Annemaré Kotzé: Protreptic and Paraenetic Features of Augustine's Confessions

It has become commonplace to call Augustine’s Confessions a protreptic text. Yet, the current state of research into the exact meaning of the term protreptikos is all but satisfactory. Apart from two unpublished doctoral theses (Van der Meeren’s Protreptique en philosophie: étude sur la constitution d'un genre, 1999, and Swancutt’s Pax Christi: Romans as Protrepsis to Live as Kings, 2001) not much has been published over the last decade or so. In contrast, publications, especially by scholars of the New Testament, on the related term, paraenesis, abound (most prominent amongst them Early Christian Paraenesis in Context, edited by Starr and Engberg-Perdersen in 2004 and Tite’s Valentinian Ethics and Paraenetic Discourse, 2009). The paper intends to support and reinforce Swancutt’s arguments (2001) that the neat distinction between the terms protresis/ protreptikos and paraenesis/ paraenetikos is invalid (10 years after Swancutt’s study the traditional dichotomous view of the two concepts still characterizes main stream thinking on protreptic and paraenetic). As part of a broader argument for seeing the terms protreptic and paraenetic as synonyms (partly based on a reinterpretation of the theoretical remarks by authors like Ps-Isocrates and Philo of Larissa), the paper points out how the Confessions displays the salient characteristics normally ascribed to protreptic as well as those defined as features of paraenetic texts: amongst other things the Confessions urges outsiders to convert to Catholicism, but it also addresses Catholic readers, aiming to confirm belief in the face of rival claims. In addition I will try to illustrate how thematic and functional elements associated with protreptic in Van der Meeren’s study as well as many of the facets of the Lund-Oslo definitions of paraenetic (Starr and Engberg-Pedersen 2004) feature in the Confessions.