Contemporary critics of Augustine, including many feminists, have often charged him with debasing the body by considering it to be the seat of sin, worthy of enmity and neglect. I argue that in several texts Augustine displays a marked effort to liberate his readers from precisely that position. I attempt to show that in De doctrina christiana and City of God, Augustine defends the body by shifting the blame for sin from the flesh to the soul. I contend that this move does not amount to claiming that the body is inherently good, but only that it is not inherently worthy of contempt -or, at least, no more than is the soul. I go on to show that in the Enchiridion Augustine moves beyond a mere defense of the body: he argues for its inherent goodness. This claim results from his metaphysics of created being, in which all substances are good to some extent simply because they are creations of God. Thus Augustine both defends the body, by showing that it is not entirely responsible for sin, and redeems it, by showing that it is inherently good.

This article argues that Augustine’s choice of verb tense for the phrase transfigurauit in se offers a sacramental dimension to his doctrine of the totus Christus, the whole Christ with Christ as Head and the Church as Body. While the apostle Paul chooses the future tense, transfigurauit (Phil. 3: 21), to locate the transformation of the Church in eternity, Augustine shifts the verb tense to the perfect, thus stretching the eschatological transformation back into the historical event of the Incarnation. Augustine’s writings emphasize, however, that the transformation culminates in eternity, thus giving rise to the question of why he chooses the perfect tense. This article asserts that the grammatical shift is a theological move that reveals the sacramental dimension of the totus Christus. It considers Augustine’s use of the word transitus to describe Christ’s passage through life on earth in the Incarnation. As the Body of Christ, the Church extends Christ’s passage through earthly life, thus the transitus that was completed with the resurrection and ascension of Christ actually continues to take place in the present. And neither the transitus nor the transformation it brings will be completed until the Church foliows Christ in his ascension into heaven. Thus, the union of the totus Christus is a sacramental reality that transcends time, bringing eternal realities into the present because of past actions. The article concludes that Augustine intentionally manipulares the verb tense in order to express the sacramental dimension of the unión of Christ and the Church as each generation of Christians is transformed anew by Christ in his transitus.

This paper critically re-evaluates a number of Augustine’s anti-Manichaean writings, principally his De moribus Manichæorum, De natura boni y De hæresibus from the perspective of recent developments in the study of gender, and the role of rumour and hearsay in ancient heresiological discourse. As part of a panel considering the role of women in late antique Manichaeism, it discusses the role of women in Augustine’s anti-Manichaean rhetoric, and also salvages historical impressions of Manichaean women from the patristic literature of the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

This article intends to demonstrate that for Augustine, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit cannot be separated from a unification synonymous of consonance. Also, this is linked to the properties he attributes to the Holy Ghost. First of all, it can be seen from his exegetical theory of the reception of the Scriptures (the notion of plurality of meanings, developed in books XII and XIII of the Confessions. The idea of consonance also plays an important role in his demonstration of the agreement of the evangelists in the De consensu euangelistarum. Finally, the idea of concord and consonance of the Scriptures allows him to criticize not only the multiplicity of discordant pagan cults, but also the disagreement between philosophical schools, as he does in book I of the De consensu; and in book XVIII of the City of God, he uses the same arguments against the whole of the «earthly city». Hermeneutic, philosophic and political categories are joined together by these images of consonance.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how, until the Conference of Carthage in 411, Augustin granted great importance to the letters as a direct and quick manner to focus his communication and debate with Donatists. He wisely used the letter to address both the Donatist plebs and the aristocrats and the schismatic bishops. In his letters, Augustine displayed a very detailed sort of arguments (historical, scriptural, theological, etc.) to achieve that followers of Donatism apostate from their schismatic faith. In fact, Augustine anticipated in his letters the arguments that he will develop largely in his treaties. After the Conference of Carthage in 411, a new shift in Augustinian epistolary strategy arose. Besides interrupting his correspondence with the Donatist bishops -now legally heretics- he will address no further letter to the Donatist people with the only exception of the synodal letter 141, read in 412 by Augustine on behalf of the Council of Zerta. From then on, Augustine did not use the epistolar format for the debate anymore, and he only used it in order to spread the verdict of condemnation of Donatism by Flavius Marcellinus.

In this paper I will survey Augustine’s concept of heart, cor in Latin, mostly focusing on his 390s works and sermons, and try to clarify how his characteristic concept of heart was discovered and developed in his philosophical investigation and pastoral experience. I hope it should shed light on Augustine’s anthropology (especially his understanding of interiority and spirituality) and its effectiveness in reforming his congregations in North Africa.

