Abstracts
Augustiniana 69(2019)
The aim of this article is to provide an account of the development of Augustine’s theory of sense-perception in his early dialogues. First, I will compare two of Augustine’s early discussions on sense-perception that are found in De quantitate animae (387/388) and De musica (387/391), and determine the development in his theory of sensation that occurred between the two works. Then I will contextualize Augustine’s theory of sensation in relation to its philosophical background, thus aiming to account for Augustine’s motives and philosophical assumptions behind the development of the theory. The conclusion of this article is that Augustine’s theory of sensation developed from a largely Plotinian view in De quantitate animae, which sees sensation as the soul’s rather 'passive' awareness of bodily affections, into the theory of De musica book VI. In the latter work, sense-perception is seen as an interplay between sensory affections and the soul’s attentive reaction to them, which makes the relationship between the soul and the external world more reciprocal than before. This in turn implies a more fundamental change in Augustine’s way to see the relationship between the soul and the external world.
key words
Sense-perception - Epistemology - Neoplatonism - De quantitate animae - De musica
Repentance emerged as an important theme in Augustine’s works as early as 392 and continued to attract his attention for the rest of his life. While in Augustine’s later works his interest in repentance as a sacramental rite was largely stimulated by his responsibility as a bishop for the reconciliation of sinners, in early works written during the time of Augustine’s priesthood, significant attention is devoted to the personal dimension of penance. This essay explores Augustine’s discourse on penance as a process of personal moral renewal, based on the works he wrote during his priesthood. After reviewing the background and context of Augustine’s thinking on repentance, the article discusses three topics, namely, the relation between penance and will, emotions in the contrite soul, and the role of humility in the process of moral renewal. It will be shown that Augustine’s insight in human psychology resulted in a profound understanding of the moral dimension of penance.
key words
Augustine - Penance in the early Church - Emotions - Heart
This article provides a critical edition of Augustine’s Sermo 2 on Abraham and Isaac. The text of this sermon has come down to us incomplete, since the longest version, provided by the collection Sancti catholici patres (s. XII), is not more but a composition of the mutilated text of the Collectio Lugdunensis (cc. an. 700) and an excerpt in Bede’s Collectanea in Apostolum. Thus, to the difference of the previous edition by Lambot (CCSL 41A), the collection Sancti catholici patres cannot be invoked as an independent textual witness and the critical edition has to be based only on the Collectio Lugdunensis and Bede’s excerpts. This new evaluation of the transmission requires several modifications of the text. In addition, this article compares the structure and motives of Sermo 2 to Sermo 2A, a homily on Abraham and Isaac that was recently reascribed to Augustine.
key words
Augustinus - Abraham - Isaac - Sermones ad populum (Sermo 2, Sermo 2A) - Transmission (Collectio Lugdunensis, Bede, Sancti catholici patres)
The study of St. Augustine’s sermons has developed, over the last three decades, into a dynamic part of the field of patristics. Still, this category of Augustine’s oeuvre presents a number of challenges that complicate significant progress for several promising avenues of research into Augustine’s preaching. This article first offers a status quaestionis on Augustinian sermon studies since the year 2000. In a second part, the author addresses the issues scholars of Augustine’s preaching face: (a) access to a reliable text, (b) the size, dispersal and uneven identification of the corpus, (c) the problem of authentic versus inauthentic, (d) the distance between patristic sermon studies and medieval sermon studies. Finally, the article reviews resources – both existing and still in development – that can help scholars harness the full potential of the rich corpus of sermons attributed to the Bishop of Hippo: (a) the updated critical text of the sermons in Brepols’ Library of Latin Texts; (b) existing tools to make sense of the different versions of (pseudo-)Augustine’s sermons such as Gryson’s Répertoire général des auteurs ecclésiastiques latins de l’Antiquité et du Haut Moyen Âge and Machielsen’s Clavis Patristica Pseudepigraphorum Medii Aevi; (c) a recently started project to create a digital network of medieval manuscripts that transmit patristic sermon collections (PASSIM).
