally perfect record of correspondence. What I would suggest we should be thinking of when we detect such lacunae is not the missing letters but the ones we have. Why were these preserved and circulated? That is surely the primary fact attested by their existence and the non-existence of the others.

The most accessible and satisfactory English language study is still W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Movement (Oxford, 1952 and later editions).

The study of this collection by M. Moreau, Le Dossier Marcellinus dans la Correspondance de saint Augustin (Paris 1973), is excellent in treating these documents as transparent sources for history and doctrine, but pays little attention to their independent textual status. For ep. 151, see her pp. 93-102.

I say cautiously "A.'s presentation of V." because even V.'s one letter back to A. is clearly transmitted by and among A.'s own writings, and we have no way of knowing whether it fully and faithfully presents everything V. said in writing to A. The correspondence was in circulation not long after this exchange, as witness a quotation from it by Evodius (Aug. ep. 161.1, with reply by Aug. at ep. 162.6-7: dated probably to 414/5.) Similarly, P. Courcelle showed ("Date, source et genèse des 'Consultationes Zacchaei et Apollonii'," Revue de l'histoire des religions 146[1954] 174-93) that an anonymous cleric in Africa, at some date between 411 and 484, drew upon letters 137 and 138 to construct his own refutation of "paganism".

ep. 137.3, ". . . non quo ad ea, quae necessaria sunt saluti, tanta in eis perueniatur difficultate, sed, cum quisque ibi fidem tenuerit, sine qua pie recteque non uiuitur, tam multa tamque multiplicibus mysteriorum umbraculis opacata intellegenda proficientibus restant tantaque non solum in uerbis, quibus ita dicta sunt, uerum etiam in rebus, quae intellegendae sunt, latet altitudo sapientiae, ut annosissimis, acutissimis, flagrantissimis cupiditate discendi hoc contingat, quod eadem scriptura quodam loco habet: 'cum consummauerit homo, tunc incipit' (Sirach 18.6)."

The quotation marks are necessary to remind the reader that "paganism" is a Christian construction of non- Christian behavior and is a category that would make no sense to the people of whom it was used. Further, it is far from clear how "pagan" it is fair to say a Volusianus was, for he ended his life with baptism, after all. For a contrarian study of "paganism" in this period, see my "Demise of Paganism".

I have discussed de peccatorum meritis elsewhere.

I have discussed de spiritu et littera elsewhere as well.

From my commentary on Conf. 1.6.7: At every stage of A.'s life, he refused to take a definite position on the origin of the soul, an ambivalence he later compared to the canniness of the sailor avoiding Scylla and Charybdis: nat. et or. an. 2.13.18. The fundamental doubt is expressed early: lib. arb. 3.21.59, 'harum autem quatuor de anima sententiarum, (1) utrum de propagine veniant, (2) an in singulis quibusque nascentibus novae fiant, an in corpora nascentium iam alicubi existentes (3) vel mittantur divinitus, (4) vel sua sponte labantur, nullam temere adfirmare oportebit. aut enim nondum ista quaestio a divinorum librorum catholicis tractatoribus pro merito suae obscuritatis et perplexitatis evoluta atque inlustrata est, aut si iam factum est, nondum in manus nostras huiuscemodi litterae pervenerunt.' For his late insistence on his ignorance, retr. 1.1.3, 'nam quod attinet ad eius originem, qua fit ut sit in corpore, utrum de illo uno sit qui primum creatus est, quando "factus est homo in animam vivam," an similiter fiant singulis singuli, nec tunc sciebam nec adhuc scio.' For the best statement of what he was willing to affirm, dating from not too long after conf., see Gn. litt. 7.28.43; see generally Gn. litt. books 7 and 10 (with note at BA 49.53-79 on the significance of the problem for infant baptism) and the later (anti-Pelagian) nat. et or. an. For the most authoritative presentation and interpretation of the evidence (including the nuances that emerged in A.'s later works), see O'Daly 1520 and 199203. For the minority position of R.J. O'Connell, who holds that at Cassiciacum, and for some time after, A. inclined to the third or fourth of these views (which on that reading he owed mainly to Plotinus), see his St. Augustine's Early Theory of Man, A.D. 386-391 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 148-52; the thesis is revised, expanded, and defended with vigor if not circumspection in his The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine's Later Works (New York, 1987). O'Connell's position refuses to acknowledge A.'s willingness to leave such a significant question radically open and not feel a philosopher's qualm that his system is thus undermined. A. had no system, despite what we try to make of him, but found himself following the teachings of a God who did not always make everything perfectly clear. A. managed, with great difficulty, to make his peace with the uncertainties of that condition: not all his students since have been so successful. A.'s agnosticism gave him both advantage and disadvantage in polemical situations. To be noncommittal on an essential issue left him open to one kind of criticism, but to have asserted any form of transmission of souls from Adam would have given Pelagians more grounds for attacking A. as a crypto-Manichee (cf. c. Iul. imp. 2.178), and he was also eager himself to avoid taking a position the Manichees could attack (c. Fort. 11, 'si quaeris utrum a deo descenderit anima, magna quidem quaestio est; sed sive a deo descendit sive non, illud de anima respondeo non esse deum').

My commentary was taken to task for its dismissal of O'Connell's views by J. Patout Burns of Washington University, St. Louis, and in the spring of 1995, Burns and I discussed O'Connell's work at length in an on-line seminar (look at files 9501 and subsequent for the heading AUG- SOUL). Burns's palmary summary and analysis of O'Connell's 1987 book will be posted to the site as a single document early in 1996.

Volusianus' father, Rufius Albinus, is also cited by Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine 174n5, for having doubts about the virgin birth; Brown cites Photius, cod. 230 ed. Becker, p. 271, B.29.