Augustine

Augustine′s conversion to Christianity in A.D. 386 is a pivotal moment not only in his own life, but in Christian and world history, for the theology of Augustine set the course of theological and cultural development in the western Christian church. But to what exactly was Augustine converted? Scholars have long debated whether he really converted to Christianity in 386, whether he was a Platonist, and, if he adhered to both Platonism and Christianity, which dominated his thought. The debate of (...) the last thirteen decades spans an immense body of literature in multiple languages. In this literature, four major views on Augustine′s conversion may be discerned. The first view is associated with Gaston Boissier and Adolph von Harnack, and was famously championed by Prosper Alfaric: that Augustine in 386 converted to neo-Platonism but not to Christianity. Second, there is the view recently promoted by Catherine Conybeare: that Augustine in 386 converted to Christianity and rejected neo-Platonism. Third, there is the view that he converted to Christianity and was also a neo-Platonist; the most famous adherents of this view are Robert J. O′Connell and Pierre Courcelle. Finally, there is the view recently promoted by Carol Harrison: that Augustine committed to Christianity in 386, yet did not utterly reject neo-Platonism; rather, he aimed to develop a Christian faith that was informed by neo-Platonic insight. In this article, I first explain and distinguish these four general views, and then I explain why I prefer the fourth view. -/- More Info: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of Boone, Mark, "The Role of Platonism in Augustine's 386 Conversion to Christianity," Religion Compass 9.5 (May 2015), 151-61. This article has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12149/abstract. (shrink)

Augustine is commonly interpreted as endorsing an extramission theory of perception in De quantitate animae. A close examination of the text shows, instead, that he is committed to its rejection. I end with some remarks about what it takes for an account of perception to be an extramission theory and with a review of the strength of evidence for attributing the extramission the- ory to Augustine on the basis of his other works.

This article focuses on the unresolved scholarly question of how Confessiones, book 10 should be interpreted, proposing a new explanation as to how and why the second half of book 10 is critically important to this text. Emphasizing important relations between the introductory chapters and the second half of book 10, the article revisits Augustine’s treatment of ambitio saeculi, interpreted as a state of will, with which author Augustine continues to struggle, even during his act of confessing publicly (i.e., in (...) composing the book 10 text for publication). As a corruption of the motive behind his act of public confession, ambitio saeculi threatens to undermine the moral integrity of this same act. After Augustine recognizes that he cannot solve this moral flaw, he despairs and considers abandoning his human audience, and so, the very publication of his text. However, he is made newly capable of remaining, as confessant, before his readership, through a new, deeper conversion. This conversion to a new humility is given in and through the confessant’s participation in the eucharistic sacrament, which provides a hopeful resolution to his ambitio saeculi. (shrink)

Augustine believed that humans are called to be both slaves and friends of God. John 15:15, Jesus tells his disciples that they are no longer his slaves, but are instead his friends, thus posed a significant interpretive problem for him. This paper surveys Augustine’s thirteen discussions of the passage, presenting several themes Augustine developed and interpretive strategies he tried out over two decades of interpreting the passage. His favorite strategy was reading the passage proleptically. The disciples were not yet friends (...) of God at the time of Jesus’s speaking but could look forward to a certain future when they will be friends of God. But this strategy couldn’t solve the problem: Jesus treats slavery to and friendship with God as substitutes, not compossible. One theme was to associate slavery with fear. Augustine invoked this in his most extensive treatment of John 15:15, arguing that there are two species of slavery to God, each corresponding to a kind of fear. One fear, and thus one slavery, is compatible with friendship. The other is not. The paper concludes by identifying some further problems Augustine’s approach raised. (shrink)

In “Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis,” Denise Levertov encounters Christ as he bears “Incarnation’s heaviest weight.” In these fleeting moments, she writes, Christ finds himself “out of his depth,” enduring the “sickened desire... to simply cease, to not be.” The poet’s meditation on these moments offers a useful lens for reconsidering Augustinian hope. In view of Christ’s suffering as the incarnated divine promise, how does Augustine interpret the meaning of St. Paul’s “one hope” (Eph. 4:4) and St. Peter’s “living hope” (1 (...) Pet. 1:3)? While other hopes unfold under the shadow of death, the life that is “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3) draws its hope out of the depths to which Christ has descended. This results in a new way of keeping time in God’s promise: a way that for Augustine disrupts and exceeds, without abandoning, life in the saeculum. (shrink)

