[[1]]. P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), 425-6. Cf. Possidius, vita Augustini (ed. Pellegrino) 28.11, "non erit magnus magnum
putans quod cadunt ligna et lapides, et moriuntur mortales."
[[2]]. Brown 31 and 31n4.
[[3]]. Brown 39.
[[4]]. Paula Fredriksen, "Augustine and his analysts: The possibility of a psychohistory,"
Soundings 51(1978), 206-27 at 214.
[[5]]. If it seems impolite to speak in these terms, it must be borne in mind that Brown
himself some years later ("The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity," Representations 1[1983] 1-25)
chose to describe the history of his study of the 'holy man' before and after his seminal paper "The Rise and
Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61(1971), 80-101, in terms
of shifts in his own personal allegiances to schools of psychoanalytic therapy.
[[6]]. Hugh Pope, Saint Augustine of Hippo: essays dealing with his life and times
and some features of his work (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1961).
[[7]]. St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (London: SCM Press,
1963).
[[8]]. And there with formulaic intonation: "the most formidable of the Pelagian
apologists" (p. 139), "the last and most formidable of the Pelagian controversialists" (p. 154) and gives him no
very favorable treatment in doctrinal discussions ("one of the tragic figures of the Pelagian controversy . . . an
arrogance of a most unattractive nature" (p. 347).
[[9]]. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, fourth ed. revised by B.S
Page (London: Faber, 1969).
[[10]]. Porphyrios und Augustin (Schriften der Königsberger
gelehrten Gesellschaft, 10.1: Halle 1933) 2..
[[11]]. Plotin et l'Occident (Louvain: "Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense" Bureaux,
1934) 137-39.
[[12]]. The two Latin words here cited in contradistinction probably come, in Henry's
mind, from Conf. 7.20.26, "ut distinguerem quid interesset inter praesumptionem et confessionem";
see my comm. ad loc. (J.J. O'Donnell, Augustine: Confessions [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992] 2.473-4) for a few other places where the two words occur together.
[[13]]. "Sur les dernières paroles de saint Augustin," Revue des études
anciennes 46 (1944) 205-7.
[[14]]. Comm. on Conf. 2.424n22.
[[15]]. Comm. (cf. n. 16) 1.xlviii.
[[16]]. Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990) 85.
[[17]]. Esp. Brown pp. 107-109.
[[18]]. Book 7 of Conf. led him to a kind of philosophy, and it is certainly fair
to the narrative there to see Book 8 as, in a way, bringing Augustine to the philosophical goal he sought; and
if I am right in reading through the few scanty fragments that survive to us of Ambrose's work de
philosophia sive de sacramento regenerationis as a challenge to Christians to become philosophers in just
this way (though Brown does not discuss that specific influence), then the aptness is fortified.
[[19]]. Brown 113.
[[20]]. D.M. Halperin, Saint Foucault (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), now addresses some of these questions as they apply to a near-contemporary figure,
but with interesting implications for study of more remote periods. In another way, A. Momigliano, The
Development of Greek Biography (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993: expanded edition;
originally, 1971), opens and closes his study of the emergence of the form with reflections on its curious
strengths and weaknesses.
[[21]]. Think of the Biblia Augustiniana or the Specimina eines Lexikon
Augustinianum or the Handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus.
[[22]]. Secundinus, ep. Sec. 3 quoted in c. Sec.; Vincent, in Aug.
ep. 93.13.51; Consentius, ep. 12*1.
[[23]]. Possidius pioneers the school of writing, of course, that remains dependent on and
faithful to the Confessions.
[[24]]. We must be cautious about our superciliousness in judging the Manichees here.
Accusations made against Christianity on grounds of credulousness and inconsistency may well have had more
force in comparison to the Christianity of Tagaste or Carthage than they did in sophisticated Milan. Assuming
that "Christianity" was always and everywhere the same, even when it was "orthodox", can be a great and
confusing error for scholars.
[[25]]. I will add here that the argument I make ad loc. and elsewhere in my
commentary, to the effect that Book 8 of Conf. is a vital link in the acquisition of an adequate
appreciation of Christology, depends on our insisting that there be a conversion in matters of
incarnation and succeeds, if it does, in part by observing that there has hitherto been no satisfactory
identification of just where and when incarnation becomes a doctrine that Augustine accepts. For purposes
of my present argument, if we need Augustine converted, then my former argument is very strong; if we do
not need him converted, then my former argument reveals its true colors in a useful way.
[[26]]. See my comm. (cf. n. 16) 1.xxxviii-xl.
[[27]]. Comm. (cf. n. 16) 2.475.
[[28]]. If we accept the claim of skeptical readers from Courcelle onwards that Paul was
not a strong presence in Milan, then we are already moving away from the narrative of conversion
as we have it.
