The Authority Of Augustine
...lunch (light enough to keep from putting a burden on our mental faculties), I called the whole group that dined together that way every day, to go and sit in the baths, for that seemed a suitably private spot.'2 Some of those present had probably spent the morning reading a bit of Vergil and were now ready for higher and nobler things. What followed was the conversation recorded in the first book of Augustine's de beata vita.
And so we are here, 1505 years after that afternoon in the baths, 1537 years after Augustine's birth, speaking of this man long deceased as though we know him. This lecture is about him, it belongs to a series named after him, and it has the sponsorship of a venerable and international order of religious men dedicated to his name and example. I have spent my entire adult life reading him, and writing books about him. We live in a time, moreover, in which his words have reached their largest audience (if we count rather than weigh readers), but it is a time that imagines itself more free of his influence than any other since his lifetime, and that views some of his most characteristic ideas as rebarbative. But even hostility is a token of esteem: if you despise Augustine and write or speak about him in that vein, you judge him worth despising somehow; and so even there he hovers over us.
The power of this man's name is much with us. My topic is precisely that power. How did he come to have it? And what are we to make of it? Why have we made of Augustine a saint of this sort? Did he wish to be treated so? What right have we to acclaim him? And what decorum should govern our applause?
For holy men often attract a veneration that they would deprecate. To take an example Augustine could have known, the first paragraph of the ostensibly quite pious Life of Plotinus by his chief disciple Porphyry records an act of rebellion against the...
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