Augustine’s theology of divine forgiveness has received surprisingly little sustained attention. This is unfortunate, not least because his approach offers a thought-provoking contrast to the way forgiveness is typically conceived in our own day. We commonly understand forgiveness in therapeutic terms, as overcoming resentment or anger. For Augustine, God’s forgiveness is “metaphysical”—an other-oriented action that changes the moral and spiritual status of those who are forgiven. God forgives preveniently, to free sinners from their sin, so that they can be who (...) they were meant to be. Forgiveness, therefore, is a divine attempt to restore sinners to the good. Yet although God acts out of love, Augustine did not consider forgiveness incompatible with paternalistic anger or punishment. This essay draws on Augustine’s theologies of baptism and the cross to explore these ideas, and their implications for the relationship between human and divine agency in giving and receiving forgiveness. It concludes by raising some questions about how Christians should think about human forgiveness in light of Augustine’s account of God’s transformative love. (shrink)

This article helps fill a gap in studies on Augustine’s thought, by focusing on forgiveness—an ethical theme important to the Bishop of Hippo—with particular attention to the role forgiveness plays, or can and should play, in political life. The City of God (De ciuitate dei; ciu.) opens wide vistas for such study. Augustine’s reflections throughout his long work cast light on the many facets of forgiveness and related themes as they enter and impact social and civic life, characterized by our (...) human condition in all its contingency, fallibility, and fallenness, while rooted deeply in divine creation and the goodness of nature, healed and elevated by grace even in this saeculum. The article’s first segment argues that the theme of forgiveness or pardon, pagan and Christian, frames the entire ciu. The second segment studies three exemplars of forgiveness in political life highlighted by Augustine: Julius Caesar, David, and Theodosius. The third section comprises a brief conclusion, observing a parallel Augustine discerns between Virgil’s and Jesus’s teaching. This surprising confluence offers a vision of friendship forged by generous “giving and forgiving” across religious and cultural divides, and thus perhaps a partial foundation for unitas in our “foundationless age.”. (shrink)

In one of his earliest dialogues, the Soliloquia, Augustine identifies the liberal arts (disciplinae) with truth (veritas), and employs this somewhat puzzling identification as a premise in his infamous proof of the immortality of the soul (Sol. 2.24). In this paper, I examine Augustine’s argument for this peculiar identification. Augustine maintains both (1) that the constituent propositions of the liberal arts are true, and (2) that the liberal art of dialectic (disciplina disputandi) is the “truth through which all disciplines are (...) true” (Sol. 2.21). I argue that Augustine identifies the liberal arts with truth because (1) the constituent propositions of the liberal arts are learned, and (2) dialectic’s structure is essential to the liberal arts. I further suggest that the subject matter of each liberal art reflects a distinct segment of intelligible reality, that is, the realm of the intelligible Forms. (shrink)

One of Augustine’s most controversial ideas is his “order of love,” which he explicates using a distinction between “use” (usus) and “enjoyment” (fruitio). Critics complain that, by encouraging us to “use” each other and the world to “enjoy” God, Augustine instrumentalizes human beings and temporal goods in ways that deny their intrinsic value. In recent years, influential scholars have challenged this critique by offering alternative accounts of Augustine’s order of love and his distinction between use and enjoyment. Often overlooked is (...) an essential aspect of this distinction, namely, its Roman legal context, where rights of “usufruct” and “use” not only authorize others to “use” property owned by others but also prescribe duties of stewardship and sustainability that govern such use. In what follows, I explain the Roman laws of usufruct and use and show how Augustine, as a bishop managing church property and adjudicating cases on the episcopal court, would have likely been familiar with such laws. I then show how recovering these Roman legal concepts supports alternative accounts of Augustine’s order of love. In particular, when properly situated in their Roman legal and linguistic contexts, these concepts furnish a new interpretation of Augustine’s ethics of “use” and cast new light on what it means to “use” and “enjoy” the commonwealth and creation. In addition to offering a new interpretative lens, I show how elevating the concept of usufruct can supply constructive resources for contemporary accounts of political and ecological ethics. (shrink)

