1. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to Villanova University for extending the invitation to deliver the 1991 St. Augustine Lecture (13 November 1991); to Fr. Allan Fitzgerald, OSA, for his many kindnesses over the years; to my other Augustinian friends, notably Frs. George Lawless, John J. Gavigan, and Donald X. Burt, OSA, for fruitful conversations and good advice; and to the memory of my first host on the Villanova campus, the late Fr. Richard Russell, OSA, whose spirit animates the whole series of St. Augustine Lectures. I also acknowledge, and the acknowledgement is a pleasure as a duty, that this lecture has been prepared with the assistance of the Augustine Concordance Project of the University of Wuerzburg, in the copy located at Villanova University. Professor Steven N. Orso read a draft and made an important and welcome suggestion.
This lecture was composed after a very large manuscript was sent to the press but may well appear in print before the resulting book: my edition of and commentary on the Confessions will appear under the imprint of Oxford University Press in 1992 or 1993. This lecture represents reflections consecutive to the completion of that large work and the long period of development it represents; but there are some small points of overlap, as I adduce here bits of evidence and argument that may also be found in a different context in the commentary. But the lecture represents in its main lines wholly new work.
2. beata v. 1.6, `Idibus Novembribus mihi natalis dies erat.
Post tam tenue prandium, ut ab eo nihil ingeniorum inpediretur,
omnes, qui simul non modo illo die sed cottidie convivabamur, in
balneas ad consedendum vocavi; nam is tempori aptus locus
secretus occurrerat.'
3. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 1 (trans. Armstrong), `Why really,
is it not enough to have to carry the image in which nature has
encased us, without your requesting me to agree to leave behind
me a longer-lasting image of the image, as if it was something
genuinely worth looking at?'
4. E.g., Plotinus 1.2.7 (trans Armstrong), `For it is to [the
gods], not to good men, that we are to be made like. Likeness to
good men is the likeness of two pictures of the same subject to
each other; but likeness to the gods is likeness to the model, a
being of a different kind to ourselves.'
5. See G. Madec, `Connaissance de Dieu et action de grƒces.
Essai sur les citations de l'Ep. aux Romains, I, 18-25 dans
l'oeuvre de saint Augustin,' RA 2(1962), 273-309; but I would not
follow Madec (and Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de
saint Augustin [Paris, 1950] 177) in seeing conf. 7.17.23 as a
report that Augustine knew and used the verse in this sense
already at Milan on the morning after reading the platonicorum
libri; Courcelle further sees (improbably) an early reference at
quant. an. 34.77, but the verse only comes into Augustine's works
in vera rel. 10.19 and 52.101. How and whether it is appropriate
to see scholastic natural theology as an attempt to do what
Augustine and the early readers of Rom. 1.20 imagined is a good
and important question: the best resolution would come through
the thorough study of the history of interpretation of that verse
in the middle ages, when it was widely cited and used.
6. It is easy for us to take scripture for granted; it is worth
remembering that for Augustine, who probably never saw a `Bible'
(that is, a single large codex containing all the scriptural
books), the matter was not so easy, and his discussion of
questions of canon and authority at doctr. chr. 2.8.13 was
important for him; consider also the atmosphere of this
interesting passage at civ. 15.23, `omittamus igitur earum
scripturarum fabulas quae apocryphae nuncupantur, eo quod earum
occulta origo non claruit patribus, a quibus usque ad nos
auctoritas veracium scripturarum certissima et notissima
successione pervenit. in his autem apocryphis etsi invenitur
aliqua veritas, tamen propter multa falsa nulla est canonica
auctoritas. scripsisse quidem nonnulla divine illum Enoch,
septimum ab Adam, negare non possumus, cum hoc in epistula
canonica Iudas apostolus dicat [Iud. 14]. sed non frustra non
sunt in eo canone scripturarum, qui servabatur in templo Hebraei
populi succedentium diligentia sacerdotum, nisi quia ob
antiquitatem suspectae fidei iudicata sunt, nec utrum haec essent
quae ille scripsisset poterat inveniri, non talibus proferentibus
qui ea per seriem successionis reperirentur rite servasse.'
