Sigrid Mratschek: The Unwritten Letters of Augustine of Hippo

My talk will deal with the unwritten letters among the total of 270 letters of Augustine known to us (but without the recent Divjak and Dolbeau finds). They give us an excellent impression of the mechanisms of communication and conflict solving between Church and state in the west of the Roman Empire. Together with prosopographic facts from other collections of correspondence, records of African synods and imperial constitutions which have previously overlooked, the sources take on a life of their own. The result is an unfamiliar portrait of a man you all know well – Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine is possibly the most creative of all Christian authors. So forgive me if I do not present him in the way he always fashions his self-image in his own ‘Confessiones’, which shatters the unity of the human image of Classical Antiquity. Nor will I speaking to you about one of the greatest thinkers of the western world, who in his work ‘De civitate Dei’ embedded the history of the world in the events of Christian salvation and created the historical theology of the Middle Ages. For once, I would like to show you Augustine in a different light – as he meets us day by day in his written and unwritten letters: as a successful politician. In Augstine’s own words (ep. 95,2): he had to “live among people and live for people” – vivendum sit vel inter eos vel propter eos.