The (Post)Modern Augustine

Aspects of His Reception from 1600 to 2000

An international and interdisciplinary collaborative Theme Group in the Humanities at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study 2008/2009 www.nias.knaw.nl

General Principles of the Theme Group

Augustine (354-430) is the most influential ecclesiastical writer in the Latin West. In many significant ways he established what were to become the principal outlines and foundations of Western theology. Moreover, his impact can also be observed in secular areas such as political theory, philosophy of history, psychology, semiotics, epistemology, social ethics, anthropology, and the literary imagination. It is characteristic of Augustine’s legacy that there often exists a discrepancy between what he said and how his authority was (mis)represented by later generations up to the very present, where Augustine plays a key-role in post-modern and postcolonial discourses. So far, scholars have studied closely Augustine’s reception in selected areas, especially the later Middle Ages and the Reformation, mostly staying within one discipline, particularly dogmatic history, and concentrating on Western culture.

However, not only are there significant gaps in the exploration of Augustinian reception but the status of Augustine’s iconicity is such that it makes it possible to use the exploration of his enormous ‘nachleben’ to pursue tasks and demonstrate issues of a much wider impact, like the (psychological, social, cultural) functions of such authorities, the importance of historical distance, and how the ‘career’ of such an individual authority enters into larger patterns of continuity and change in the history of ideas.

The NIAS theme group will tackle the challenging period of the 17th to 20th centuries. The individual members will concentrate on investigating selected strands of Augustine’s reception in the disciplines of Classics, systematic and historical theology, early modern history, political thought, ethics, and English literature. The main aim of the Leverhulme project in St Andrews on the reception of Augustine from 430 to 2000, directed by one of the team leaders (Prof. Pollmann), is the production of an encyclopedia, to be published by Oxford University Press, which will present the reception of Augustinian thought through the ages by means of articles on individual thinkers, on the reception of specific works of Augustine, and on major themes. The main aim of the theme group as a whole is to establish specific patterns and structures of Augustinian reception in the period from 1600 to 2000. This takes the Leverhulme project one step further as the group intends to work on a synthesis, theoretization, and meta-reflection of the work done so far, something the relatively fragmented lemmata written for the project by specialists all over the world cannot easily afford.

Composition of the Theme Group

History of Religion: Professor Hilmar Pabel (Simon Fraser University, Burnaby) will concentrate on Canisius' confessionalised reception of Augustine in the late 16th century. As his works were reprinted frequently in the 17th century, he is an important factor that shaped ensuing confessionalised approaches to patristic writers in general and to Augustine in particular.

Renaissance Humanism: Dr Arnoud Visser (St Andrews), Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Leverhulme project, is interested in the interaction between the intellectual culture and the confessionalizing world of the 17th century and how this is reflected in the way Augustine was received by humanists with their various scholarly methods and confessional preferences, resulting in sometimes diametrically opposed interpretations (e.g. F. Junius, A. Rivet in Leiden versus R. Tapper, C. Jansenius in Leuven).

Political Philosophy: Dr Diana Stanciu (Bucharest) will study the seemingly anachronistic revival of Augustine in the Oxford Movement of the early 19th century and reveal both its political and epistemological implications. This will imply looking at its attempts to reconcile patristic authority with the new historicist ideals, or, in other words, how they were trying to cope with the paradox of authority both as a source of inspiration and as a historically distant entity.

Literatures in English: Professor Peter Liebregts (Leiden) will analyze the various techniques of appropriating Augustine's Confessions and The City of God in selected literary texts in English from 1800 to 2000 (including T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, J.M. Coetzee) and how they are affected by the political and economic changes during this period.

Theological Ethics: Dr Christoph Baumgartner (Utrecht) will focus on the reception of Augustine's political thought, especially his bellum-iustum theory, in recent modern political theories of fundamentalists and pacifists, and how both camps can use Augustine as an authority.

Classics: Professor Karla Pollmann (St Andrews) intends to investigate strands of the reception of Augustine's Literal Commentary on Genesis from 1600 to 2000, with the aim of establishing a pattern of when which aspects of this work received more and when less attention, and for what reasons. Apart from illuminating the virtually unexplored reception of this major work in this period, her investigation will shed light on the perennial controversy between faith and reason.

Philosophy of Religion: Dr Maarten Wisse (Leuven) will explore Augustine's possible roles in interreligious dialogue. While 17th century Cocceius read Augustine in order to support the possibility of opening up Christianity towards other religions, a dominant feature of 20th century reception of Augustine seems to be an emphasis on the exclusivity and superiority of Christianity, as exemplified by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.