Closer to Augustine: Speculating on the recent past,and future,of Augustine scholarship

1. Augustine on the internet, and voice recognition ¹

I want to begin by stating the general case that scholars of Augustine have probably never had it so good. The once daunting task of simply getting hold of his writings, all in one place, is being solved by the internet and some excellent new online editions. One such – the Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana – may even be accessed free of charge. ²

The most exciting and comprehensive development in this area is the new CAG-online. This is the latest idea of the mighty Zentrum für Augustinus-Forschung at the University of Würzburg. It makes available in an online subscriber version the full critical editions of Augustine’s works, as they were originally compiled by Professor Cornelius Petrus Mayer for his groundbreaking Augustinus-Lexikon. These editions – collectively known as the Corpus Augustinianum Gissense – had been available in searchable CD-ROM versions since 1996. Now, with the 2013 release of the CAG-online, Augustine scholars will have the security of the most up to date critical editions, available instantly, and constantly being updated and improved by the team at ZAF. The state of the art search functions, which also extend to one of the most comprehensive databases of secondary literature (33 000 items and counting), as well the reasonable costs of subscription, mean that this single development will rapidly go on to shape a large part of the future of Augustine scholarship. ³

What I mean by this in particular is how attention will now be able to shift towards Augustine’s less talked about, less known, writings. These are the writings that stand apart from his set-piece, single-volume, classics (like his Confessiones, De civitate Dei, De doctrina Christiana and De Trinitate) because they are made up of his hundreds of letters, sermons, and homiletical commentaries on the Gospel of John and the Psalms. But which manage to be just as vital – arguably more vital, because more catechetical – for understanding the overall purpose and spirit of his thought. A purpose and spirit which was first and foremost pastoral: proved and honed in his successes with his parishioners: and the great skill he could show in writing as a fellow seeker rather than an infallible authority. At times, the encouragement to make this shift comes directly from Augustine himself. As when he suddenly says something like this:

Surely I myself (and I speak this fearlessly and from the heart) if I were to write anything for the summit of authority, I would prefer to write in such a way that my words would sound forth the portions of truth which each one reader could take from them, rather than to put down one true opinion so obviously that it would exclude all others. ⁴

It was only earlier this year, in fact, that I was encouraged to see Joseph Clair ⁵ making just such use of Augustine’s remarkable letter 155 in a critical discussion of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Justice in Love. ⁶ Like C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Clair seems to have been struck by the sheer descriptive powers of Augustine’s ordo amoris ⁷ – that cascading vision of ontological goodness, in which, by loving God first and foremost, we satisfy the notoriously difficult (for modern ethicists) double commandment of love, whilst all the time having our eyes opened wider to the mesmerising interrelatedness of created things. I would recommend that any interested readers look up Clair’s excellent article for themselves; for there they will see how he has been inspired by this impressionistic writing of Augustine’s to go the next step of beginning to develop an argument for the distinct advantages of Augustinian eudaimonism as a critical perspective in Christian social and political ethics. ⁸

In this regard I could also mention Anthony Dupont, based at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, who has for some years now been working on Augustine’s sermones ad populum ‘sermons to the people’, and exploring what new clarities and vistas open up through this special genre of communication. ⁹

This quality of impressionism serves to indicate that one of the features of the more recent scholarship on Augustine has been its growing appreciation of the intensity of Augustine’s inner lyricism. And further still: the consistency of that inner lyricism throughout his life. What present day publishers would call ‘voice’. Readers like voice, too, of course; which is why publishers pay such notice to it in the first place. And in the case of Christian writers, what readers often seem to be liking in voice is the tactile sensation of recognizing some truth of themselves in the words on the page. ¹⁰ Historically, Augustine’s tactility in motifs like his cor inquietum ‘restless heart’ has been regarded as one of the outstanding examples of this Christian form of the phenomenon. ¹¹ As indeed Dom David Knowles once described the effect of it, when he wrote that Augustine,

…is that marvellous personality… at once a type and yet intensely individual, that illuminates every page and seems so often to be as it were our own mind and soul alone with God… ¹²

One theologian who has been particularly attentive to the implications of this is the American scholar Robert Dodaro, O.S.A. ¹³

Now, from the strictly intellectual point of view, writer’s voice, when it presents itself in a case like Augustine’s, is often identified as the author’s unnerving ability to hit an exceptional height of fluency on a complex subject without many of the intervening steps of conceptual clarification. It is as though they didn’t need the various booster rockets that must light and burn in stages in order to get our own minds to the equivalent heights. Perhaps nowhere has this been more apparent to scholars than in Augustine’s handling of the Christus totus doctrine. Dodaro has made a special point of investigating this as theology, ethics and rhetoric; and I suspect that this triple focus has given him a unique perspective on it.