7. One need only read Augustine's de haeresibus, the catalogue
he compiled late in life (based on a Greek source) of all the
heresies known to him to get a sense of how fragile and
threatened was his sense of church unity: so many ways to go
wrong, such fine points leading to such disastrous error. But of
course, that said, there is also in Augustine what is often for
moderns a surprising vein of licit multiplicity of
interpretation. For him the regula fidei as guide of
interpretation was a much less explicit, detailed, and risky
matter than it later became for western Christians, and so we get
the development at conf. 12.14.17ff of the idea that an
interpretation of scripture may be erroneous as regards the
author's intent but correct if it is remains in accord with the
will of God; the same idea underlies the generosity that
permeates the interpretative precepts of doctr. chr.
8. In reflection of Augustine's own practice, I will speak of
`authority' to mean post-scriptural and ecclesiastical authority.
The `authority' of scripture is of course overwhelming in
Augustine, but since for him it represents a different discourse
entirely from that of churchmen like Augustine himself, it seems
appropriate to make a distinction.
In most of Augustine's early works, auctoritas appears
in benevolent guise (e.g., vera rel. 29.52, `auctoritatis
beneficentia'), but a particularly clear series of texts
revealing ambiguity and marked by the lingering anxiety of the
search for authority, appears in util. cred.: util. cred.
9.21Ä11.25, `nam vera religio . . . omnino sine quodam gravi
auctoritatis imperio inire recte nullo pacto potest. . . .
(11.25) quod intellegimus igitur, debemus rationi, quod credimus,
auctoritati, quod opinamur, errori.'
9. Auctoritas is the crutch that supports the weakened faculty
of ratio: vera rel. 24.45, `auctoritas fidem flagitat et rationi
praeparat hominem.' See Holte, Beatitude et Sagesse (Paris,
1962), esp. 304Ä10, who measures the extent and limits of
Augustine's originality here. The yoking of ratio and auctoritas
(Holte 308) `n'a pas de parfait equivalent chez les theologiens
occidentaux anterieurs comme Tertullien, Lactance ou Ambroise,
quoique la terminologie elle-meme soit attestee chez ce dernier.'
The juxtaposition of ratio and auctoritas is familiar in
Cicero, e.g., Cic. Lucullus 18.60, `quae sunt tandem ista
mysteria, aut cur celatis quasi turpe aliquid sententiam vestram?
``ut qui audient'' inquit ``ratione potius quam auctoritate
ducantur.'' quid si utrumque, num peius est? unum tamen illud
non celant, nihil esse quod percipi possit. an in eo auctoritas
nihil obest? mihi quidem videtur vel plurimum.' At c. acad.
1.3.8, Trygetius seems to share Cicero's preference for ratio in
claiming to have thrown off the iugum auctoritatis in the name of
that libertas which philosophia promises. But a
characteristically Augustinian view is also present: c. acad.
3.20.43, `nulli autem dubium est gemino pondere nos impelli ad
discendum, auctoritatis atque rationis. mihi autem certum est
nusquam prorsus a Christi auctoritate discedere; non enim reperio
valentiorem.'
10. Just how the fallen reason of the church fathers, or the
fathers of an ecumenical council, may be temporarily liberated
from the penalties of the fall is a subject that Augustine would
understand in terms of the inspiration of the spirit; and the
technicalities again he would leave for later generations to
worry about.
11. To anticipate, this is how Augustine expects to be read
himself: conf. 10.3.3, `sed quia caritas omnia credit, inter eos
utique quos conexos sibimet unum facit, ego quoque, domine, etiam
sic tibi confiteor ut audiant homines, quibus demonstrare non
possum an vera confitear. sed credunt mihi quorum mihi aures
caritas aperit.'