While recent studies have illuminated the social and cultural realities underlying the cult of the saints in late antiquity, this communication focuses on Augustine’s beliefs regarding the metaphysical status of the saints’ humanity after death and the interaction between the saints and temporal human beings. Augustine’s representation of the lives of the saints in works such as his Sermons on the saints, On the care of the dead, the City of God, and On the predestination of the saints and On perseverance at the end of his life reveals the dichotomies in his thinking on the saints with which both he and his reader must contend. The most striking dichotomies are those between popular, or lay, Christianity, and the intellectualized Christianity of a bishop like Augustine; the different historical periods to which Augustine’s works refer, namely, the persecution of the martyr-saints in the third century and faithful Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries; and the different metaphysical and spiritual frameworks of the here and now and the life to come. Against the background of these dichotomies that surface in Augustine’s writings on the saints, I explore the coherence of Augustine’s doctrine of the saints with respect to the following three concerns: (1) a consideration of who the saints are, and what their status is after death, (2) the relevance of the interaction between the saints and temporal human beings for living a good life now in preparation for death, and (3) the effect that the doctrines of predestination and election have on Augustine’s determination of what can be known with respect to who is and is not saved among the saints.

Augustine’s ‘corpus’ of Pentecost sermones (29, 29A-B, 266-272B, 378) serves in this contribution as a case study to see whether he touches on the topic of grace within these specifically pastoral and liturgical sermones, and to what extent his homiletic treatment is different from his (anti-Pelagian) treatises on grace. The Spirit, liturgically celebrated at Pentecost, plays a central role in Augustine’s doctrine of grace. Furthermore, a possible link with the Donatist controversy will be examined. Augustine stresses ecclesial unity in the collection of Pentecost sermons, which is given by the Holy Spirit. The topic of unity in the Church is a central feature in is anti-Donatist polemics.

Abstract: Augustine’s y. 174 is traditionally dated around 413 (Kunzelmann 1931; Verbraken 1976). This dating has been confirmed by Hombert (2000). His main argument is based on Augustine’s use of humanus sermo instead of fidelis sermo, when quoting 1Tim. 1:15. According to Hombert, Augustine first adopted the faulty reading humanus sermo, but, after realizing this reading was mistaken, switched to the correct phrase fidelis sermo. Thus, when establishing a timeline using the switch to fidelis sermo as a reference point, the preaching of y. 174 must be placed, according to Hombert, before the sermons quoting 1 Tim 1:15 with the words fidelis sermo, such as s. 175-176, which are traditionally dated around 413-414. However, as Hombert remarks himself, this timeline has to be used with precaution. He mentions Dolbeau 30 as a counterexample. This sermon is traditionally dated 416, but still contains humanus sermo, instead of fidelis sermo. Since Augustine still uses humanus sermo after the supposed correction to fidelis sermo, I will argue that we cannot automatically assume that his use of humanus sermo in 5.174 originates in his ignorance of the correct reading. Moreover, 5. 174 provides us with Information on Augustine’s Christology, paying much attention to Christ’s humanity. I will show that in this specific Christological context, the phrase humanus sermo is more functional than fidelis sermo and that Augustine’s use of this reading could, thus, just be motivated by the fact that he wanted to explicitly state his Christological views.

The paper presents the exegetical role that the Old Testament names of places and persons have in Augustine’s exegesis of the Psalms within his commentary Enarrationes in Psalmos. It presents the vocabulary used by Saint Augustine within the Enarrationes in Psalmos to talk about the different meanings that Scripture has (literal, spiritual, allegorical). It suggests that for Saint Augustine everything within the Scriptures has a meaning, and so also all the names of persons and places that are in the texts of the Psalms - or within their titles - have a meaning for the believer. It also makes a brief presentation of Augustine’s sources for this exegetical work, underlining the influence of Jerome’s work Liber Interpretationis Hebraicorum Nominum. Finally it presents briefly the main theological ideas that Saint Augustine derives in his Enarrationes in Psalmos from his exegetical work with the names of persons and places, having as a leitmotiv the idea of the peregrinatio. The believer is a pilgrim that goes from the Earthly Babylon (which is interpreted by Augustine as confusion) to the heavenly Jerusalem, name that is interpreted as uisio pacis.

This paper moves into the mental world of late antique Milan at the end of the 4th century AD, the centre of interest is the figure of Augustine and hence the years 384 to 387. This was also the period (385-386) of the dispute between Ambrose and the homoean imperial court over the Basilica Portiana and Basilica Nova, which ended in victory for Ambrose. In the Confessions, Augustine refers only once to the crisis of 385/6 in his depiction of his Milan period, and he does this only after giving an account of his baptismal ceremony in spring 387 (9, 14f). In the narrative sequences which inelude the period 385/6, Augustine does not mention the conflict over the churches at all, even though his own mother was involved in it. This silence has been ascribed to Augustine’s lack of interest in ecclesiastical power politics at the time; the Church is said to have been of interest to him at that time only as a spiritual space, not as a social or material one. But at latest when he was writing the Confessions, as bishop of Hippo and representative of the ‘catholic’ Church, the striking importance of those events should have been o become clear to him. The question arises of why he gives them so little space in his account.