However, before I get to Dodaro, I want to give a little background on Augustine’s relationship to this doctrine.

2. Parallels with Paul

What must be understood first is that Christus totus was the doctrine which would run centrally in Augustine’s thinking from the start to the finish of his professional Christian life. From the first, it signified to him the compassionate Face of Christ as something radically new upon the ancient ways of doing wisdom. These ancient ways had afforded little space or vocabulary to the processes of human longing and heartbreak. Instead, wisdom was associated with eternal features and substrata that held their privileged status precisely because they were the paradigm opposites of emotion and chaos. Pythagoras thought that everything could reduce to numbers; and generally the idea was that, if not numbers, then other patterns would be found; meaning that one should try to think hard and grasp hold of these dazzling configurations. This was wisdom.

When, for instance, the Stoics began teaching that the wise man is imperturbable, and tries to calibrate his body and mind to the fateful configurations that cannot be changed, it could just feel like common sense. Here (it was said) are men and women, tormented all over with love for one another and for life; yet tormented also with the sensation that they are not yet wise – and tormented most of all by death. Surely their longed for wisdom will prove, when it comes, to have been the opposite of this moaning and gnashing of teeth? Surely it will be something as hard and clear and deathless as apatheia?

As a brilliant university student at Carthage, and born into an ascetic sensibility, Augustine might have gone far in this tradition. But something in his brilliance seems to have taken him into opposition to it. He had noticed a paradox; or at least an irony. And it started to corrode his pleasure in winning prizes and excelling in the curriculum subscribed to him. He began to wonder how hard and clear and deathless things like numbers (or stars, he had dabbled in astrology) could ever logically be the siren for the love of the lover of wisdom – the philosophus?

Certainly you can be astounded, perhaps humbled, by the way that the reductive view of life breaks out into all manner of harmonies to do with particles and processes. Bertrand Russell talked of his love of philosophy in this way on a number of occasions. ¹⁴ But what are you really admiring in this array, and why? What it seems to have been in the very nature of Augustine’s personality to do was to be appalled that this serene, smiling philosophy should be the end of the story. He had loved passionately himself; indeed at this time in his life at Carthage he was living with a woman, the love of his life. So he began to ask himself whether the language of love – for this is the true philosopher’s true language – does not demand a similar kind of satisfaction. A satisfaction that is not the negation of human love, and its tears, but the fulfilment of it.

All this those writings of the Platonists do not have. Their pages do not have this face of piety, the tears of confession, Your sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a contrite and a humbled heart, the salvation of Your people, the city that is like a bride, the pledge of the Spirit, the cup of our redemption. ¹⁵

Earlier in this piece I mentioned Augustine’s homiletical commentaries on the Psalms as amongst his writings that the new generation of scholars will be able to make more use of. Shortly, however, I am going to quote from his Contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas – a mature work, from much later in his life than the period I am talking about. In fact from 414, when he was 60 years old. But it is the signature of his personality that I am after as an example; and that never changed.

The passage that I am going to quote is really quite remarkable – though quite unremarked upon in turn. Possibly because it is so characteristic: and for so long scholars have looked for peripeties and developments to tell the story of his life. Here again I am promoting my idea of voice and voice recognition as the more intuitive approach that is in any case coming increasingly to the fore.