12. For the rituals, see best F. Van Der Meer, Augustine the
Bishop (London, 1961), 347-87.
13. Classic studies include Courcelle, Recherches sur les
Confessions 147-57; A. Mandouze, Saint Augustin: L'aventure du
raison et de la grace (Paris, 1968); Courcelle, Les Confessions
dans la tradition litteraire (Paris, 1973), 43-58; R.J.
O'Connell, Saint Augustine's Confessions. The Odyssey of Soul
(Cambridge, Mass., 1969); and G. Madec, `La Delivrance de
l'Esprit (Confessions VII)', in `Le Confessioni' di Agostino
d'Ippona: Libri VI-IX (Palermo, 1985), 45-69, the most recent
extended statement of Madec's views. To state my own position
(fully developed in my commentary) very baldly, I believe that a
theory about the ascent of the mind to God derived from neo-
Platonism but fully (to Augustine's mind) Christianized is one of
the structural principles of conf. as a whole and a factor that
animates much of what he wrote before and after, notably Gn.
litt. and trin.
14. It is the signal merit of the St. Augustine Lecture for 1984
(R.A. Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment in Augustine's
Spiritual Career [Villanova, 1989]) to have described with
compassion and clarity the sea-change of expectations that
Augustine underwent in the 390s, resulting in the poignant and
rich expression of his new, chastened, expectations in conf.
15. civ. 11.1.
16. conf. 1.11.17 reports Augustine's earliest religious
awareness, clearly mediated to him by Christianity; conf. 7.3.4,
on the other hand, shows Augustine before reading the
platonicorum libri in possession of a doctrine of God that few of
us would find very incompatible with Christianity; but I argue in
my commentary that one point of conf. 7 is to show how errors in
his view of God that obstructed progress were decisively removed.
On the other hand, O. du Roy, L'intelligence de la foi en la
trinite selon saint Augustin: genese de sa theologie trinitaire
jusqu'en 391 (Paris, 1966), 96-106, makes a case that cannot be
dismissed out of hand that Augustine's view of a trinitarian God
derives from the neo-Platonists; du Roy reproaches him from a
theological point of view for this dependance on an extra-
Christian source. I discuss du Roy's view further in my
commentary.
17. The classic studies are P. Courcelle, Late Latin Writers and
Their Greek Sources (Cambridge, Mass., 1969; trans. French ed. of
1948), 149-223; and the articles of B. Altaner, collected in his
Kleine Patristische Schriften (Berlin, 1967), 181-331.
18. So the points where Augustine remarks that some has not yet
been dealt with by any authoritative writer as far as he knew
(e.g., lib. arb. 3.21.59, on different theories for the origin of
the soul); often he was right and his profession of ignorance is
a veiled statement of the originality of his own line of inquiry,
but the riches of the Greeks could have served him well at many
points.
19. See L.F. Pizzolato, La dottrina esegetica di sant'Ambrogio
(Milan, 1978); since it is unlikely that Augustine and Ambrose
ever really sat down to have what Bertie Wooster would call a bit
of the old heart-to-heart (as many modern students seem
determined to believe that they must have done), the question of
just how much influence Ambrose exercised is a vexed one, still
not satisfactorily studied in detail. As always, Augustine
received by transforming.
20. Augustine, ep. 31 to Paulinus of Nola (c. 397?) asks for a
copy of the now lost but important work of Amb., de sacramento
regenerationis sive de philosophia.
21. Ten years after leaving Milan, Augustine was sure he had
heard Ambrose say that Plato met Jeremiah in Egypt (doctr. chr.
2.28.43); but he was wrong, as he would have learned from the de
sacr. reg. sive de philos. and as he acknowledges at civ. 8.11
and retr. 2.4 (Mutzenbecher).
