Augustine and Tradition by David G. Hunter;Jonathan P. Yates;

Author:David G. Hunter;Jonathan P. Yates;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: INscribe Digital
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Augustine was, like many people at other times and in other places, “forever caught up in the flow of the current moment, not just freighted with the icy inventory of the past.”103 His moment was one characterized by the significant cultural realignments that accompanied Christianity’s recent rise to social and political prominence, transformations initiated decades earlier by Constantine’s choices and policies but accelerating rapidly during Augustine’s Theodosian age. For almost all of Augustine’s career-minded and ambitious Western contemporaries—regardless of their religious affiliations—the past was an imaginative realm textured above all else by the works of those canonized Latin authors who dominated the school system through a pedagogy that rewarded verbal fluency and prioritized the enarratio poetarum. Christians, like the son of Monica and Patricius, had no viable alternative. Certainly, over time and as circumstances dictated, Augustine added new texts and authors to his “classical reading,” searching out other poets (Lucretius, Persius, Horace, and Lucan), digesting Cicero’s philosophical and political dialogues, delving into the books of the Platonists (as well as the books of the Manichaeans), and reading intently Livy’s history Ab urbe condita. And he discovered other pasts stored away in Christian scripture and within the pages of earlier Latin Christian writers such as Tertullian and Lactantius, men who had in like manner—though in a different age—observed the world from a cultural divide. Yet the tally of Augustine’s testimonia stands witness to the abiding influence of his school days, as teacher as well as student. As the tides of dilemma, debate, and controversy swirled within and around him, Vergil and Cicero were seldom long absent from his thought. As he scanned the immediate and far reaches of the future, those authors continued to cast light forward.

Consequently, during his last years, mired in acrimonious debate over concupiscence and original sin with the glib Julian of Eclanum, for whom Paulinus of Nola had once penned a wedding poem thoroughly scrubbed of the old gods,104 Augustine would have recourse again to the larger-than-life figures who had been his companions for so many decades. In the fourth book of the Contra Iulianum (c. Iul.), Cicero and Sallust, Terence and Vergil all reappear.105 Hortensius was called into service to rebut Julian’s own “crowd of philosophers.”106 Vergil was quoted to verify the difference between basic hunger (fames) and an extravagant love of eating (edendi amor).107 Certainly, here as elsewhere scriptural citations outweigh Augustine’s classical allusions and quotations, but the very presence of the latter in the Contra Iulianum is witness to their abiding influence on Augustine’s patterns of thought. In this sense, his exchange with the Christian Julian of Eclanum overlaps his earlier debate with the cultivated pagan Nectarius of Calama, against whose claims of (misplaced) patriotism Augustine enlisted both Cicero (via Rep.) and that “most illustrious poet of your literature.”108 The possessive adjective (uestrarum) may have been intended to distance Augustine safely from Vergil, but it belies just how long and how profoundly the Aeneid spoke to Augustine of values and ideas whose vibrancy seems never to have dulled.

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