One of the rather disregarded elements in Augustine’s anti-Donatist campaign was his utilisation of a theme of the ‘Holy Spirit’ to drive his critiques and full-on theological attacks against the Donatist leadership. This article re-examines the historical background of the Holy Spirit theme in North African theology, starting with Cyprian of Carthage where the Holy Spirit was closely associated with being an invigorator of martyrs and Church integrity, then moving onto the evidence contained in the Donatist martyr stories where the Holy Spirit was described as the source of courage for persecuted Africans and as crowner of martyrs glory, and then to the tradition’s reception by Augustine of Hippo in 390s/400s when he had to re-adapt African pneumatology to aid his anti-Donatist campaign.

The following study will elucídate the role of curiosity in the thinking of Augustine. At first, he sees it as a problem, as this element has misled the first human beings to sin. The serpent in paradise has misused the woman’s curiosity, resulting in her blindness towards God's commandment. Hence, curiosity arouse desire and desire gave birth to sin. On the other hand, Augustine thought, curiosity can be a help for human beings, as it attracts catechumens towards baptism. Augustine, here, refers to the disciplina arcani and repeatedly hints at the curiosity of catechumens in his homilies. Especially their ignorance makes them curious to undergo baptism. This interplay is real masterpiece of Augustine: the very same curiosity that leads humans to sin also makes them search and find salvation.

In the Confessions, after telling the audience about his internal struggle with desires, Augustine relates the famous tolle lege incident in a garden in Milan where Augustine happened to read a codex of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. With regard to the act of consulting a sacred book, Augustine appears to follow a venerable tradition in late antiquity, in which these words tolle lege chanted by children indícate a procedure of the oracle. Augustine also recorded the conversation he had with a knowledgeable physician, Vindicianus, earlier in the Confessions (4.3.5-6) where they discussed how astrological predictions often turned out to be correct. Vindicianus pointed out the prediction drawn from the consultation of a book of poetry. Yet, remarkably, although he concluded that the true predictions by astrologers were produced not by skill but by chance ('non arte, sed sorte'), Augustine’s attitude was not simply negative. Not only in the Confessions, but in some works (e.g. De diuersis quæstionibus octoginta tribus 45.2; Epistula 55.37), he was concerned about a source of inspiration for the oratorical process that had played such a crucial role in his conversion. Why did Augustine think about this kind of oracle? How did he follow the custom in late antiquity? In this paper I shall argue the signifícance and impact of this phenomenon in the thought of Augustine.

This paper begins by addressing the following question: Given the importance of the Platonism of the school of Plotinus to Augustine’s development, why didn’t he adopt apophatic theology in his early writings? That question leads to a consideration of the role of apophasis in the theology of the Roman Platonist school and in its framing of pagan monotheism. Attention then turns to the Cassiciacum treatises and their representation of interior contemplation. There we find the record of Augustine’s discovery of transcendence within the interior self. But Augustine understands transcendence after his own fashion, incorporating it into his newly recovered Catholicism without entirely obscuring the outlines of Platonic transcendentalism. Thus in these early treatises the outlines of Augustine’s mature understanding of Christian contemplation can be seen already to emerge.

Augustine often pairs the words locutio and sensus in his efforts to interpret the books of the Heptateuch. Locutiones are un-Latin expressions in the Latin text of the Bible, which point to a Greek or Hebrew idiom behind the Latin. In each case, Augustine tries to decide whether or not a sensus, an intelligible meaning, can be found that explains the locutio. In some cases, he writes confidently that the idiom does not conceal a meaning. In other cases, he suspects that it does; sometimes he can discover the meaning, sometimes not. This study demonstrales Augustine’s profound respect for the Old Latin text, as well as his effort to make sense of the (sometimes unintelligible) text, without violating the rules of grammar or reason. Within these boundaries, he took delight in the biblical text and its mysteries.

This paper will examine the ecclesiological background to Augustine’s encounter with Emeritus at Caesarea in September 418. Papal business brought Augustine out to Mauretania Caesariensis, but I believe that he also regarded the long trip as his final opportunity to persuade Emeritus (Donatist bishop of Caesarea and one of Augustine’s most intransigent rivals) to embrace Catholicism. My paper will demónstrate that scholars have paid insufficient attention to several historical and ecclesiological factors that prompted Augustine to be sanguine about Emeritus’ possible conversión. Writings (or fragments) from Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Tyconius, and Possidius will anchor my arguments. Pope Zosimus’ request for Augustine to settle some ecclesiastical matters in Mauretania came at a propitious moment. The Council of 418 had just ended. Though Pelagianism had been the chief topic, the issue of forced conversions of Donatists and their integration in Catholic congregations also bulked large on the agenda. By concentrating on Pelagianism, scholars have overlooked important clues regarding the immediate background to Augustine’s mission out west. Even more importandy, I shall also address the Mauretanian Church’s long-standing aversion to rebaptism - the cornerstone of Cyprian’s and Donatas’ ecclesiology. Recent emphasis on Donatism as the authentic African Church has obscured the dissension that characterized the formative years of that sect. I shall focas on the early years of Christianity in Mauretania and on a significant Donatist council held in 336. My paper will reveal deep ecclesiological fissures within the Donatist Church almost from its inception.