22. In the absence of complete critical editions of the works
against Julian, any list is provisional, but would have to
include Amb. in Isaiam, in Lucam, de sacramento regenerationis
sive de philosophia, de Isaac, de arca Noe, contra Novatianos, de
apologia prophetae David, explanatio super Ps. 48, de Tobia, and
de paradiso.
23. Polemically, it was combined with a different appeal to
Amb.'s authority: in 422, Augustine patronized the production of
Paulinus' of Milan's life of Ambrose, undoubtedly to buttress
Augustine's own increasing reliance on Amb.'s views. The later
date for Paulinus' vita is preferable in spite of E. Lamirande,
Paulin de Milan et la `Vita Ambrosii' (Paris/Montreal, 1983),
21Ä4; though Lamirande prefers a date of 412Ä3, he does not
positively rule out 422. More satisfactory is A. Paredi, Sacris
Erudiri 14(1963), 212Ä13 (good on the anti-Pelagian context of
the vita).
24. The mid 390s were a time when Augustine fought off a case of
writer's block, leaving work after work unfinished, until conf.
brought release and led to a remarkable outpouring of ambitious
projects. The lost c. ep. don. known from retr. 2.5
(Mutzenbecher) was his anti-Donatist failure of this period,
which bapt. redeemed.
25. To be sure, Augustine quotes Cyprian later in life, e.g., c.
Iul. 2.6, 2.25, as a frank `authority' when it suits him, and cf.
the unambiguous praise of Cyprian in the sermons preached on his
feast day (e.g., ss. 309-13).
26. And it perhaps offers a model for our own response to
Augustine; see my concluding remarks below.
27. Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that the platonicorum libri
(conf. 7.9.13) that played such an important and now
controversial part in Augustine's conversion never became
`authoritative' in any way in Augustine's writings. Whatever he
owes them, he owes implicitly.
28. Thus we have had two books of the first water about Gregory
in the last fifteen years (C. Dagens, Saint Gregoire le Grand:
Culture et experience chretiennes [Paris, 1977], and C. Straw,
Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection [Berkeley,
1988]), neither of which more than flirts with the question of
the Augustinianism of Gregory.
29. Music offers a good point of comparison: compare the way he
treats the subject, both in mus. (which never quite gets to
technical music) and in remarks elsewhere with the slavishness
and scholasticism of Boethius or Cassiodorus.
30. epp. 128-29, 132-33, 135-39, 143; see M. Moreau, Recherches
Augustiniennes 9(1973), 1-181 (also published separately as Le
dossier Marcellinus dans la correspondance de saint Augustin
[Paris, 1973]).
31. Peter Brown's biography is a marvel of the nations, but it
is now a quarter century old; and it is noteworthy that it does
not provide a detailed chronicle or an equally comprehensive and
thorough treatment of all periods of Augustine's life. The
chronological researches of A.-M. La Bonnardiere had to be
pursued before any such thing would be possible, and continued
work on the Biblia Augustiniana will be needed; but sometime in
the next generation, the avenue will be open for a new, probably
multi-volume, biography of Augustine to reshape the landscape
once again. It would be interesting to study in detail the
effect of Brown's portrayal of Augustine's later years and the
quarrel with Julian on the readership of Augustine in the last
generation; I do not think a work such as E. Pagels, Adam, Eve,
and the Serpent (New York, 1988), would have been possible
without it.
32. Courcelle, Les Confessions dans la tradition litt‚raire 559-
607, is exhaustive and exemplary on epistolary relations with
Paulinus of Nola (though Courcelle's intention to link that
correspondence closely with the writing of conf. leads him to
pressing his case further than was wise at several points); the
studies provoked by the discovery of the Divjak letters (see Les
lettres de saint Augustin d‚couvertes par Johannes Divjak [Paris,
1983] and the annotated edition/translation in BA 46B) offer many
points of interest in this regard as well.
33. Augustine, ep. 94; see P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo
(Berkeley, 1967), 340.
