Karla Pollmann: The Proteanism of Authority: Patterns and Perspectives of the Reception of Augustine of Hippo

I. The importance of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) for the religious as well as the cultural history of the West is hard to overestimate. Yet in spite of his pervasive presence, Augustine’s influence is far from monolithic. A major international and interdisciplinary project, generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust, has nearly completed its attempt to gather evidence of Augustine’s impact through the ages, also beyond the discipline of theology. The first paper of this workshop will present some of the project’s findings, problems, and methodological issues, and attempt a synthesis of what the phenomenon of reception actually means and why it occurs. This general overview will then be substantiated by two case studies of 20^th century receptions of Augustine in theology (II) and philosophy (III) respectively.

II. Re-examining the "Augustinianism" of Henry de Lubac.

Whilst Lubac has been representative of a wider trend in the first half of the twentieth century characterised by a turn to the Church Fathers in general and to Augustine in particular (resourcement theology), I will examine the relationship between recent insights into the nature of Augustine's thought on the one hand and the degree to which Lubac's loyalty to Roman Catholic church doctrine, in particular Thomism, may have prevented him from drawing more radical conclusions from his own approach.

III. The Force of Time: Augustine in Heideggerian and Post-Heideggerian Thought.

This paper has two aims. First, it examines three Augustinian moments in Heidegger’s trajectory:  a) the 1921 ‘destruction’ of the Confessions and its central significance for Being and Time; b) the 1930 lecture “St. Augustine’s Meditations on Time”; c) the subtle invocation of Augustine against Nietzsche by the late Heidegger.  These three moments form a progression elucidating a shift in Heidegger’s approach to the nature of temporality.  Second, I argue that this shift determines the stakes of more recent, French retrievals of Augustinian thought. In this manner, the paper demonstrates how figures such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Marion draw upon, yet ultimately contest, the dimension of Heideggerian thought in their own re-readings of the Augustinian corpus.