Augustine and Tradition

Influences, Contexts, Legacy

David G. Hunter,Jonathan P. Yates

• Verlag: Eerdmans
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467462648
• Thema: Théologie et religion
• Thema: Théologie chrétienne

An indispensable resource for those looking to understand Augustine's place in religious and cultural heritage

Augustine towers over Western life, literature, and culture—both sacred and secular. His ideas permeate conceptions of the self from birth to death and have cast a long shadow over subsequent Christian thought. But as much as tradition has sprung from Augustinian roots, so was Augustine a product of and interlocutor with traditions that preceded and ran contemporary to his life.

This extensive volume examines and evaluates Augustine as both a receiver and a source of tradition. The contributors—all distinguished Augustinian scholars influenced by J. Patout Burns and interested in furthering his intellectual legacy—survey Augustine's life and writings in the context of North African tradition, philosophical and literary traditions of antiquity, the Greek patristic tradition, and the tradition of Augustine's Latin contemporaries. These various pieces, when assembled, tell a comprehensive story of Augustine's significance, both then and now. Contributors: Alden Bass, Michael Cameron, John C. Cavadini, Thomas Clemmons, Stephen A. Cooper, Theodore de Bruyn, Mark DelCogliano, Geoffrey D. Dunn, John Peter Kenney, Brian Matz, Andrew McGowan, William Tabbernee, Joseph W. Trigg, Dennis Trout, and James R. Wetzel.

PART I

Augustine and the North African Tradition

Chapter 1

AUGUSTINE’S RHETORICAL READING OF GENESIS IN CONFESSIONES 11–12

Michael Cameron

INTRODUCTION: THE PUZZLE OF SCRIPTURE’S FUNCTION IN CONFESSIONES

Augustine dapples Confessiones (conf.) with so many scripture quotations, fragments, allusions, evocations, and echoes—more than 1,500 by one count¹—that he can seem to muffle his own voice. Augustine tells us that, at the time of writing, scripture was his constant waking companion; practically speaking, so must it be for readers who wish to enter the depths of his book. Yet they must not merely note the citations as tools of proof, walls of defense, or types of allegory. Scripture is existentially vital, even visceral to Augustine in Confessiones; he clings to it as a drowning man clutches driftwood, not merely quoting it but digesting and transforming it into his personal idiom in a way that invites the reader to do the same. Grasping scripture’s function in this work therefore calls for something different and more comprehensive than making lists, something that will make sense of Augustine’s experience and strategy in using it the way he does.

Two big questions arise from scripture’s appearance in Confessiones. First, how does Augustine come to understand the texts so as to frame and advance his story? This is a hermeneutical question. Second, how does he present the texts so as to teach and persuade readers toward his ends? This is a rhetorical question. The two questions can be distinguished but not separated; each deeply implicates the other. Getting a handle on Augustine’s use of scripture in Confessiones will require broad examination from different angles.

I limit this chapter to investigating books 11–12, which form something of a unity for their intense focus on a single text, Gen. 1:1: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” The chapter imports a template from recent scholarship called “hermeneutical rhetoric” as a tool to explore a fresh approach to Augustine’s reading of this text in these two books.

Setting Context for Scripture’s Function in Confessiones

The heavy use of scripture in Confessiones calls for framing within the context of Augustine’s purpose for writing and awareness of his audience. This emerges briefly at the start of book 11’s examination of reasons for writing as Augustine turns from autobiographical storytelling to his close reading of Genesis: “I do it to arouse my own loving devotion towards you, and that of my readers.”² Thomas F. Martin, drawing on the work of Pierre Hadot, discerns a pedagogy in Confessiones in Augustine’s construction of “spiritual exercises.”³ Annemaré Kotzé, following Erich Feldmann and others, speaks broadly of Augustine’s purpose to produce a “protreptic” that aims “to change both the worldview and the conduct of the addressee.”⁴ Knowing scripture—that is, learning to surrender to its formative grace and power—is the modus operandi of this change (i.e., conversion). Hence Confessiones not only cites the Bible but also models ways of reading it. Each citation trains apprentices to read alongside Augustine as he tells his story and stages performative scripture readings for them to imitate. Augustine uses biblical fragments as small hermeneutical footbridges over which readers may carry their stories into Augustine’s biblically inspirited story, and thus cross over into scripture for themselves.