Augustine can appear to be a rigidly dogmatic writer and thinker—he is responsible for defining much of what becomes orthodox dogma against positions he vigorously labels heretical. But he is too honest and too poetic a thinker to be so simple. His reading of original sin, a concept whose importance is largely his doing, is often understood as not only unambiguous but strongly misogynistic. This paper suggests that it is neither. It draws especially on two sources. The first is a (...) letter to a young monk, in which Augustine urges that the monk—and perhaps implicitly all devout men—should avoid Eve in all women, but specifically in the figures of mother and wife. The second is the Confessions. Here three feminine figures—Augustine’s mother, Monica; his unnamed partner/wife; and the enticing Lady Continence—all complicate any negative imagery. A series of heartbreaks emerges. It begins, in a way, with Eve’s creation out of Adam’s side; it extends to the exile consequent upon original sin; it goes on to Monica’s death and the unnamed woman’s banishment. But Continence, who turns Augustine to God, strongly echoes both these women, and arguably is not possible without them—not just as women, but specifically as mother and wife. Heartbreak and heart-mending, absence and God, turn out to be inextricably interwoven. (shrink)

This essay makes three points. First, in his work Augustine sought to craft something like what Theodor Adorno called a “late style”—a style achieved after maturity has been realized, when a thinker or artist finds their work frustrated by the received cultural expectations, and they seek to overcome those expectations. So understood, a “late style” expresses both frustration and hope. However, second, Augustine’s late style differs from Adorno’s Romantic aesthetics, in both content and form, and usefully illuminates his overall project: (...) It explains his repeated troubling of his own acts of writing and his culture’s practices of reading, and what reading was expected to produce in its practitioners. Across his whole career he struggled, increasingly self-consciously, against his culture’s formal expectations about authoritative teachings, and its material fantasy of a straightforwardly successful life. He attempted instead to communicate both his own flawed and ongoing path, and the inevitable difficulty and frustrations of post-lapsarian life, as he understood the Christian faith to depict it. The final manifestation of his late style is found in the City of God, where it produces a mode of writing, and a picture of the wayfaring Christian, capable of both skeptical critique, confessional affirmation, lively compassion, and humble gratitude. Third, recognizing and appreciating Augustine’s late style can provoke us to our benefit, in facing the challenges of religious life today, both as individuals and as people seeking to live together for the common good. (shrink)

In Confessiones 6.14.24, Augustine describes a dream for living in community with his male friends. Although this particular community never came to fruition, Augustine continued to promote the idea of gendered communities and lived his later years surrounded by men. His biographer and friend Possidius even makes a point of noting that as bishop Augustine was stringent about never being alone with a woman. In this paper I examine Augustine’s Confessiones alongside De Genesi ad litteram to consider why Augustine prefers (...) gendered communities, what he thinks necessitates them, and what potentially misogynistic thinking might be underlying his thought. I suggest that Augustine’s reasoning for gendered communities privileges men’s struggles with chastity over women’s opportunities and treats women as temptresses. I conclude by arguing we should listen to women as we reconsider the usefulness and desirability of creating communities along gendered lines. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus in Augustinian studies that Augustine’s two cities cannot be mapped neatly onto the distinction between Church and State. How, then, can he help illumine Church-State questions? In this essay, I examine how Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) retrieve and build upon Augustine’s theological-political thought to develop a contemporary Augustinan approach to Church-State relations. I begin by discussing how their attention to the movement of Augustine’s thought leads them to recognize the importance of (...) mysterium in his vision and develop a Eucharistic ecclesiology focused on the Church as corpus mysticum. I then show how this ecclesiology helps them to critique ways of thinking about Church-State relations that operate solely within a political-juridical paradigm. Both thinkers, I argue, root their vision of spiritual authority in this Augustinian ecclesiology, and maintain that it must be understood in different terms than political authority. I conclude that this vision of spiritual authority illumines the Church’s perennial mission of elevating political life and its present mission of forming citizens capable of acting as leaven in their political communities. (shrink)