[[29]]. As Brown 307 notes: heretics are to be attacked savagely, but not so Plotinus and
Porphyry, who stimulate A. to his finest thought. By contrast, our contemporary view at least would be that
heresy and schism (Pelagian and Donatist in particular) stimulated Augustine to some of his less successful
flights of argument.
[[30]]. Neil McLynn, Ambrose of Milan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), is in many ways the most important new book about Augustine in many years, for the
most part by implication rather than explicit statement, and should have deep impact on our view of both
figures.
[[31]]. beata v. 1.4, from Cassiciacum, still rebukes the version of religion that
he held when he first came upon the Manichees with this charge.
[[32]]. Augustine's epistolary history and strategies are too little studied. For his
encounter with Jerome, we have R. Hennings, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Augustinus und
Hieronymus (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), and there is some service to be gotten from F. Morgenstern,
Die Briefpartner des Augustinus von Hippo (Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer,
1993), but other studies (notably T.P. Carpino, Paolino di Nola: Epistole ad Agostino [Naples:
LER, 1989] and the older study of M. Moreau, Le Dossier Marcellinus [Paris: Études
Augustiniennes 1973]) are far more interested in history and philology than in the subtle commerce of
epistolary society; apart from isolated aper‡us in the collective volume Les lettres de saint Augustin
découvertes par Johannes Divjak (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1983), the best work on
the topic of epistolary construction of society in late antiquity is S. Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein
Kreis (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1992).
[[33]]. Hennings (cf. n. 35) 32-34: neither text survives.
[[34]]. See my comm. (cf. n. 16) 1.xlii and Augustinian Studies 26(1995) 215ff
for G. Lawless' demurral on this point and my response.
[[35]]. I have spoken on this theme in "The Authority of Augustine," 1991 St. Augustine
Lecture in Villanova University (Augustinian Studies 22[1991] 7-35), emphasizing that the writerly
authority of Augustine runs well beyond the limits of the civitas of Hippo Regius, to which his
formal ecclesiastical authority was confined.
[[36]]. A full study of the career of Augustine the writer -- no such thing has been
attempted since A.'s own retractationes -- would also divagate at some length on de civitate
dei, a work marked by a deliberately traditionalist style and range of reference. Macedonius, the vicar
of Africa in 413/4, responded to that work in terms that shows a conventional reader's response: "Explicui
tuos libros; neque enim tam languidi aut inertes erant, ut me aliud quam se curare paterentur: iniecerunt
manum, ereptumque aliis solicitudinum causis suis vinculis illigarunt ..., ut ego anceps sim quid in illis magis
mirer, sacerdotii perfectionem, philosophiae dogmata, historiae plenam notitiam, an facundiae iucunditatem."
(ep. 154.2).
[[37]]. Here and often in this paper, I do no more than
pursue lines of thought broken open by Mark Vessey in, e.g., his "Jerome's
Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona", Studia Patristica
XXVIII (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993), 135-45; "Conference and Confession:
Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's 'Apologia contra Hieronymum'", Journal
of Early Christian Studies 1 (1993), 175-213. See also L. Jardine,
Erasmus: Man of Letters (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993), for the way Erasmus both shaped the patristic past (by his life of Jerome
based on the letters, chronologically arranged) and shaped his own reputation
in their image as letter-writer and promoter, with Vessey, "Erasmus' Jerome:
The Publishing of a Christian Author," Erasmus of Rotterdam
Yearbook 14(1994) 62-99.
[[38]]. We now have Augustine the Reader (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996) from Brian Stock.
[[39]]. Similarly, Carl Lachmann's edition of Lessing virtually created the figure
we know, bringing together in one collection all Lessing's known writings, including many ephemera that had
otherwise languished unread for decades since his death. See Harald Weigel, Nur was du nie gesehn wird
ewig dauern: Carl Lachmann und die Entstehung der wissenschaftlichen Edition (Freiburg: Rombach,
1989).
[[40]]. F. Van Der Meer, Augustine the Bishop (London: Sheed and Ward,
1961; orig. ed. in Dutch 1949).
[[41]]. C. acad. is noteworthy for the way it does not so much confound the
Academics as accept their critique of traditional philosophy and then offer to transcend it with the forcing
move of Christian illumination; but Augustine would not be one-half so interesting to modern philosophers
from Wittgenstein to Derrida by way of Heidegger and Ricoeur were he not in many respects a lifelong sharer
of their mistrust of ordinary human language and its strategies, for all that he was a master in their
deployment.
[[42]]. By this I do not quite mean what Courcelle meant when he thought he saw
"Manichean reflexes" still with Augustine at Milan (Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition
littéraire [Paris: Études Augustiniennes 1963] 17ff) or again what Elizabeth Clark pursues
in her "Vitiated Seeds and Holy Vessels: Augustine's Manichaean Past," in her Ascetic Piety and
Women's Faith: Essays in Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston/Queenston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,
1986): 291-349, for both of those writers share the view of Augustine and of Julian, that much is
at stake if one can successfully prosecute the charge of "Manichee" against Augustine at some date past his
formal dissociation from the sect. I would rather emphasize the patterns and structures of thought that
Augustine retained in good conscience: the very fact, for example, of placing prime importance on
the question 'unde malum', whatever the answer he gave, is a sign of that continuity.