key words
Augustine - Sermons - Preaching - Sermones ad populum - Early Christian preaching - Medieval preaching - Patristics - Pseudo-epigraphic writings of the Church Fathers - Manuscript studies - Transmission studies - Reception studies - Digital humanities - Philology - Network analysis - Caesarius of Arles - Textual criticism - Paul the Deacon - Alanus of Farfa - Maurists
This article consists in a critical edition of Jacobus de Viterbio’s 27th Question on divine predicaments. This question reads 'Whether truth can be predicated of God'. James of Viterbo answers the question in the positive, pointing out the different ways in which 'truth' can be predicated altogether, before applying the predicate to God. According to James, truth is said of God in a threefold way: (1) as a description of God’s mode of being, (2) as a description of the relation ad intra (between the divine Persons, with the Son as the Veritas corresponding to the Father), and (3) as a description ad extra, in two ways: when we as images of God correspond to God’s being, or when our mental representation of God corresponds to God’s own essence. The edition is based on a full collation of the five extant manuscript witnesses, leading to a new assessment of the textual tradition.
key words
Divina predicamets - Truth - James de Viterbo - Divine essence - Critical text edition
School theatre constituted an inherent part of the educational programmes of religious orders such as the Jesuits and the Augustinians in early modern Europe. Yet whereas Jesuit drama is currently a flourishing area of Neo-Latin scholarship, research on Augustinian school theatre is still very much in its infancy. The main reason for this striking imbalance is the apparent lack of surviving Augustinian material: while playbills have only been preserved in fairly low numbers, complete Augustinian school plays even seem to be close to non-existent. This article deals with the rediscovery of a corpus of seventeenth-century Latin school plays which, it argues, are to be attributed to the Augustinian college of Ghent. After a brief contextualisation and an overview of the plays, it presents the various pieces of evidence in support of this attribution and discusses the significance of investigating the often overlooked intertextual relationships to contemporary Neo-Latin drama which tend to be present in school plays.
key words
Neo-Latin drama - Ghent - Augustinian college - Seventeenth century - Complete maunscripts - Intertextuality - Jacobus Zevecotius
While scholars gesture to Augustine’s critical stance toward Cicero’s political thought, little has been said in the affirmative concerning the substantive Ciceronian contribution to the basic precepts of Augustinian political theory. Against this common perception, we argue that the distinction between the basic categories of the 'social' and the 'political' realms, which is vital to Augustine’s thought in the City of God and elsewhere in his corpus, reflects a Christianized version of a conceptual division articulated by Cicero in numerous of his writings. In particular, both embrace the idea that the political sphere results from the inability of 'natural' social interaction, based purely on a principle of justice, to be sustained. Thus coercive mechanisms are necessary as remediation for conflict that would otherwise destroy humanity. On the basis of our analysis, we conclude that an important backdrop to Augustinian political theory may be found in key features of Cicero’s thought. Our paper is not an exercise in tracing sources per se, but rather an effort to make an intellectual connection that some previous scholars have briefly alluded to but not analyzed and defended in any detail. We also employ our interpretation to critique a recent trend in Augustinian scholarship – which actually has its origins in St. Thomas Aquinas – of ascribing an Aristotelian element to Augustine’s theory.
key words
Cicero - St. Augustine - Social - Political - The Fall - Christianity
Le dossier patristique contenu dans le Contra Iulianum I et II, est le plus ample ensemble de testimonia patristiques utilisés par Augustin et l’un des premiers florilèges patristiques. Augustin a rassemblé luimême le dossier patristique, en réponse à ses adversaires. Les extraits rassemblés sont de trois types: issus d’œuvres connues intégralement, issus de collections de textes, ou issus de recueils d’extraits préexistants. Dans tous les cas, il s’avère qu’Augustin n’a pas recouru à un dossier déjà élaboré.
The patristic dossier contained within the Contra Iulianum I and II constitutes the largest set of patristic testimonies used by Augustine as well as one of the first patristic florilegia. Augustine himself assembled the dossier in response to his opponents. The extracts gathered are of three types: those derived from works which are known in full; those derived from collections of texts; and those derived from preexisting compilations of extracts. In any case, it is clear that Augustine did not make use of an already developed dossier.
key words
Augustine - Julian of Aeclanum - Tradition - Heresiology
Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei is a sizeable work, with a complex and incompletely understood textual tradition. In attempting to elucidate such a complex tradition, not only the text, but also its paratexts need to be considered. This article explores how marginal annotations that were copied with the text of De ciuitate Dei can be used to further understand its textual tradition. The article examines five series of annotations found in more than one copy of the text, and argues that these can be used to formulate hypotheses about the relationships of the De ciuitate Dei copies they are found in, and to approximately date and place these manuscripts in the tradition.