In the passage that follows, Augustine imagines vivisecting a human life and discovering in its different elements the generics of every kind of created thing and process. But the remarkable part is where he goes next with this discovery. It is not into a further organizing and classifying of these connections, and a (Darwinian) book about it: it is straight into the gigantic thought that we human beings could have been created to be, amongst other things of course, the very speech and thanksgiving of an otherwise silent world. A world silent because, when you think about it, what is there for Perfection to say when it is in every way harmonized – each part to the whole? Because of this, the non-rational creation cannot think and speak the words of thanksgiving (the ordo amoris) because they do not have the intellects that would form the requisite ethical perspective. So it is left entirely to the human race to bear the responsibility of groaning and yearning and reaching out to God. It is an extension of the original onomastic duty of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the fall. It is not, of course, the only reason that men and women were created. But I want to draw attention to how much it thrilled Augustine to see things in this way, aesthetically. And then further attention to how much it was the contraflow to the ancient ways of his education, in which the emotionless wisdom of the philosophers seemed, in the end, to only reach back and justify the martial world of the Empire. Peoples conquering peoples, and man abusing the beasts, and the paradigm pleasure of it all in the blood of the circus. But I must let Augustine say it in his own words from his Contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas:

In each human being all creation is present – not taken all together, that is, Heaven and earth and all the things in them, but taken in a generic sense. In each human being there is, for a start, a rational creation, which we have proved or believe that the angels possess. There is also, if I may use that term, sensual creation, which even the other animals do not lack. After all, do they not use the senses and sensual movements to seek what is useful and to avoid the opposite? And there is vital creation without sensation, such as can be found in trees. In us bodily growth comes about without our being aware of it, and hairs have no awareness, even when they are cut, and still they grow. And this is how we witness to this vital creation. Bodily creation is even more obviously apparent in us. Though the body has been made and formed from earth, it contains some particles of all the elements of this bodily world for a balanced state of health… Thus there is no kind of creature that we cannot recognize in a human being: and in that sense all of creation groans and suffers pain in us, awaiting the resurrection of the sons of God [see Rom. 8.22–23]. ¹⁶

The book in which this passage appears was written against the Priscillianists and the Origenists at the request of a young Spanish priest called Paul Orosius. He had arrived in Hippo from his native land precisely to enlist Augustine’s help in refuting these heresies. On some points, Augustine felt that he had already done the work in other books. For example, he felt that his books against the Manichees dealt adequately with the Priscillianist contention that human souls are divine (rather than ex nihilo). Against the Origenists, however, he saw that he needed to produce something new – particularly against their literal reading of Paul at Rom. 8.22-23. For they had read Paul saying there that all creation groans and suffers pain in anticipation of the resurrection to mean that objects like the heavenly bodies have souls and sensibilities like humans. It was against this that Augustine wrote the passage I have quoted above; and produced his remarkable argument that humanity has to resist the tides of evil that would suck it down to parity with the beasts of the field and cultivate, instead, its higher responsibilities. This was a theory of beauty enlisted to prove the soundness of Christian doctrine by making any other way seem like the guillotine sèche.

I want to return now to the young Augustine, in the time leading up to his conversion to Christianity, when he was only just beginning to grasp hold of this. Two things happened during this time which would be crucial to him making the step into full communion with God and the Church; and therefore also to him making this aesthetic conviction the working truth of his Christocentrism ever afterwards.

The first thing was his spiritual adoption by Bishop Ambrose of Milan – and the subsequent way in which Ambrose’s skill with Neoplatonism opened up whole new areas of Augustine’s mind to the credibility of idealism. The second, and probably more decisive, thing was his discovery and reading of Paul’s Epistles.

For Paul was a philosopher’s philosopher, and a writer’s writer, at just the time when Augustine was needing a hero and a mentor in both these things. Of course, Ambrose could cover this ground as well: but he was too much in the mould of the classical rhetor to appeal to Augustine with the thrill of the new like Paul could. Augustine thought that Ambrose’s sermons were first class; and he could sit there listening to them as a professional and equal, being himself by then Imperial Professor of Rhetoric at Milan. But with Paul there was a category difference of appreciation going on.