[[43]]. The devotee of free will, that is, who had to
demolish parts of himself and his past in order to oppose the excesses he
descried in Pelagius, Caelestius, Julian, and others. That self-deconstruction
is perhaps the most important story to be told of the old Augustine: no
"hardening", as those who have read Brown like to think, but the radical
reconstruction of thought of a man forced to turn on himself and his past in
order to defend his present.
[[44]]. I should say that I mean "post-modern" here as no prescription or sect, but as I
read Lyotard especially the term is a plain and simple description of what we have, all of us, become,
volens nolens. Post-modern man is what we most fear to be, for very good reason: because we have
no choice in the matter.
[[45]]. Perler 1969 is a meticulous guide to Augustine's movements and evokes some of
the flavor of his Africa.
[[46]]. For readers seeking to consult this essay as a source of information or to refresh
memories, I supply here a few key dates in Augustine's life.
[[47]]. But he had been thinking about it for fifteen years: Ep. 143.2-3.
[[48]]. Englished as Retractations, trans. Bogan 1968.
[[49]]. Never translated to my knowledge; Latin text available in Miscellanea
Agostiniana 1930, 2.149-233.
[[50]]. In the last two decades, two precious finds have added to the corpus. Johannes
Divjak brought to light over two dozen letters never before published and Fran‡ois Dolbeau a like number
of sermons. Best approach to the new letters is Divjak 1987, in the series Bibliothèque
Augustinienne, vol. 46B, with text, French translation, and notes; English translation by Eno 1989. The
sermons have been published as Dolbeau 1996, translated by Edmund Hill (New Hyde Park, NY: New City
Press, 1998).
[[51]]. The French Bibliothèque Augustinienne (described in the
text here: now published by the Institut des études augustiniennes in approximately four
dozen volumes) has come closest, but is now being rivaled by the English "A Translation for the
Twenty-First Century," under the general editorship of John Rotelle, OSA, but both sets are far from
complete at the present writing.
[[52]]. On this period and the gap between Augustine's imagination and Pelagius's
teachings, see Wermelinger 1975.
[[53]]. Courcelle 1963, 559-607.
[[54]]. Hennings 1994.
[[55]]. Dyson 1998 is the newest version; Brown 1967, pp. 287-329, is still the
best introduction to the circumstances of writing.
[[56]]. That familiarity lubricates our reading of De civitate Dei: a little
less familiarity might bring greater understanding, howbeit at the price of greater effort. The notion
of "pagan", making no sense except as a Christian theological category, hurries us into thinking in
ways quite alien to the period. See O'Donnell 1979.
[[57]]. Frend 1985 is still the best connected narrative of the sect's
history but is marked by a certain partisanship that must be kept in mind.
[[58]]. Books 10-13 of the Confessions (see O'Donnell 1992 passim)
show Augustine struggling with the role he had undertaken and the inadequacies he felt.
[[59]]. The skeptics represent the breadth of Augustine's polemical opponents:
Secundinus the Manichee (object of Augustine's Contra Secundinum), Pelagius (described
reacting to Conf. 10 at De dono persev. 20.53), Vincent the Rogatist
(Ep. 93.13.51), and Julian of Eclanum.
[[60]]. The Manichee was Secundinus (epistula Secundini 3 ž transmitted with
Augustine's C. Sec.), the renegade Donatist Vincentius (see previous note).
[[61]]. Lepelley 1987.
[[62]]. McLynn 1994 is a first-rate study and in many ways the best new book on
Augustine in many years.
[[63]]. Augustine wrote, in the habit of that period, books of the "liberal arts" during that
winter and spring of 387, books meant to purify the mind from earthly matters by showing it the eternal
patterns through which to ascend from language to number to the heavens and then to peace beyond. See
Hadot 1984.
[[64]]. Serm. 355.
[[65]]. Ep. 21.
[[66]]. On the Freudian reading and misreading of the Confessions and
of Augustine, see O'Donnell 1992, 1.xxx-xxxi, esp. n. 32. The best modern essay on the topic is
Fredriksen 1978.
[[67]]. See O'Daly 1987.
[[68]]. See Meijering1979 and Sorabji 1983.
[[69]]. Conf. 7.9.13 and see O'Donnell 1992 ad loc.
[[70]]. Courcelle 1950; see O'Donnell 1992 on Conf. 7.9.13 for a
summary of the issues.
Brown 1967 is so masterful a narrative that I have annotated only specific references and matters where
Brown's book might not serve as an adequate guide. The freshest recent recounting of Augustine's life is Wills
1999, with especially fresh and effective translations from Augustine. I have written at length on many of the
issues here in my commentary on the Confessions (O'Donnell 1992).