key words
De civitate Dei - Manuscripts - Annotations - Textual tradition
This paper analyzes Hugolinus of Orvieto’s treatise on the perfection of species, which was written around 1348-1349, and compares Hugolinus’s main theses with the positions of other theologians of the same period. The first part of the paper examines the main concepts (nobility, latitude, degree) that Hugolinus uses to present his conclusions. Then, the views of Hugolinus on the order of perfections and the way to measure them are studied in comparison with previous approaches to the same problem (in particular those of John of Mirecourt and Peter of Ceffons). The final part of the paper indicates how the weaknesses of Hugolinus’s positions explain to a certain extent the theories that John of Ripa and Jacques Legrand will develop concerning the problem of specific perfections.
key words
Huglinus of Orvieto - Perfection of species - Specific degrees - Latitude - Intension of forms - John of Ripa - Jacques Legrand
In his Vetera Analecta (1675), the French Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon was the first to distinguish between the two Augustinian florilegia on the Apostle Paul compiled by the Venerable Bede and by Florus of Lyons, and to draw attention to two manuscripts from Bede’s unpublished Collectio in Apostolum. By putting this discovery in its historical context and in relation to Mabillon’s works and travels in the 1670s, this article shows that the two manuscripts described by Mabillon were two manuscripts from the Abbey of Saint-Bertin (at Saint-Omer), one of which is now lost. From the indications given by Mabillon and other medieval and modern sources, it is possible to reconstruct the content and understand the textual value of this lost Carolingian manuscript.
key words
Augustinian florilegia - Manuscript transmission - Maurist scholarship - Venerable Bede
- Eetu MANNINEN, From awareness to activity : the development of the active theory of sensation in Augustine's early works. Augustiniana 69(2019)1 : 7-27
The aim of this article is to provide an account of the development of Augustine’s theory of sense-perception in his early dialogues. First, I will compare two of Augustine’s early discussions on sense-perception that are found in De quantitate animae (387/388) and De musica (387/391), and determine the development in his theory of sensation that occurred between the two works. Then I will contextualize Augustine’s theory of sensation in relation to its philosophical background, thus aiming to account for Augustine’s motives and philosophical assumptions behind the development of the theory. The conclusion of this article is that Augustine’s theory of sensation developed from a largely Plotinian view in De quantitate animae, which sees sensation as the soul’s rather 'passive' awareness of bodily affections, into the theory of De musica book VI. In the latter work, sense-perception is seen as an interplay between sensory affections and the soul’s attentive reaction to them, which makes the relationship between the soul and the external world more reciprocal than before. This in turn implies a more fundamental change in Augustine’s way to see the relationship between the soul and the external world.
key words
Sense-perception - Epistemology - Neoplatonism - De quantitate animae - De musica
- Evgenia MOISEEVA, The inner life of sinners : Saint Augustine on penance as disciplina morum. Augustiniana 69(2019)1 : 29-54
Repentance emerged as an important theme in Augustine’s works as early as 392 and continued to attract his attention for the rest of his life. While in Augustine’s later works his interest in repentance as a sacramental rite was largely stimulated by his responsibility as a bishop for the reconciliation of sinners, in early works written during the time of Augustine’s priesthood, significant attention is devoted to the personal dimension of penance. This essay explores Augustine’s discourse on penance as a process of personal moral renewal, based on the works he wrote during his priesthood. After reviewing the background and context of Augustine’s thinking on repentance, the article discusses three topics, namely, the relation between penance and will, emotions in the contrite soul, and the role of humility in the process of moral renewal. It will be shown that Augustine’s insight in human psychology resulted in a profound understanding of the moral dimension of penance.
key words
Augustine - Penance in the early Church - Emotions - Heart
- Clemens WEIDMANN, Et potest hoc iubere Deus? Abraham und Isaak in den Predigten des Augustinus. Mit einer Neuedition von Augustinus. Sermo 2. Augustiniana 69(2019)1 : 55-81
This article provides a critical edition of Augustine’s Sermo 2 on Abraham and Isaac. The text of this sermon has come down to us incomplete, since the longest version, provided by the collection Sancti catholici patres (s. XII), is not more but a composition of the mutilated text of the Collectio Lugdunensis (cc. an. 700) and an excerpt in Bede’s Collectanea in Apostolum. Thus, to the difference of the previous edition by Lambot (CCSL 41A), the collection Sancti catholici patres cannot be invoked as an independent textual witness and the critical edition has to be based only on the Collectio Lugdunensis and Bede’s excerpts. This new evaluation of the transmission requires several modifications of the text. In addition, this article compares the structure and motives of Sermo 2 to Sermo 2A, a homily on Abraham and Isaac that was recently reascribed to Augustine.
