Essay About Kind Of Allegiance And Strangeness Of Augustine

The Strangeness Of Augustine
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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 Mandouzes 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 wont. 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 Homberts 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