On Saturday June 5, 2010, we organised our annual study day for academics and researchers involved in the study of Augustine. The Augustine colloquium consisted of three lectures, by Prof. Maureen Tilley (Fordham University, New York, USA), Prof. Paul van Geest (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands), director of the Centre for Patristic Studies (Tilburg) and Shiju Chittilappilly (doctoral student, KU Leuven).
Prof. Maureen Tilley (Fordham University, New York, USA), a distinguished scholar in the field of Early Christian Africa, hagiography, and Donatism in particular, delivered a lecture entitled Donatism beyond Augustine: Developing the Agenda. Her presentation was focused on re-evaluating conceptions of the Donatist Church as overly rigid and intolerant of sinners. She described at length how Donatist theology changed according to historical circumstances (e.g., the Maximianist Schism of the 390s) and the notions we have today of their church needs to be re-examined. Her paper was also partly a status quaestionis of research into Donatism and the African Church in Late Antiquity. Prof. Tilley took care to mention that scholarly exploration still tends to evaluate Donatism through the lens of Augustine, even though there are original sources that could provide another route. With this in mind, she suggested that we not only carefully look at what the Donatists themselves said in filtered form via Augustine, but also to pay more attention to archaeological data and liturgical practice in North Africa.
Prof. Paul van Geest (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands), director of the Centre for Patristic Studies (Tilburg), professor of Augustinian Studies, gave an exposition on Augustine’s thinking on fear: Ante omnia igitur opus est Dei timore converti. Augustine’s evaluation of fear and its reception. In his standard work about the hour of death Philippe Ariès blames Augustine for affecting the Christians’ original trust in God’s mercy and increasing their fear to end up in the power of Satan for all eternity. Kurt Flasch reproached the church father with setting in motion a ‘Logik des Schreckens’ by minimizing human autonomy, freedom and individual responsibility, by stressing God and his arbitrarily bestowed grace. Flasch did not hesitate to characterize Augustine’s teaching on grace, as it is formulated in Ad Simplicianum 1.2., as a terrible shade across Europe. The question van Geest posed was whether these judgements on Augustine as the great terrifier of Europe are justified. First of all he gave a provisionally negative answer to this question. His provisional proposition was that Augustine intensified fear in order to evoke hope in the end. The ‘Logik des Schreckens’, which came into effect in the course of the centuries, is far less present in his work than was recognized in the centuries after him. Consequently, van Geest investigated how Augustine describes or defines fear (timor, metus). To define fear is different from intensifying fear, however. Therefore van Geest subsequently considered with what objective Augustine intensifies fear in certain sermons. More specifically, he dealt with the theme of fear in two sermones ad populum – s. 22 and s. 57 – he considers representative respectively for the early and the later Augustine.
Shiju Chittilappilly (doctoral student, KU Leuven) presented a part of his doctoral project, and discussed The Role of Prayer in Augustine’s Works to the Monks of Hadrumtum and Marseille. Augustine, although he did not write any systematic treatises completely devoted to the subject of prayer – while accepting, of course that the letter to Proba is solely dedicated to prayer –, one of Augustine’s arguments for his doctrine of grace is derived from prayer in his works addressed to the monks of Hadrumetum and Marseilles. In other words, Augustine seeks support from the practice of prayer – lex orandi, lex credendi – for his arguments. In his paper Chittilappilly highlighted these arguments in order to discover the role of prayer in the functioning of Augustine’s doctrine of Predestination. For Augustine, prayer provides a very solid foundation for his presentation of the predestination theory and the practice of the Church praying for the conversion of the pagans proves that he is in line with the long lived tradition of the Church.
The study day was complemented by a short presentation by Anneke Goovaerts (staff Augustinian Historical Institute) of the on-line Augustine bibliography (www.findingaugustine.org) created within the Institute. In 1963, the late prof. Tarsicius J. van Bavel osa edited an extensive bibliography on Augustine of Hippo, covering the years 1950-1960. Since 1963 the Augustinian Historical Institute has kept the bibliography up-to-date via an impressive card catalogue and a further refinement of the manual taxonomy. Currently, the catalogue contains around 71,000 cards, categorized into more than 1,700 keywords. In close collaboration with the Augustinian University of Villanova (USA) this bibliography is made freely available on the internet for online searches and information retrieval.
Anthony Dupont & Matthew Alan Gaumer
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