34. Think, for example, of Orosius coming from Spain to make
himself Augustine's (occasionally irritating) lapdog (Oros. hist.
1.prol.3) or Consentius of Maiorca (see epp. 119, 120, 205, 11*,
12*, and c. mend.; discussion now by M. Moreau in BA 46B.479-93).
35. The phrase is one I owe to the suggestive volume of B.
Stock, Implications of Literacy (Princeton, 1982).
36. Aug., ep. 75.7.22, `tu qui iuvenis es, et in pontificali
culmine constitutus, doceto populos; et novis Africae frugibus
Romana tecta locupleta. mihi sufficit, cum auditore et lectore
pauperculo in angulo monasterii susurrare.'
37. ep. 75.3.6, on the controversy between Augustine and Jerome
over the apparent quarrel between Peter and Paul, invokes
Chrysostom as holding the same opinion as he, thus, `si igitur me
reprehendis errantem, patere me, quaeso, errare cum talibus'.
38. ep. 72.1.2, `deinde illud cavebam, ne episcopo communionis
meae viderer procaciter respondere, et aliqua in reprehendentis
epistula reprehendere; praesertim cum quaedam in illa haeretica
iudicarem'; ep. 72.2.4, `non enim convenit ut ab adolescentia
usque ad hanc aetatem, in monasteriolo cum sanctis fratribus
labore desudans, aliquid contra episcopum communionis meae
scribere audeam, et eum episcopum quem ante coepi amare quam
nosse, qui me prior ad amicitiam provocavit, quem post me
orientem in scripturarum eruditione laetatus sum.'
39. One other aspect of Jerome's work is instructive here: his
repeated references to and defenses against his critics, usually
in the prefaces to his works, are a reminder of the considerable
resistance to `patristic' authority that such texts found when
they first reached the general Christian public. None of the
most famous and influential writers of the golden age of
patristic Christianity was the object of universal acclaim and
all had their enemies and critics.
40. His earliest successes had been against the Manichees
(recorded in dialogues like c. Fort. and in imposing a stricter
discipline on popular customs [see ep. 29]). Both of these
contests were played out on parochial stages.
41. en. Ps. 36 and c. litt. Pet. 3.25.30, for example, defend
against such attacks.
42. Cf. Secundinus the Manichee (ep. Sec. 3), Consentius of
Maiorca (ep. 12*.1.3: sympathetic as regards doctrine, but
critical of the style), Pelagius (see next note), and Julian (c.
Iul. 1.68).
43. persev. 20.53, `quae mea verba [conf. 10.29.40ff, `da quod
iubes et iube quod vis'] Pelagius Romae cum a quodam fratre
coepiscopo meo fuissent eo praesente conmemorata, ferre non
potuit et contradicens aliquanto conmotius paene cum eo, qui illa
conmemoraverat, litigavit.'.
44. Best in English is still W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church
(Oxford, 1951), 275-89, with which cf. the acts of the Council
itself, best read in the SC edition of S. Lancel (SC 194, 195,
225).
45. See O. Perler, Les Voyages de saint Augustin (Paris, 1969),
with summary for these years on pp. 462-76.
46. For that controversy in its `international' context, see O.
Wermelinger, Rom und Pelagius (Stuttgart, 1975). The emperor
Theodosius II apparently made a special point of inviting
Augustine to attend the council of Ephesus of 431, but Augustine
had already died in August 430 when the invitation was issued
later that year: see Liberatus, Breviarium 5.17 (PL 68.977).
47. retr. 2.6.1, `confessionum mearum libri tredecim et de malis
et de bonis meis deum laudant iustum et bonum atque in eum
excitant humanum intellectum et affectum. interim quod ad me
attinet, hoc in me egerunt cum scriberentur et agunt cum
leguntur. quid de illis alii sentiant, ipsi viderint; multis
tamen fratribus eos multum placuisse et placere scio.'
48. conf. 10.36.58ff.