Point of departure is the way post-modern philosophers such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben have theorized the calamity of 9/11. What comes to the fore is a Carl Schmitt-like preoccupation with foundational notions like Setzung - notions that in their turn are embedded in a web of negativity, culminating in the sovereign status, for good or for ill, of the state of exception. Next, we turn to Augustine’s way of dealing with disaster in De civitate dei. If there is (...) any foundational dimension to be found in De civitate, it is in the Augustinian concept of permixtio, the entanglement of the two cities. This very permixtio functions as a razor cutting off each and every attempt to hypostatize negativity or to establish sovereignty reaching beyond the dynamics of the cursus of the entangled cities. As a result, the meaning of disaster (the utilitas calamitatis) should be assessed within the parameters of that entanglement. Thus the destruction of Carthage as alerting the reader semantically to historical catastrophe, becomes entangled in a more serious calamity resulting, not from historical disaster but from the failure to cope with victory which in the end comes down to the failure to cope with oneself. (shrink)

This article draws on Augustine’s De trinitate to articulate a logic of fallibilist commitment. It speaks into the wider context of twenty-first century religious pluralism, focusing as a test case on Christian post-supersessionism, in which the problem of fallible commitment emerges for the Christian who seeks, in response to her Jewish co-traditionalists, to repair her own tradition in respect of its long-entrenched supersessionism (the family of claims and practices rooted in the belief that the church has replaced Israel in the (...) purposes of God). With a focus on the work of R. Kendall Soulen, I argue that postliberal post-supersessionist Christian theology is both exemplary in the way it enacts fallibilist commitment and falls short of a more thoroughgoing fallibilism. After tracing the fallibilist commitment, or logic of searching, articulated and enacted by Augustine in response to the questions he poses in De trinitate 10, I return to postliberal post-supersessionism in order to follow through more fully its partial repair of supersessionist Christianity. (shrink)

Among historians of philosophy, a long-standing tradition holds that Augustine invented the modern concept of ‘the will’. Against this tradition, recent scholarship has tended to conclude that the Augustinian term voluntas refers not to a faculty of the soul, but only a volition. I argue that the correct understanding of Augustine’s use of voluntas is a middle ground: Augustine uses the term equivocally, sometimes referring to an individual volition, sometimes referring to something more, namely, a source of willing in the (...) soul. Proponents of the volition-only reading make a strong case for their view by showing that texts from the Augustinian corpus only make sense when voluntas is read as a volition; however, the same method of textual analysis can be used to defend the tradition of reading voluntas as a faculty. Ultimately, Augustine’s discussion of the nature of voluntas in De trinitate, his historical context, and his theological commitments suggest that neither reading alone sufficiently captures Augustine’s use of the term. At play in Augustine’s thought is a novel sense of the term voluntas which is neither inherited from ancient philosophy nor a familiar contemporary concept, but something transitional between the two: a proto-faculty of will. (shrink)

In this paper, I present three claims belonging to Cavendish's theory of the passions. First, positive and negative passions are species of love and hate. Second, love and hate involve pleasure and pain. Third, pleasure and pain are regular and irregular, where these notions are to be understood in teleological terms. From these commitments, it follows that hate is irregular. I argue that this consequence is a problematic one for Cavendish. After defending my reading through a consideration of Cavendish's reflections (...) on mental health and disorder, I explore ways in which she might revise her commitments to avoid the problem. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate the extent to which Cavendish's theory of the passions draws on Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas that loomed large in late sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century writings on the topic. (shrink)

This book addresses a lacuna in scholarship concerning Hannah Arendt's Augustinian heritage that has predominantly focused on her early work. It de-canonises the sources that political theology has appealed to by shifting the interpretive focus to her mature treatment in The Life of the Mind. Arendt's initial criticism of Augustinian desiring is that it generates worldlessness. In her later works, Arendt develops a more nuanced reading of the movements of thinking, desiring, and loving in her engagement with Augustine. This study (...) attends to these movements and inspects the spatio-temporal framework which structure Arendt's conception of the political. The author assesses the claim that Arendt's conception of the political is drawn from a pedagogy of desiring and thinking from Augustine severed from his mystagogy. Although respecting the method of political theory, the author contends that Arendt's severing of Augustinian pedagogy from mystagogy brings her to an insurmountable aporia. Instead, the author embeds these pedagogical practices within Augustine's theology and suggests how that aporia might be overcome and used to develop a mystagogy for contemporary political life. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of political theology, as well as political theory, and political philosophy. (shrink)