While Ambrose exemplified the translation of Christianity into the thought patterns of Neoplatonism and vice versa; or from the point of view of the intellectual elite, its gentrification at last; Paul exemplified a radical new kind of fluency. To Augustine, it was the fluency of heartbreak, homesickness and return. In a stark lucidity of style that required no adumbration, Paul could write Christian truth as speedily and unreflectively as though he were making it up as he went along. ¹⁷ In a sense, of course, he was. But what the rhetor and writer in Augustine started to understand was that this ability and grace came to Paul only because he had allowed himself to be afflicted by Christ on the road to Damascus. He wrote as a man in a state of unending affliction. ¹⁸ And to Augustine this was an excellent thing and a brilliant new style. But more than that again: it was the answer all at once to what had been so aesthetically displeasing to him in the ancient, pre-Christian wisdom of his education. Everything that wise men had hitherto projected onto the stars and planets and other such esoteric objects, Paul had simply recognized in the Face of Christ. And from the simplicity of that millisecond process of recognition seemed to flow every advantage that he enjoyed as a communicator. Everything that had dispirited Augustine in the crawling pace of ancient rationalism (and worse still in ancient materialism) was swallowed up and rehabilitated in this vast Pauline acceleration of thought.

Let me paraphrase for a moment the way that the mature Augustine learnt to express this:

You can’t love like the lover of the Song of Songs, a wisdom-book full of clever ideas. But you can love Christ and His Church. A wisdom-book full of clever ideas can’t explain the origin of your love back to you, but Christ and His Church can. And that is the essential difference that makes Christian revelation what it is. Once upon a time in Eden your first parents were in a perfect state of grace, but fell; and falling from it they banished you to be born into the exact same coordinates of their heartbreak and homesickness. So now it is up to you to take this congenital emotional content as the reality it is; because if you do not you will slip, with all the encouragement of evil in your ears, into re-describing it to yourself as something other than a living remnant. You will lose contact with guilt and shame: and you will have no reason in the end to distinguish between good and evil at all. You will, as I put it earlier, be reduced to the same as the beasts of the field:

You are men, so you have got beyond the cattle. You are superior to the cattle; for you are able to understand what great things He has done for you. You have life, you have sensation, you have understanding: you are men! And to this benefit, I ask you, what can be compared? Well then, how about that you are Christians? For just think how things would be had we not received this additional possibility. What then would it profit us that we were men? Would we be more truly happy than the cattle or only more agitated than them? So then we are Christians, we belong to Christ. And for all the world’s rage it does not break us, because we belong to Christ. For all the world’s caresses, it does not seduce us, because we belong to Christ. ¹⁹

In relation to all of this, Christus totus, or Augustine’s Christocentrism, clearly meant more than just doctrine or dogma. It was not just the good news of atonement and salvation; though it was all of that, too. It was a totalizing theory of knowledge, described as the shockwave created when the sum of all there is to know turns up, of a sudden, in the present, in the ‘living lines’ of a Face – Christ’s Face – and the pinpoint of His instructions: ²⁰

By Your direction he himself establishes what is Your will, what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect thing. Since he is now capable of receiving it, You teach him to see the Trinity of unity, and the unity of the Trinity. ²¹

For amongst us, in His Christ, has God made Heaven and earth, the spiritual and the carnal parts of His Church. And before it received the form of doctrine, our earth was invisible and without order, and we, for our parts, were covered over in ignorance. ²²

As the most beautiful of beautiful things it was not the age-long struggle of the philosophers to be able to account, in theory, for the fitting and the apt. Here I am intentionally aping the title of one of Augustine’s first books, De pulchro et apto, now lost; in which he tried to do exactly this on the conventional lines (that we still use) of part to whole at the age of 26 or 27.

I observed with care and saw that in bodies themselves it is one thing to be a whole, as it were, and therefore beautiful because of that wholeness; and another thing to be beautiful because suitable, and well adapted to something else. Just as a bodily part is adapted to the whole body, a shoe to the foot, and the like. ²³

No, it was nothing as static as this. It was much more like a new form of thinking, speaking and writing. It was much more like a new form of eloquence, sustained by returning all human love back to its one true source in Christ: and the beauty of the circle that is completed in this way.

The Presocratic philosopher Heracleitus had written of the human betrayal by book-wisdom and understanding as like the unassailable truth that no man can step into the same river twice. ²⁴ So here, then, was Augustine giving his direct answer to Heracleitus et al in the counter rhythms of the Wisdom that does not betray but abides. Here follow two potent examples. Notice, too, that I have chosen quotations from Augustine’s Sermones and Enarrationes in Psalmos, in keeping with my suggestion that these pastoral, catechetical writings keep closest to the Pauline spirit of his thought.