49. Ed. Mutzenbecher, CCSL 57 (1984).
50. Ed. M. Pellegrino (Alba, 1955).
51. Ed. A. Wilmart, in Miscellanea Agostiniana (Vatican City,
1931), 2.149-233.
52. Mutzenbecher knows no fewer than 25 manuscripts of retr.
from before 1100 and another 40 from the 12th century alone.
53. The harrowing picture in Victor of Vita's history of
persecutions is perhaps overdrawn but not fundamentally
inaccurate (see, for example, his account of a veritable shoot-
out in church on Easter Sunday morning: Victor Vit. 1.13).
54. See Averil Cameron, `Byzantine Africa: The Literary
Evidence', in J. Humphrey, ed., Excavations at Carthage VIII (Ann
Arbor, 1982), 29-62.
55. A.'s response is given in persev. and praed.
56. A full review of the Gaulish controversy would be welcome;
for background, see still O. Chadwick, John Cassian (2nd ed.,
Cambridge, 1968), and now R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient
Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), 157-97.
57. See my `Salvian and Augustine,' Augustinian Studies 14(1983)
25-34.
58. Carried out, of course, in veiled language, of which the
most explicit is perhaps at Vinc. Ler. comm. 26.37, `audent
etenim polliceri et docere quod in ecclesia sua, id est, in
communionis suae conventiculo, magna et specialis ac plane
personalis quaedam sit dei gratia, adeo ut sine ullo labore, sine
ullo studio, sine ulla industria, etiamsi nec petant nec quaerant
nec pulsent [echoing Mt. 7.7, itself a favorite text of
Augustine's], quicumque illi ad numerum suum pertinent, tamen ita
divinitus dispensentur, ut angelicis evecti manibus, id est,
angelica protectione servati, numquam possint ``offendere ad
lapidem pedem suum'' [Mt. 4.6], id est, numquam scandalizari.'
59. Vinc. Ler., Excerpta sanctae memoriae Vincentii Lirinensis
insulae presbyteri ex universo beatae recordationis Augustini
episcopi in unum collecta (ed. R. Demeulenaere, CCSL 64 [1985]);
the passages are chosen to express Augustine's orthodox teaching
on trinity and incarnation against the Arians, Apollinarians, and
Nestorians.
60. Eugippius, Excerpta ex operibus sancti Augustini (ed. Kn”ll,
CSEL 9.1 [1885]).
61. I have in mind the important articles of M.M. Gorman, esp.
`Eugippius and the Origins of the Manuscript Tradition of St.
Augustine's ``De Genesi ad litteram''', Revue Benedictine
93(1983), 7-30.
62. The arrangement is fundamentally scriptural: approximately
200 of the nearly four hundred excerpts are arranged from Genesis
through the gospels. The work begins with excerpts on the four
cardinal virtues and ends with two on caritas. The anti-Pelagian
extracts appear as nos. 305-22 in Kn”ll's edition, which
comprises 384 items in all, and they fill approximately 60 out of
the 1100 pages of the printed edition.
63. The same principle animates the ninth century anthology of
Augustinian texts made by Florus of Lyons.
64. ACO 4.1.212.4-6: `Augustini religiosae memoriae, qui inter
Africanos episcopos splenduit, diversae epistolae recitatae sunt
significantes quod oportet haereticos et post mortem
anathematizari'.
65. And of course Cassiodorus had emulated Augustine in
commenting on the whole Psalter, and had used his en. Ps.
wittingly in the process. See inter alia A. Quacquarelli, `La
elocutio di S. Agostino nelle riflessioni di Cassiodoro',
Augustinianum 25(1985) 385-403; repr. in Vetera Christianorum
25(1988), 177-98. See n. 68 below.
66. inst. 1.22.
67. `cuius aperta suavia sunt, obscura vero magnis utilitatibus
farcita pinguescunt.'
