Han-luen Kantzer Komline - Via est qua imus: Perspectives on Augustine’s Christology

Since the publication of T.J. van Bavel’s Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin in 1954, a watershed contribution that decisively overturned the sharply negative appraisal of Augustine’s Christology O. Scheel had advanced at the turn of the previous century, Augustine’s Christology has begun to see some attention.  This attention, while including a growing number of excellent monographs and articles, especially in French and German, has amounted to nothing more than a trickle in comparison with the flood of interest in other aspects of Augustine’s thought in recent decades.  Much remains to be done to fill out the complex picture of Augustine’s ways of speaking about Christ, and how they changed throughout his career.  This workshop brings together four researchers interested in Augustine’s Christology as they engage this issue from diverse perspectives.  Mirjam Kudella (University of Tübingen, Germany) builds on her previous work on Augustine and Manichaeism in her paper, “Augustine’s Polemics against Manichaean Christology: A Question of Demarcation,” in which she considers Augustine’s argumentation against the Manichaean Christology from which he became so concerned to distance himself.  Ron Haflidson (University of Edinburgh, UK) offers a resolution to questions about the structure of book twelve of the Confessions in his paper “The Mediation of Christ in Confessions XII” by showing that Augustine connects the two parts of this book via the analogous mediation of Christ in creation and in the Church.  Han-luen Kantzer Komline (University of Notre Dame, USA) addresses Augustine’s attribution of two wills to Christ in his Enarratio of Psalm 93 and his treatise Contra sermonem Arianorum, exploring how and why Augustine may have developed this notion in the context of his debates with Pelagianism and Arianism.  Finally, Sarah Stewart-Kroeker (Princeton Theological Seminary, USA) examines Augustine’s appropriation and modification of the Plotinian image of the journey to God as a voyage to the Homeland in her paper, “A Journey for the Feet: Augustine’s Incarnational Appropriation of Plotinus,” illuminating the significance of this incarnationally reconfigured image for Augustine’s vision of the ethical life.  These diverse perspectives promise to stimulate further breadth and depth in the work of each individual contributor, and in the ongoing conversation about Augustine’s Christology.