Who can comprehend the abiding Word? All our words sound, and pass away. So who can comprehend the abiding Word, save he who abides in Him? Would you comprehend the abiding Word? Do not follow the current of the flesh. For this flesh is certainly a current; it has nothing about it that abides. Men are born from what would appear to be a kind of secret fount of nature. They live, they die; but all in a manner that keeps hidden their coming or going. Theirs is indeed a hidden water. It shows itself only as it leaves its source; it flows on, and is seen by its course; but then finally it goes hidden again into the sea. Let us remember these characteristics of this stream – flowing on, running, disappearing – let us not forget them. ²⁵

For their eyes, that is their mind, is beaten back by the light of truth, because of the darkness of their sins; by the habitual practice of which they are not able to sustain the brightness of right understanding. Therefore even they who see sometimes, they who understand the truth, are yet unrighteous still. They cannot abide in their brightness because they come too quickly to love those things they understand – and they are turned aside from the truth. In this sense they carry about with them their night; which is not only the habit, but even the love, of sinning. But if this night shall pass away and they shall cease to sin, and this love and habit be put to flight, the morning will dawn, so that they not only understand, but also cleave to the truth. ²⁶

3. How the scholarship is beginning to respond to Augustine’s voice

I said that I would return to Dodaro, and I want to do that now. I have described Augustine’s Trinitarian theology aesthetically, as a mystery not so much of the three persons of the Trinity and how they can be said to interact technically, but as a mystery of the mediation that occurs between God and man through Christ. In 2004, Dodaro made this mediation mystery the centrepiece of his investigation of Augustine’s political thought in his book Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine. ²⁷ But in the context of my piece here, I am more interested in what Dodaro has been doing with this approach of his more recently.

In 2010, he published an article in Augustinian Studies, which examined the longstanding difficulty that Augustine scholars have had to explain the respective roles of Christ and the Holy Spirit in the mediation of virtues to Christians. ²⁸ In Christ and the Just Society, Dodaro made use of a similar portrayal of Christus totus in Augustine to the one I have been giving here. He reinforced that Christ’s role as head of the Church is a version of His role as head of the human body under grace; which makes it that the human body under grace is the same thing as the good life and happiness that the philosophers were seeking all along in their (restless) hearts. To political theorists, he then proceeded to show how grace and the Bible can be the keys to Augustine’s political thought; so that his political ideas do not have to be extracted from his theology, or even rescued from it, in the projects of reconstruction that so many others have attempted.

What happens in his 2010 article is that he shifts gears in this mood and looks over the last 60 or so years of the scholarship on Augustine’s handling of the mediation mystery; and notices how it has largely contended between exclusively pneumocentric or Christocentric interpretations; and how at stake in these has been whether Augustine can even be said to offer a systematic Trinitarianism at all?

Dodaro’s shifting of gears is to sit back and ask whether the real problem has been with how scholars have been reading Augustine. What he means is: have they been reading him in the same Pauline spirit in which he was writing? As a man afflicted with the desire to communicate whole and intact the unified beauty of the mystery he was looking into? Dodaro’s way of putting this methodologically is to point out that when Augustine’s texts are read from the point of view of voice, it is seen that his fluency with Christus totus is often achieved by assigning similar mediation functions to Christ and the Holy Spirit in different places in the same text. A confusing business for scholars, if they want to interpret Trinitarianism as meaning everything must have its place; but a delight for Augustine’s millions of readers down the centuries, for whom Trinitarianism has meant an esoteric mystery, and a Lectio Divina.