In De cura pro mortuis gerenda, Augustine addresses the issue as to whether burial ad sanctos contributes to the well-being of the spirits of the deceased. In this context, he also discusses the value of burial in general. Augustine not only uses logical and biblical arguments, but derives some essential arguments from narratives as well. Up to now, the rhetorical force of the narratives in De cura and in other works by Augustine has been underexposed. The approach to narratives proposed by Labov in Language in the Inner City (1972) may elucidate the argumentative function of Augustine’s narratives. The analysis by Labov of the global structure of oral narratives, which has been adapted for written narrative by, among others, Fleischman (1990: Tense and Narrativity), focuses on the alternation between the consecutive ‘phases’ or ‘episodes’ in a narrative, such as preparatory events, complicating acts, evaluating elements and the culmination or climax of the narrative. One of Augustine’s narratives in De cura deals with the hermit John of Lycopolis appearing to a woman in her dream. This story also occurs in the Historia monachorum, a writing which Augustine may have known in the Latin translation by Rufinus. A comparison between the version in Historia monachorum and that in De cura along the lines of the analysis proposed by Labov and Fleischman shows how Augustine shifts the culmination of the events to another point in the story, and in this way carefully moulds the story into a narrative that fits in with the argument of De cura. Contrary to the narrative in Historia monachorum, in Augustine’s version of the story the climax does not coincide with the dream, but occurs earlier in the narrative, when John of Lycopolis announces his appearance in the woman’s dream and, at the same time, interprets the nature of this appearance as a mere image. As I intend to demonstrate in this paper, Augustine’s rearrangement of the narrative is consistent with one of the important statements in De cura, viz. that a deceased appearing in a dream and asking to be buried does not coincide with the deceased in person, but is just an image.

In this article, the notion of image, as it appears in Confessions X, is analysed. Literature on this theme is lacking, though the word imago appears up to a forty-five times. Augustine, in his analysis of memory, widely uses the notion of image. Memory, he states, confronts us with the unknown in ourselves. Firstly, we can’t grasp its dimensions; secondly, it also bears in it what has been forgotten. But in fact, what has been forgotten but still lingers on in memory, otherwise we couldn’t remember what has been forgotten. So it appears that all we know and all we remember is based on images. Image therefore bridges the gap between the known and the unknown in our memory, i.e. in ourselves. Thus, he gives the notion of image a very important role and transforms it in a idea guaranteeing our inner unity and overcoming the split in ourselves between subject and object. In a second phase however, when he discovers God inside our memory, he refrains from using this notion and passes to the notion of confession. It appears that confession functions in a similar way as does image. It creates the unity between God and man, where image creates the unity of the human subject. Image and confession are used in comparable ways, both serving to create a unity. Image in this sense is used in a much more positive way than in the platonic tradition Augustine based himself on. Secondly, it allows him to prepare elements of his Trinitarian theology, especially the theme of unity of the son and the Father.

De natura et origine anima? (419/420), arguably Augustine’s most complex treatise on the soul, will be predominantly discussed here. It will be compared to another late treatise, De origine anima? hominis = ep. 166 to Jerome (415) and also to earlier ones: De inmortalitate anima? (387), De quantitate animae (387/388) and De duabus animabus (391/392). The new emphases in De natura et origine animas and in the ep. 166 will be highlighted while concentrating on the fact that spirit/Holy Spirit are discussed differently in relation to salvation and to creation, as illustrated by the distinction Augustine makes between the Greek terms pnoén and pnoé. The first defines the manifestation of divine spirit/grace at the creation of the human soul. The second defines wisdom/grace/prophetic inspiration coming upon humans prior to merit and also Holy Spirit/divine grace manifested in the sacrament of baptism. Augustine also discusses the differences between divine flatus (breathing, blowing) creating the human soul and divine spiritus (spirit), which is actually the Holy Spirit coming upon the apostles at the Pentecost. In this respect, Augustine explicitly compares the action of the Holy Spirit with that of grace, which operates gratuitously, necessarily and irresistibly. Thus, in De natura et origine animae and in the ep. 166 more than in other treatises on the soul, Augustine, beyond the Platonic/Neoplatonic inspiration in discussing human soul/spirit/body, seems to insist on the importance of divine grace and of baptism, issues related primarily to the Pelagian controversy.