key words
Augustinus - Abraham - Isaac - Sermones ad populum (Sermo 2, Sermo 2A) - Transmission (Collectio Lugdunensis, Bede, Sancti catholici patres)
- Shari BOODTS, Navigating the vast tradition of St. Augustine's Sermons : Old instruments and new approaches. Augustiniana 69(2019)1 : 83-115
The study of St. Augustine’s sermons has developed, over the last three decades, into a dynamic part of the field of patristics. Still, this category of Augustine’s oeuvre presents a number of challenges that complicate significant progress for several promising avenues of research into Augustine’s preaching. This article first offers a status quaestionis on Augustinian sermon studies since the year 2000. In a second part, the author addresses the issues scholars of Augustine’s preaching face: (a) access to a reliable text, (b) the size, dispersal and uneven identification of the corpus, (c) the problem of authentic versus inauthentic, (d) the distance between patristic sermon studies and medieval sermon studies. Finally, the article reviews resources – both existing and still in development – that can help scholars harness the full potential of the rich corpus of sermons attributed to the Bishop of Hippo: (a) the updated critical text of the sermons in Brepols’ Library of Latin Texts; (b) existing tools to make sense of the different versions of (pseudo-)Augustine’s sermons such as Gryson’s Répertoire général des auteurs ecclésiastiques latins de l’Antiquité et du Haut Moyen Âge and Machielsen’s Clavis Patristica Pseudepigraphorum Medii Aevi; (c) a recently started project to create a digital network of medieval manuscripts that transmit patristic sermon collections (PASSIM).
key words
Augustine - Sermons - Preaching - Sermones ad populum - Early Christian preaching - Medieval preaching - Patristics - Pseudo-epigraphic writings of the Church Fathers - Manuscript studies - Transmission studies - Reception studies - Digital humanities - Philology - Network analysis - Caesarius of Arles - Textual criticism - Paul the Deacon - Alanus of Farfa - Maurists
- Gerd VAN RIEL & Eelco YPMA, Jacobus de Viterbo, Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis. Quaestio XXVII. Augustiniana 69(2019)1 : 117-165
This article consists in a critical edition of Jacobus de Viterbio’s 27th Question on divine predicaments. This question reads 'Whether truth can be predicated of God'. James of Viterbo answers the question in the positive, pointing out the different ways in which 'truth' can be predicated altogether, before applying the predicate to God. According to James, truth is said of God in a threefold way: (1) as a description of God’s mode of being, (2) as a description of the relation ad intra (between the divine Persons, with the Son as the Veritas corresponding to the Father), and (3) as a description ad extra, in two ways: when we as images of God correspond to God’s being, or when our mental representation of God corresponds to God’s own essence. The edition is based on a full collation of the five extant manuscript witnesses, leading to a new assessment of the textual tradition.
key words
Divina predicamets - Truth - James de Viterbo - Divine essence - Critical text edition
- Nicholas DE SUTTER, Lost and found : Latin school drama at the Augustinian college of Ghent. Augustiniana 69(2019)1 : 167-211
School theatre constituted an inherent part of the educational programmes of religious orders such as the Jesuits and the Augustinians in early modern Europe. Yet whereas Jesuit drama is currently a flourishing area of Neo-Latin scholarship, research on Augustinian school theatre is still very much in its infancy. The main reason for this striking imbalance is the apparent lack of surviving Augustinian material: while playbills have only been preserved in fairly low numbers, complete Augustinian school plays even seem to be close to non-existent. This article deals with the rediscovery of a corpus of seventeenth-century Latin school plays which, it argues, are to be attributed to the Augustinian college of Ghent. After a brief contextualisation and an overview of the plays, it presents the various pieces of evidence in support of this attribution and discusses the significance of investigating the often overlooked intertextual relationships to contemporary Neo-Latin drama which tend to be present in school plays.
key words
Neo-Latin drama - Ghent - Augustinian college - Seventeenth century - Complete maunscripts - Intertextuality - Jacobus Zevecotius
- Cary J. NEDERMANN & Kasey Khoobiar MARTINEZ, A leap from innocence : Cicero and Augustine on the relationship between the "social" and the "political". Augustiniana 69(2019)2 : 213-238
While scholars gesture to Augustine’s critical stance toward Cicero’s political thought, little has been said in the affirmative concerning the substantive Ciceronian contribution to the basic precepts of Augustinian political theory. Against this common perception, we argue that the distinction between the basic categories of the 'social' and the 'political' realms, which is vital to Augustine’s thought in the City of God and elsewhere in his corpus, reflects a Christianized version of a conceptual division articulated by Cicero in numerous of his writings. In particular, both embrace the idea that the political sphere results from the inability of 'natural' social interaction, based purely on a principle of justice, to be sustained. Thus coercive mechanisms are necessary as remediation for conflict that would otherwise destroy humanity. On the basis of our analysis, we conclude that an important backdrop to Augustinian political theory may be found in key features of Cicero’s thought. Our paper is not an exercise in tracing sources per se, but rather an effort to make an intellectual connection that some previous scholars have briefly alluded to but not analyzed and defended in any detail. We also employ our interpretation to critique a recent trend in Augustinian scholarship – which actually has its origins in St. Thomas Aquinas – of ascribing an Aristotelian element to Augustine’s theory.