68. It is a pleasure to praise the dissertation of D.W. Johnson,
Purging the Poison: The revision of Pelagius' Pauline
Commentaries by Cassiodorus and his Students (diss., Princeton
Theological Seminary, 1989). There are uncertainties because
there is no critical edition of Cassiodorus' revision, but the
main lines of investigation are sound and I think the conclusions
suggestive. I particularly admired the corollary demonstration
(at 256-74) that the standard histories of doctrine (e.g.,
Harnack, Pelikan) are on very shaky ground when they speak of the
history of Augustinian influence in late antiquity. See also
Johnson, `The Myth of the Augustinian Synthesis', Lutheran
Quarterly 5.2 (Summer 1991), 157-69, which reached me after this
lecture was completed: he shows in both places how Cassiodorus'
version of Augustine was not so much unfaithful as simply
incoherent, an incoherency arising from the difficulty of the
issues and the imperfection of Cassiodorus' own grasp of the
positions taken by both Augustine and Pelagius.
69. See J. Gross, `Cassiodorus und die augustinische
Erbsuendenlehre', Zeitschrift fuer Kirchengeschichte 69(1958),
299-308: Cassiodorus's Augustinian God winds up foreknowing
merits, and in de anima goes for a creationist origin of soul,
though Augustine had been unable to reconcile that with original
sin/predestination.
70. de viris illustribus, ed. Richardson (Leipzig, 1896).
Gennadius is particularly interesting for his insistence, vir.
ill. 4.4, that books have authors' names attached to them in
order to be accepted: names are the guarantors of authenticity.
(So Paul's name was early attached to the Epistle to the Hebrews,
though few ever really accepted that attribution.)
71. See E. von Dobschuetz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris
recipiendis et non recipiendis (Leipzig, 1912).
72. See Gorman, art. cit. at note 53 above.
73. H.-I. Marrou, `Autour de la bibliotheque du pape Agapit',
MEFR 48(1931), 124-69.
74. For demonstration, see the edition of L. Duchesne (Paris,
1886), 1.xxiii-xlviii.
75. These fascinating texts have no adequate editions and must
be sought out in eighteenth century texts, one of which is not
even in PL: for details, see Clavis Patrum Latinorum nos. 1679-
82.
76. For it is a curious fact that the rise of the papacy is
associated with the decline of the charismatic authority of the
holder of the chair: the prestige of the institution prevails at
the expense of that of the individual who holds the office.
77. Computer checks now make it possible to say that Augustine's
surviving works comprise about four times the words of the
surviving works of Cicero, and the extant writings of the first
generations of Latin Christian fathers down to Augustine, Jerome,
and Cassian -- those writings alone add up to a corpus larger
than all of surviving classical Latin literature.
78. The importance of the Visigothic, and particularly, the
Isidoran contribution should not be forgotten. Isidore's
Augustine remains a fertile subject for investigation.
79. A good example of the kind of meticulous study required is
H. A. Oberman and F. A. James III, edd., Via Augustini:
Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation:
Essays in Honor of Damasus Trapp, OSA (Leiden, 1991); cf. esp.
Trapp's own `Hitalinger's Augustinian Quotations' reprinted in
that volume at 189-220. General studies of the Reformation of
course pay much lip-service to Augustine's role, but I do not see
that even there do we have a study that approaches the subject
with adequate range and attention to detail.
80. For a central part of the history, see N. Abercrombie, The
Origins of Jansenism (Oxford, 1936), and Saint Augustine and
French Classical Thought (Oxford, 1938), especially the
introductory chapter in the latter work, and revise with
reference to the numerous works of Jean Orcibal, most recently
his Jansenius d'Ypres (Paris, 1989); for the wider theological
picture, see H. de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology
(London, 1969).
