Catherine Conybeare takes the notion of St Augustine as rigid and dogmatic Father of the Church and turns it on its head. She reads his early works to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine who valued changeability and human interconnectedness and deplored social exclusion.
Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes--secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.
Written about the year 400. [Faustus was undoubtedly the acutest, most determined and most unscrupulous opponent of orthodox Christianity in the age of Augustin. The occasion of Augustin's great writing against him was the publication of Faustus' attack on the Old Testament Scriptures, and on the New Testament so far as it was at variance with Manichæan error. Faustus seems to have followed in the footsteps of Adimantus, against whom Augustin had written some years before, but to have gone considerably beyond Adimantus in the recklessness of his statements. The incarnation of Christ, involving his birth from a woman, is one of the main points of attack. He makes the variations in the genealogical records of the Gospels a ground for rejecting the whole as spurious. He supposed the Gospels, in their present form, to be not the works of the Apostles, but rather of later Judaizing falsifiers. The entire Old Testament system he treats with the utmost contempt, blaspheming the Patriarchs, Moses, the Prophets, etc., on the ground of their private lives and their teachings. Most of the objections to the morality of the Old Testament that are now current were already familiarly used in the time of Augustin. Augustin's answers are only partially satisfactory, owing to his imperfect view of the relation of the old dispensation to the new; but in the age in which they were written they were doubtless very effective. The writing is interesting from the point of view of Biblical criticism, as well as from that of polemics against Manichæism.--A.H.N.]
A Companion to Augustine presents a fresh collection of scholarship by leading academics with a new approach to contextualizing Augustine and his works within the multi-disciplinary field of Late Antiquity, showing Augustine as both a product of the cultural forces of his times and a cultural force in his own right. Discusses the life and works of Augustine within their full historical context, rather than privileging the theological context Presents Augustine’s life, works and leading ideas in the cultural context of the late Roman world, providing a vibrant and engaging sense of Augustine in action in his own time and place Opens up a new phase of study on Augustine, sensitive to the many and varied perspectives of scholarship on late Roman culture State-of-the-art essays by leading academics in this field
The nature and development of Augustine's understanding of the church between his conversion (386) and his forced entry into the clergy (391) provides an essential lens to understanding this seminal period of transition and the foundations of his future ecclesial contributions. Even so, most studies of Augustine's ecclesiology bypass this period, starting with the clerical Augustine (post 391). In fact, research on the 'young' Augustine and the Confessions too often stalls over debates between his neo-Platonic or Christian orientation, focusing on dichotomies in Augustine or an individualistic Augustine too rigidly labeled. This book helps fill these gaps and provides a case study supporting arguments for continuity between the 'young' and the clerical Augustine. A careful chronological textual approach to Augustine's early Christian years demonstrates how his ecclesiological thought began during this period and comprised a core component of his first theological synthesis. The emergence of his ecclesiological ideas was intimately intertwined with his overall personal, religious, philosophic, and theological development. As such it is crucial to our biographical and theological understanding of the great North African and will be of interest to specialists and students alike of Augustine's development, Confessions, mature ecclesiology, and the late antique world.
This book presents an overview of the best of contemporary scholarship on the fourth and fifth century bishop, Augustine of Hippo. His life, his sermons and letters, doctrinal writings and pastoral work, as well as his own faith and spirituality are reviewed in light of new research. This Father of the Church emerges as a dynamic thinker struggling to integrate his Christian faith with the demands of reason, and to discern Christian meaning amidst the political and social controversies that plagued the late Roman world. The circumstances of his life and the dynamism of his faith are more relevant to the contemporary Christian than one might suspect. The early- and mid-twentieth century saw new scholarly interest in and understanding of Augustine. His persistent influence on Christian theology, especially in the West, was evident, mid-century, at the Second Vatican Council; his thought is cited liberally in Council documents. Since the Council there has been an explosion in Augustine studies, marked largely by the shift from doctrinal to historical approaches and methodologies. New appreciations of Augustine s pastoral role have arisen from careful study of his sermons and letters, several of which have been rediscovered in the past several decades. Controversy about Augustine s teachings on original sin, human sexuality, and the relationship of church and state continue. However, contemporary Augustinian scholarship invites a reconsideration of long-standing presumptions about Augustine, among both those who defend him as well as those who revile him.
Augustine's Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement considers the relationship between Augustine's account of God's judgment and his theology of grace in his early works. How does God use his law and the penal consequences of its transgression in the service of his grace, both personally and through his 'agents' on earth? Augustine reflected on this question from different perspectives. As a teacher and bishop, he thought about the nature of discipline and punishment in the education of his pupils, brothers, and congregants. As a polemicist against the Manichaeans and as a biblical expositor, he had to grapple with issues regarding God's relationship to evil in the world, the violence God displays in the Old Testament, and in the death of his own Son. Furthermore, Augustine meditated on the way God's judgment and grace related in his own life, both before and after his conversion. Bart van Egmond follows the development of Augustine's early thought on judgment and grace from the Cassiacum writings to the Confessions. The argument is contextualized both against the background of the earlier Christian tradition of reflection on the providential function of divine chastisement, and the tradition of psychagogy that Augustine inherited from a variety of rhetorical and philosophical sources. This study expertly contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion on the development of Augustine's doctrine of grace, and to the conversation on the theological roots of his justification of coercion against the Donatists.
After setting Augustine's thought firmly within the context of his life and times, Ryan Topping examines in turn the causes of education (the purposes, pedagogy, curriculum, and limits of learning) as Augustine understood them. Augustine's towering influence over Medieval and Renaissance theorists – from Hugh of St Victor, to Aquinas, to Erasmus – is traced. The book concludes by drawing Augustine into dialogue with contemporary philosophers, exploring the influence of his meditations on higher education and suggesting how his ideas can reinvigorate for our generation the project of liberal learning.
Augustine and the Cure of Souls situates Augustine within the ancient philosophical tradition of using words to order emotions. Paul Kolbet uncovers a profound continuity in Augustine’s thought, from his earliest pre-baptismal writings to his final acts as bishop, revealing a man deeply indebted to the Roman past and yet distinctly Christian. Rather than supplanting his classical learning, Augustine’s Christianity reinvigorated precisely those elements of Roman wisdom that he believed were slipping into decadence. In particular, Kolbet addresses the manner in which Augustine not only used classical rhetorical theory to express his theological vision, but also infused it with theological content. This book offers a fresh reading of Augustine’s writings—particularly his numerous, though often neglected, sermons—and provides an accessible point of entry into the great North African bishop’s life and thought.
Carol Harrison counters the assumption that Augustine of Hippo's (354-430) theology underwent a revolutionary transformation around the time he was consecrated Bishop in 396. Instead, she argues that there is a fundamental continuity in his thought and practice from the moment of his conversion in 386. The book thereby challenges the general scholarly trend to begin reading Augustine with his Confessions (396), which were begun ten years after his conversion, and refocuses attention on his earlier works, which undergird his whole theological system.