The Strangeness Of Augustine

The Strangeness of Augustine

Augustinian Studies 32.2(2001) 201-206

To spend decades in the company of a long dead African bishop cannot

fail to leave its mark on the sojourner. It may be extreme to speak of

Stockholm syndrome, and I suppose it might be questioned whether it is he

that holds us hostage or we him, but perhaps the relationship is more one of

the old Spanish married couple that Peter Brown spoke of in the preface to

his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine,*1 bound by ties of

illusiуn, a shared version of the world arising out of shared experience.

Augustine holds special sway over his students, more than most other

ancient figures, for several reasons. First, his influence over after-generations

has been broad and deep and he has merited close study. Second, his

association over the last centuries with one and another stream of modern

Christianity has assured him a cadre of partisan readers, both supporters and

opponents, but has also assured that few people read him seriously without

preconceptions. Third, the vast bulk of his surviving oeuvre makes it

impossible to pay brief scholarly calls on him and come away with any serious

observations. To work seriously on Augustine is to declare, willingly or not, a

kind of allegiance and to establish a kind of co-dependency. We must know

this of ourselves, our colleagues, and our forerunners, if we are to advance in

such study.

Robert Markus and Peter Brown have provided, from their long and wise

experience, striking snapshots and some bits of video footage (as it were) of

the last half-century. To one whose memory is reliable, if at all, only for the

last quarter-century, they seem, of course, as giants from another era. The

fifties and sixties, years when the bibliography of Augustinian secondary

literature began truly to "gallop"--in Andrй Mandouze's word*2--defined the

landscape in which we all now live, the years between Courcelle and Marrou

on the one hand and Brown and Markus on the other.

And like many citizens of these decades, Augustine has gone through his

own changes. He entered the post-war world as rather a fashionable liberal,

and to study him was to declare yourself as, howbeit traditionalist, of a

forward-looking bent of mind. Does he end this half-century, as others might,

rather chastened and subsiding back into conservative ideas, unchanging

himself perhaps but understood differently by new generations for whom the

forward-looking conservatism of another era seems no longer so coherent, or

so nearly liberal?

This is not to say the last decades, especially since the discoveries of

Divjak and Dolbeau,*3 have not been exciting ones, though perhaps not

entirely riveting. The revelations of the new letters and sermons have sufficed

to enthrall the scholars, but have not made headlines beyond scholarly circles.

Augustine remains philosophically quite broad-minded, but just a little bit

more high church and state church than most of his modern readers would

prefer.

And his language: the old cadres of ecclesiastically-trained Latinists who

could edit and interpret him with proprietorial care have largely slipped away,

replaced in quality if not in quantity by younger scholars without ecclesiastical

roles. His original Latin words are far more readily available in print to readers

on every continent than ever before, and if we consider digital versions of his

texts, bid fair to be nearly ubiquitously available very soon. But translation is

the necessary precondition of any but an extremely narrow readership, and

the greatest services to scholarship in the last half century have been supplied

by the Bibliothиque Augustinienne in French, the Nuova Biblioteca

Agostiniana in Italian, and the New City Press in English.

Prognostication is a silly exercise: at best what the prophet says will

happen is a useful sketch of what won't. But issues that loom in 2001 are

easier to see: how we will respond to them is the question. I will confine

myself here to sketching a few that interest or worry me.

Pierre-Marie Hombert's Nouvelles recherches sur la chronologie

augustinienne*4 is a sobering reminder, first of all, of the ever-renewed labor

of mastering any of Augustine at all. Five million words of text can scarcely

be imagined, much less read and known with any consistent intensity. When I

worked on the Confessions in the 1980s, I passed