Bonnie Brunelle - The Recasting of Augustine's Ideals of Community in the Sermons of Caesarius of Arles

Michel Rouche paints a bleak picture of the declining Roman society and the migration of Germanic tribes in 5th and 6th century Gaul. A constant threat to personal property ate away at the sense of community and cohesion once fostered by the Graeco-Roman world, prompting individuals to secure private wealth and act primarily in defence of their own interests. Personal identity could no longer depend upon one's status as a member of the state, and in its place stood family lineage, membership in exclusive societies, and bequeathed wealth, which itself often became a divisive battleground. The privatization, or to use a stronger term, isolation, of the human self was made ever more explicit by this increased fragmentation of society. Still, as Klingshirn and Hillgarth assert, the Church served as a vestige of community within the Merovingian world, and particularly in the city of Arles. One looked to membership in the Church to recover a sense of belonging lost in the ultimate fall of Roman Arles to the Visigoths in 476/477. 

Given the centripetal force of the institutional Church and Caesarius' monastic background, as well as his high esteem for the writings and sermons of Augustine of Hippo, we might expect to find in Caesarius’ sermons the enthusiastic cultivation of a community-oriented life, promoting the old ideals of Christian brotherhood and the common good in the face of such alienation; and indeed we catch a glimpse of this heroism in Sermon 16. A good Christian “welcomes strangers in his home, washes the feet of his guests, not only fails to stir up quarrels, but even recalls the discordant to harmony.” And yet, despite this affirmation, there is a noticeable tension throughout the sermons between an idealistic notion of Christian community and the reality of isolation in a fractured and unstable world. This paper shall address this tension between the community and the individual in Caesarius' sermons to the people, with specific attention given its relationship to Augustine’s ideal of perfect Christian unity.