This essay explores the theological and anthropological significance of birth, in order to discern what might be lost with the adoption of complete ectogestation (“artificial wombs”). Specifically, it considers both Saint Augustine and Karl Barth’s respective accounts of humanity’s whence—that is, their theological answer to the question of the nature and significance of our origins as individuals. I suggest that Augustine’s account of his origins emphasizes both his epistemic and biological dependency on his mother and nurses, while Barth’s stresses the (...) individual’s immediate derivation from God. Those disparate answers affect how they construe the relationships of parents and children and work themselves throughout their theological visions and imaginations. I conclude that careful consideration of humanity’s whence cannot answer whether we ought to pursue ectogestation; but it does help us account for how our understanding of God and ourselves might be altered if we gestate human life outside the womb. (shrink)

The present article examines Contra Academicos 2.5 in which Augustine seems to detail the influence of the libri Platonicorum on his conversion. In the first part of the paper, I argue that Michael P. Foley is correct to interpret Augustine’s phrase “libri quidam pleni” as a reference to the libri Platonicorum. I advance the further claim that Augustine primarily has in mind Ennead I.6. This is in contrast to the argument alluded to by Pierre Courcelle and formally given by John (...) J. O’Meara where such a reading of Contra Academicos misconstrues the relationship between Augustine and Plotinus. In response to O’Meara, I advance a threefold argument, a corollary of which is a novel reading of a Latin phrase (bonas res Arabicas) that has perplexed scholars. In the second part of the paper, I use my reading of Contra Academicos along with two considerations from Ennead I.6 to motivate a deeper understanding of Augustine’s conversion. The present study develops recent lines of thought in Augustine scholarship and seeks to open new avenues for understanding the libri Platonicorum and their influence on Augustine’s conversion. (shrink)

The Enarrationes in Psalmos are an important source for understanding the Augustinian theology of desire, linking it to his systematic theology and his pastoral practice. In this paper I illustrate by overviewing the expositions on Psalms 11 (12), 12 (13), 23 (24), and 26 (27). These Psalms teach us to love, trust, and seek God only, a failure to do which marks the Donatist schism. Augustine mingles ideas from pagan philosophy’s quest for eudaimonia or beata vita—the good, happy, and blessed (...) life—with biblical ideas. We want a stable happiness, and we must pursue wisdom; we can find stability in the rock that is Christ, to follow whom is to pursue wisdom rightly. Our desires must be converted to God, the only complete and perfect good and the source of eternal happiness, whom we must single-mindedly pursue with prayer and faith. While we must desire the eschaton and look to no earthly satisfaction, earthly goods may be received as gifts from God. One thing we can learn from studying the Enarrationes is how closely connected are the ideas of right love, the right church, and the right end; all three go together in Augustine’s theology. (shrink)

Augustine’s sermons on the Psalms of Ascent, part of the Enarrationes in Psalmos, are a unique entry in the venerable tradition of those writings that aim to help us ascend to a higher reality. These sermons transform the ascent genre by giving, in the place of the Platonic account of ascent, a Christian ascent narrative with a Trinitarian structure. Not just the individual ascends, but the community that is the church, the body of Christ, also ascends. The ascent is up (...) to God, the Idipsum or the Selfsame, the ultimate reality, confessed by the church as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Through the grace of the Incarnation, God the Son enables us to ascend, making himself the way of ascent from the humility we must imitate at the beginning of the ascent all the way up to Heaven, where he retains his identity as Idipsum. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit works in the ascending church to convert our hearts to the love of God and neighbor. I review the Platonic ascent tradition in Plato’s Republic and Plotinus’ Enneads; overview ascent in some of Augustine’s earlier writings; introduce the narrative setting of the sermons on the Psalms of Ascent; and analyze the Trinitarian structure of their ascent narrative. I close with some reflections on the difference between a preached Trinitarianism that encourages ascent and a more academic effort to understand God such as we find in Augustine’s de Trinitate. (shrink)