81. J. Orcibal, Jansenius d'Ypres (1585-1638) (Paris, 1989) 304:
`C'est la le point faible de l'Augustinus, car cette litanie ne
justifie guere le privilege doctrinal exorbitant que l'auteur en
accorde a son heros.' One need not believe the report that
Jansenius had read all of Augustine ten times and the anti-
Pelagian parts thirty times to recognize in it a substantial
truth about the disorder of his proceedings. (Texts need not
always be read to be influential: I have never seen a copy of
Jansenius' Augustinus, and for good reason. There seems to have
been no printing of the work from the seventeenth to the
twentieth century, and then only a single 1960s-vintage
photographic reprint, not abundantly disseminated.)
82. See Miscellanea Agostiniana (Vatican City, 1931), 2.ix-
xxxvi.
83. This admiration leads to a curious kind of ritual
invocation, for Augustine has achieved a place in a kind of
multicultural pantheon in which he can be instanced without being
read, often in association with Plato. A critic like George
Steiner (see his recent Real Presences [Chicago, 1989]) manages
this with an easy dexterity that glibly masks the distortion and
misrepresentation of Augustine that necessarily attends the
ritual.
84. One thinks of the works of E. Pagels (see above) and
Margaret Miles (Augustine on the Body [Missoula, MT, 1979];
`Infancy, Parenting, and Nourishment in Augustine's
``Confessions''', The Journal of the American Academy of Religion
50[1982], 349-364; and in other works of a more general nature),
and the remarkable little book of C. Lorin, Pour Saint Augustin
(Paris, 1988).
85. One has this impression never so strongly as when reading
attempts to interpret Augustine in light of modern psychoanalytic
categories. The literature on the subject does not in the main
repay reading; pride of place in any catalogue goes to the
embarrassingly naive and unscholarly symposium published in the
Journal for the Scientific (sic) Study of Religion 5(1965/6),
130-52 and 273-89, with articles by D. Bakan, W. H. Clark, J.
Dittes, J. Havens, P.J. Pruyser, and P. Woolcott; that journal
returned to the subject with a similarly distressing symposium
twenty years later (Jour. Sci. Stud. Rel. 25[1986], 57-115). The
classic study of Freudian orthodoxy is that of C. Kligerman, `A
Psychoanalytic Study of the Confessions of St. Augustine',
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 5(1957), 469-
84; of interest also is E.R. Dodds, `Augustine's Confessions: A
study of spiritual maladjustment', Hibbert Journal 26(1928), 459-
73, but to my taste the two most interesting and least personally
involved studies are the oldest (W. Achelis, Die Deutung
Augustins [Prien am Chiemsee, 1921] -- very hard to find) and one
by a well-regarded student of Augustine who also happens to be a
woman and thus not quite so driven to compete with the father-
figure: P. Fredriksen, `Augustine and his analysts: The
possibility of a psychohistory', Soundings 51(1978), 206-27.
86. I have been told but cannot verify that President Bush at
one point in early 1991 invoked the doctrine of a `just war' by
explicit reference to `Saint Ambrose Augustine' (sic). I have
discussed elsewhere how poor a patron saint Augustine makes for
`the just war': see my Augustine (Boston, 1985), 58.
The point is important for recent discussions of
Augustine's views on sexuality and his influence on the later
western tradition. Two Princeton books, P. Brown, The Body and
Society and E. Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (both New York,
1988), characterize Augustine's views as the culmination of a
late antique development and then leave the story in mid-air
(Brown adds a suggestive epilogue, pp. 428-447, but Pagels goes
no further). They seem to assume that it may be taken for
granted that Augustine's ideas exercised wide influence, but it
must be emphasized that neither they nor anyone else has troubled
to trace the steps by which that influence was felt. If, as I
suspect, the essential development is not medieval at all but
modern (here I would follow M. Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, I: An Introduction [New York, 1978, trans. French
original of 1976]), then it scarcely matters what Augustine may
have said or meant; for if he had not said what the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries wanted him to say, that would scarcely have
dissuaded them from imposing the views they had already developed
quite without attention to Augustine.