key words
Cicero - St. Augustine - Social - Political - The Fall - Christianity
- Mickaël RIBREAU, La constitution du dossier patristique du Contra Iulianum d'Augustin. Augustiniana 69(2019)2 : 239-275
Le dossier patristique contenu dans le Contra Iulianum I et II, est le plus ample ensemble de testimonia patristiques utilisés par Augustin et l’un des premiers florilèges patristiques. Augustin a rassemblé luimême le dossier patristique, en réponse à ses adversaires. Les extraits rassemblés sont de trois types: issus d’œuvres connues intégralement, issus de collections de textes, ou issus de recueils d’extraits préexistants. Dans tous les cas, il s’avère qu’Augustin n’a pas recouru à un dossier déjà élaboré.
The patristic dossier contained within the Contra Iulianum I and II constitutes the largest set of patristic testimonies used by Augustine as well as one of the first patristic florilegia. Augustine himself assembled the dossier in response to his opponents. The extracts gathered are of three types: those derived from works which are known in full; those derived from collections of texts; and those derived from preexisting compilations of extracts. In any case, it is clear that Augustine did not make use of an already developed dossier.
key words
Augustine - Julian of Aeclanum - Tradition - Heresiology
- Jesse KESKIAHO, Copied marginal annotations and the early history of Augustine's De civitate Dei. Augustiniana 69(2019)2 : 277-298
Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei is a sizeable work, with a complex and incompletely understood textual tradition. In attempting to elucidate such a complex tradition, not only the text, but also its paratexts need to be considered. This article explores how marginal annotations that were copied with the text of De ciuitate Dei can be used to further understand its textual tradition. The article examines five series of annotations found in more than one copy of the text, and argues that these can be used to formulate hypotheses about the relationships of the De ciuitate Dei copies they are found in, and to approximately date and place these manuscripts in the tradition.
key words
De civitate Dei - Manuscripts - Annotations - Textual tradition
- Sylvain ROUDAUT, Hugolinus of Orvieto and the controversies about the perfection of species. Augustiniana 69(2019)2 : 299-331
This paper analyzes Hugolinus of Orvieto’s treatise on the perfection of species, which was written around 1348-1349, and compares Hugolinus’s main theses with the positions of other theologians of the same period. The first part of the paper examines the main concepts (nobility, latitude, degree) that Hugolinus uses to present his conclusions. Then, the views of Hugolinus on the order of perfections and the way to measure them are studied in comparison with previous approaches to the same problem (in particular those of John of Mirecourt and Peter of Ceffons). The final part of the paper indicates how the weaknesses of Hugolinus’s positions explain to a certain extent the theories that John of Ripa and Jacques Legrand will develop concerning the problem of specific perfections.
key words
Huglinus of Orvieto - Perfection of species - Specific degrees - Latitude - Intension of forms - John of Ripa - Jacques Legrand
- Jérémy DELMULLE, Note à propos de la Disquisitio de Mabillon sur les florilèges augustiniens de Bède et de Florus. Augustiniana 69(2019)2 : 333-354
In his Vetera Analecta (1675), the French Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon was the first to distinguish between the two Augustinian florilegia on the Apostle Paul compiled by the Venerable Bede and by Florus of Lyons, and to draw attention to two manuscripts from Bede’s unpublished Collectio in Apostolum. By putting this discovery in its historical context and in relation to Mabillon’s works and travels in the 1670s, this article shows that the two manuscripts described by Mabillon were two manuscripts from the Abbey of Saint-Bertin (at Saint-Omer), one of which is now lost. From the indications given by Mabillon and other medieval and modern sources, it is possible to reconstruct the content and understand the textual value of this lost Carolingian manuscript.
key words
Augustinian florilegia - Manuscript transmission - Maurist scholarship - Venerable Bede
- Book reviews. Augustiniana 69(2019)2 : 355-514