The scriptural fragments appear as part of a story he tells about his developing relationship to the Bible itself, a long twisting journey that eventually arrives at the perspective from which Confessiones is written. He stumbles out of the gate onto that rocky road, first rejecting the Bible, then distorting it, before reorienting to it, accepting it, and finally embracing and savoring it. In so doing Augustine imitates the unforgettable text that had wooed him to seek wisdom as an older adolescent, Cicero’s Hortensius, a book that had changed his young feelings and prayers to God. That encounter leads to a first experimental reading of the Bible that ends badly and sets off a decade’s downward spiral. But when Ambrose reverses and expands his thinking about scripture, it sets the stage for Augustine’s biblically induced embrace of Nicene Christianity. Thereafter Augustine immerses himself in biblical texts, especially the Psalms, and he passes through the gates of the new “world of the text” that scripture opens up.⁵ He invites readers to enter that world with him, offering in the final three books of Confessiones to immerse readers in the book of Genesis and to take a sustained look into his life and thinking beneath scripture’s load-bearing sky-dome.⁶ There is revealed the full perspective from which Confessiones has been written, which has merged genres of protreptic, spiritual exercises, and Christian storytelling with rhetorically appropriated biblical fragments. This embeds the scriptural subplot of his individual turn to God within the larger story of the cosmic turn to God told in scripture, “from the beginning when you made heaven and earth to that everlasting reign when we shall be with you in your holy city.”⁷

Scripture Reading for Self-Understanding

What sort of scriptural “world” does Augustine arrive at in the latter books of Confessiones? Augustine himself writes of the dual structure of Confessiones in his retrospective Retractationes (retr.), where he says that the first part, books 1–10, comes “from my own life,” and the second part, books 11–13, “from sacred Scripture.”⁸ Older scholarship tended to prioritize part 1’s vivid narrative, even if that turns part 2 into a dry and virtually unintelligible addendum that goes off the exegetical rails. Recent scholarship reverses this view, positing books 11–13 as the work’s climax and books 1–10 as an extended narrative introduction. In this perspective, Augustine’s story moves from pagan literature to holy scripture⁹ and emerges into the world opened up by scripture as “the outcome of the journey” toward self-understanding.¹⁰

At the beginning of book 11 Augustine shifts gears. Declining to continue his narrative into his immediate postbaptismal story, Augustine focuses instead on the marvels of reading scripture as the one thing he considers still worth telling about his life. But the perspective achieved narratively with this “arrival” has been operative all through Confessiones; the same spiritually remade man who plumbs the depths of Genesis in part 2 also fashions the narrative of part 1. Thus there exists “a direct relation between the two parts”: part 1’s confession of sin and praise depends on part 2’s perspective looking out from within scripture’s world, “for the only one who can gain access to such a confession is the self that allows itself to be instructed and judged by Scripture.”¹¹ This tightly wound circular unity means that the “place of arrival is at the same time a point of departure. For the reading of scripture is the very mainspring of the work [emphasis added]: indeed, it is what makes possible the new self-comprehension that Augustine presents in the Confessiones.”¹² In testimony to this circularity, many note that Augustine’s wonderstruck praise in the opening line of Confessiones (“Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise” (a composite of Ps 47:2 [48:1], 95[96]:4, and 144[145]:3) reappears at the beginning of book 11. The difference is his later explicit inclusion of his reading community. The Psalms mosaic in book 1 launches Augustine’s individualized story, whereas book 11 hopes that “together we may declare” its words—that is, to co-inhabit the Psalms within a shared space of soul.¹³ Books 11 and 12 train readers to offer the same full-throated confession of love and praise for God that moved Augustine to write in the first place. In so doing, he hopes, readers will commence writing their own editions of Confessiones.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ROLE OF RHETORIC

Augustine’s concern for his audience draws our attention to strategies of communication in Confessiones; the mosaic of scriptural texts-within-texts is one of these. It is easy to overlook the importance of such rhetorical strategies in Augustine, either by reducing them to abstract principles (e.g., from book 4 of De doctrina christiana) or by demoting them as mere decoration, manipulative “performance,” or even outright deception. Recent studies, however, have begun to attend to the substantive role played by rhetoric in ancient exegesis and theology.¹⁴ Jean Doignon has observed, “A new movement seems to be dawning which consists of envisioning, using a much wider angle than that of figures [of style], the impact of rhetoric upon apologetic, exegesis, and even Christian theology; we reach toward clarifying the ways and means of these fields of knowledge by means of the schemas of inuentio and dispositio.”¹⁵ Inuentio and dispositio represent the first two of five parts or stages in classical rhetorical composition: invention (inuentio), arrangement (dispositio), style (elocutio), memory (memoria), and delivery (actio).

Jacques Ollier reads the latter books of Confessiones through the lens of Isabelle Bochet’s insight into Augustine’s exegesis for self-understanding in order to analyze the specific role of rhetorical arrangement, dispositio. Augustine writes to train his audience, says Ollier, not merely to impress with style, but in order “to form an ideal reader” who is capable of doing biblical exegesis of the primordial days (of creation), and “thereby to interpret himself.”¹⁶ Books 11 and 12 prepare readers to follow Augustine’s way of reading scripture about to take center stage in book 13. Ollier notes that Augustine’s series of precise moves shows a “progression of rhetorical argumentation that establishes the reader in a movement that constrains him or her to move from one point to another.” This “curvature [courbure] of Augustinian thought” defines his approach, writes Olli...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• List of Abbreviations
• I. Augustine and the North African Tradition
• II. Augustine and the Philosophical and Literary Tradition
• III. Augustine and the Greek Patristic Tradition
• IV. Augustine and His Latin Contemporaries/Successors
• Bibliography
• List of Editors and Contributors