Augustine Reconsiderations

Augustine

Reconsiderations

From his writings it is clear how this bishop beloved by God lived his life, as far as the light of truth was granted him, in the faith, hope, and charity of the catholic church, and those who read what he has written about the things of God can profit thereby. But I think that those who could hear and see him speaking before them in the church could profit more from him, especially those who knew how he lived among men."[1] So wrote Augustine's friend and biographer, Possidius, not long after the old bishop died (28 August 430). He felt what every reader of Augustine has known, the inadequacy of trying to hear the message of this man through the written word alone. Every powerful writer is doomed in this way to outlive his own grave, and to suffer the transformations and deformations that later generations impose on one who is no longer able to protest aloud.

For fifteen and a half centuries, Augustine's words have gone on being read and misread, gone on fueling controversy and lending comfort. Whatever those words meant in his lifetime, and whatever their role in the controversies of the day, they have meant more and exercised more influence since their author's death than before. The history of Augustine's posthumous readership is a part of any attempt to grasp the character of his thought.

Augustine's own last contributions played an important role in shaping and directing posterity's judgment of him. Augustine had lived long enough to see optimistic phrases of his youth thrown up in his face by the Pelagians and their allies. He felt deeply the gaps that separated past from present and present from future. We have seen how the "historical" part of the Confessions, the painstaking archaeological investigation of his own past, was meant to put that past to rest and in so doing to clear the stage for what would follow. For Augustine, all human life is preface to a future the human imagination can scarcely grasp; so at every point, the whole past becomes preface anew and the future, whole and entire, remains.

Because Augustine continued to grasp the freshness of the future and refused to accept the finality of the past, he maintained with surprising vitality in old age not only the convictions that had fired him in the fervor of conversion, but even the tenacious power to explore their implications further. This attitude produced what deserves to be recognized as the first work

in the history of Augustinian scholarship; it is a book called the Retractationes (in English, best perhaps as Reconsiderations).

In 427, Augustine reopened the excavation into his own past, in a way almost as remarkable as that which produced the Confessions: he set out to catalogue his own works, part of a project that was to include a complete register of his letters and sermons as well as his formal literary products. Only the first stage of the catalogue was completed in the form of the Reconsiderations we have, but it is to that work, along with an index compiled by Possidius shortly afterwards, that we owe not only our knowledge of the identity and scope of Augustine's works, but even to some extent the very survival of those works. No other ancient author came equipped with so detailed a list of his works for medieval scholars to use in searching out copies with which to supply their libraries. The works had therefore a better chance of survival.

But Augustine was not content merely to catalogue the past. He also reviewed it. For every work listed, he says something of the circumstances of composition and publication and adds something of the corrections and amendments that, in his old age, he found necessary. A fair number of these alterations treat points that had come into controversy since the rise of the Pelagian movement, but the corrections are scarcely limited to such clarifications.

The Reconsiderations offer a final open chapter in an intellectual autobiography: "The reader who reads my works in the order in which they were written may learn something of how I progressed as I wrote them."[2] The ideas and themes of Augustine's past literary works were not for him dead accomplishments of his past, but living testimonies to faith. As such they were subject to change and improvement as much as he was. The Reconsiderations retroactively turn every one of Augustine's works into a kind of preface of its own. What is important is not that the works were written at some dead time in the past, but that they continued to be read. What matters is not his achievement in writing the works, but the reader's enlightenment on encountering them. To that end, improvement, revision, clarification, and correction all had a role to play. Confession and reconsideration go hand in hand.

The old Augustine observing the young Augustine at a distance, qualifying and rephrasing but for the most part affirming: he is not a bad model for his later students to follow. Not all of his readers have been so indulgent to his faults, though to be sure not all have been so cautiously attentive to the nuances of what he said.[3]

Augustine's death did not transform his readers overnight from partisans to scholars. The debates that had begun over grace and freedom in his lifetime lingered, to divide and embarrass his followers. He was defended, vociferously--perhaps too vociverously, against the criticisms of the Gaulish monks, by Prosper of Aquitaine (d. c. 463), but he was also the thinly veiled target of an influential pamphlet, the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lйrins (d. c. 450), who proclaimed that Christian doctrine consisted in what had been taught "always, everywhere, by everybody"--and hence by implication did not include novel ideas about predestination propagated by African bishops. Behind both these relatively minor figures stood the charismatic and magisterial authority of Augustine's contemporary, John Cassian, a veteran of eastern monastic discipline who had settled in Gaul and wrote two tremendously influential collections of essays on the monastic life, his Institutes and Conferences; his authority and his restraint were equally influential in keeping the controversy within remarkable bounds of toleration. Schism was avoided. Eventually the cause of Augustine's doctrine was taken up by the greatest Latin preacher of the early church after Augustine, Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), who shepherded the bishops of Gaul through an important council in Orange (in 529) at which the essence of the Augustinian doctrine was affirmed even while certain doctrines (particularly that of double predestination) were foresworn without