For Dodaro, all of these observations can be resolved into a single remedial picture for scholarship. It is one in which the centrality of Christ in Augustine is not a colour-coded symmetry of parts, but the very structure and deportment of his prose in the first place. Its freedom, in other words – and its artistic license:

Rather than treat Augustine’s texts collectively as a kind of Rubik’s Cube, so that by re-aligning the various passages in his writings, his conception of mediation can be synchronized with the distinct operations of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, scholars might look instead at his texts as at a multi-faceted gem. When looking at a gem we appreciate the beauty of its internal crystalline structure as we turn it and observe its interior through its several facets. Each facet presents to the beholder the gem’s interior structure as a unity. ²⁹

This turns out, in fact, to be similar to something that Rowan Williams wrote in 1999 in an article on Augustine’s De Trinitate. In that article, Williams was prompted to ask, like Dodaro, whether the essence of Augustinianism is less a programme, radiating dogma from the inside out, than a continuously renewing body of readers who keep pace with Augustine as they look for and appreciate that tactility I talked about at the start. A tactility that is aesthetically pleasing before it is anything else: and that manages, because of this, to be a correspondence theory of truth the likes of which the most ardent empiricist would be proud: but one which is reaching across all the time from Augustine’s words to the wet earthy tears of his readers’ lives:

The genius of De Trinitate is its fusion of speculation and prayer, its presentation of Trinitarian theology as, ultimately, nothing other than a teasing out of what it is to be converted and come to live in Christ. While it bequeaths to later theology some bits of theological vocabulary… it stands alone as a meditation on the Trinitarian mystery as a mystery at once of theology and of anthropology. ³⁰

I wonder, finally, whether our increasing ability to recognize and appreciate Augustine’s voice will lead at last to a new consensus about the meaning of Augustinianism? The scholarship has hitherto failed to provide a textbook-neat definition of it. Yet around and about them has been the giant and resounding resource of Augustine’s historical success with Christian and philosophical readers in books like his Confessiones. He has been loved and admired and never gone out of print, so why all the scratching of heads about the essence of his project?

Thanks to Dodaro, Williams and others (and the new generation of scholars that will now dig into his lesser known works) we may begin to realize that what he was in the business of was producing literature rather than arranging concepts. And that, insofar as he was conscious of this difference, it meant to him the project of proving that Christianity has total ownership over the grand narrative of mankind. Or that the Scriptures really are the greatest story ever told – and that it really is true that all forms of human understanding orientate themselves on proving or disproving this. As he would put this in one of the last works of his hand, his Retractiones:

For the truth itself, which is now named the Christian religion, existed and was not missing among the ancients from the beginning of the human race. ³¹

Or more explicitly still, if we return again to one of his pastoral works:

This Aristotle said. Set him beside the Rock, and he is swallowed up. Who is Aristotle? Let him hear, ‘Christ has said’, and he trembles among the dead. This Pythagoras said, that Plato said. Set them beside the Rock, compare their authority to the authority of the Gospel, compare the proud to the Crucified… Therefore if any of them be found to have said what Christ too has said, we congratulate him, but we follow him not. ³²

Perhaps, then, I should end with something from this past year from probably the most famous living Augustinian scholar, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and the third volume of his Jesus of Nazareth – The Infancy Narratives. For I certainly don’t think that any scholar has done more than Benedict to argue persistently and patiently that the utter simplicity of the Christmas story was what also fitted it to be the only mystery that could exercise and occupy Augustine’s powers. ‘Simplicity’: because it does not meet our fallen ideologies with a greater, obliterating ideology, but touches that ‘living remnant’ of our inner hope. ‘Mystery’: because what it does next is take that inner hope and redirects it from the star in the sky to the Christ Child Who was born beneath that star. So that, like some aeons-old potential difference being made up at last, we feel the arcing sparking justice of this. And all at once our lives are rendered truly beautiful again. Enlarged, and not reduced, because we are no longer distracted and making idols of soulless things like stars, but loving Christ. That is to say: we are restored into the proper love of ourselves.

If Benedict has been an Augustinian scholar all this time, exhibiting Augustine as his muse and master, then I want to suggest that it is because he has always been thinking and working for this chance:

All kinds of factors could have combined to generate the idea that the language of the star contained a message of hope. But none of this would have prompted people to set off on a journey, unless they were people of inner unrest, people of hope, people on the lookout for the true star of salvation. The men of whom Matthew speaks were not just astronomers. There were ‘wise’. They represent the inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God and hence ‘philosophy’ in the original sense of the word. Wisdom, then, serves to purify the message of ‘science’: the rationality of that message does not remain at the level of intellectual knowledge, but seeks understanding in its fullness, and so raises reason to its loftiest possibilities. ³³