Confessions by Saint Augustine

Author:Saint Augustine
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

1 Simplicianus succeeded Ambrose as bishop of Milan in 397 and died c.400; so he was still living when the Confessions were published.

2 1 Cor. 7: 7 (of married and unmarried). Augustine means that the Church included both married and unmarried believers (a marked difference from Manicheism).

3 Simplicianus, at one time in Rome, moved to Milan and was the senior priest responsible for baptizing Ambrose when he, the provincial governor, in 374 was suddenly nominated to be bishop of Milan. In Rome Simplicianus knew Marius Victorinus, a rhetor of African origin, who embodied the ideal of high culture, writing (extant) books on grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, translating some of Aristotle’s logic, and presenting to Latin readers works by Porphyry and Plotinus. Victorinus read Neoplatonism into the prologue to St John’s gospel, and could count himself a Christian fellow-traveller. After conversion in his seventies, his writings on Christian theology tend to present the faith as a kind of Platonism for the masses.

4 Jerome says the statue was in the Forum of Trajan.

5 The Latin text has a corruption here; the translation above has a little manuscript support, but cannot claim to offer more than a guess at the general sense.

6 The sign of the cross on the forehead in baptism.

7 Augustine (Sermon on Ps. 143) interprets the ‘inclined heavens’ to mean the apostles who, when people wanted to honour them as gods, humbly pointed them to the true God; the ‘mountains’ are the proud, and ‘smoke’ when, at God’s touch, they confess their sins (like Victorinus).

8 It is a Neoplatonic axiom that the immutable and eternal deity knows mutable and temporal things with a transcendent and immutable knowing.

9 Julian’s edict of 17 June 362 was based on the presupposition (shared by puritan Christians) that pagan literature and pagan religion are indissoluble. Christians such as Gregory of Nazianzus resented it. The admiring pagan Ammianus Marcellinus thought it should be condemned to everlasting silence as disgraceful. At Athens the famous sophist Prohaeresius declined to accept the special exemption granted him by Julian and, like Victorinus at Rome, resigned. Augustine himself (City of God 18. 52) thought the edict an act of persecuting intolerance.

10 From Tertullian on (AD 200), Latin Christians spoke of baptism in military terms as enlistment in Christ’s army by an oath (sacramentum), with the cross as the standard (vexillum, signum) and the sign of the cross over the forehead.

11 Antony’s Life by Athanasius of Alexandria was translated into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch, a friend of Jerome, about 371; an earlier version was also in circulation.

12 Agentes in rebus were an inspectorate of the imperial bureaucracy, sometimes used as intelligence gatherers and secret police, but mainly responsible to the Master of the Offices (who was among other things head of the intelligence service) for the operation of the cursus publicus or government communications system. Promotion in this department could lead as high as a provincial governorship, though this was rare. ‘Friends of the Emperor’ were not a branch of the

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