The Strangeness Of Augustine
...spend decades in the company of a long dead African bishop cannot
fail to leave its mark on the sojourner. It may be extreme to speak of
Stockholm syndrome, and I suppose it might be questioned whether it is he
that holds us hostage or we him, but perhaps the relationship is more one of
the old Spanish married couple that Peter Brown spoke of in the preface to
his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine,*1 bound by ties of
illusión, a shared version of the world arising out of shared experience.
Augustine holds special sway over his students, more than most other
ancient figures, for several reasons. First, his influence over after-generations
has been broad and deep and he has merited close study. Second, his
association over the last centuries with one and another stream of modern
Christianity has assured him a cadre of partisan readers, both supporters and
opponents, but has also assured that few people read him seriously without
preconceptions. Third, the vast bulk of his surviving oeuvre makes it
impossible to pay brief scholarly calls on him and come away with any serious
observations. To work seriously on Augustine is to declare, willingly or not, a
kind of allegiance and to establish a kind of co-dependency. We must know
this of ourselves, our colleagues, and our forerunners, if we are to advance in
such study.
Robert Markus and Peter Brown have provided, from their long and wise
experience, striking snapshots and some bits of video footage (as it were) of
the last half-century. To one whose memory is reliable, if at all, only for the
last quarter-century, they seem, of course, as giants from another era. The
fifties and sixties, years when...
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