Marianne Djuth - Augustine on the Saints: The Metaphysical Dynamics of the Living and the Dead

While recent studies have illuminated the social and cultural realities underlying the cult of the saints in late antiquity, this communication focuses on Augustine’s beliefs regarding the metaphysical status of the saints’ humanity after death and the interaction between the saints and temporal human beings.  Augustine’s representation of the lives of the saints in works such as his Sermons on the Saints, On the Care of the Dead, the City of God, and On the Predestination of the Saints and On Perseverance at the end of his life reveals the dichotomies in his thinking on the saints with which both he and his reader must contend.  The most striking dichotomies are those between popular, or lay, Christianity, and the intellectualized Christianity of a bishop like Augustine; the different historical periods to which Augustine’s works refer, namely, the persecution of the martyr-saints in the third century and faithful Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries; and the different metaphysical and spiritual frameworks of the here and now and the life to come.  Against the background of these dichotomies that surface in Augustine’s writings on the saints, I explore the coherence of Augustine’s doctrine of the saints with respect to the following three concerns: (1) a consideration of who the saints are, and what their status is after death, (2) the relevance of the interaction between the saints and temporal human beings for living a good life now in preparation for death, and (3) the effect that the doctrines of predestination and election have on Augustine’s determination of what can be known with respect to who is and is not saved among the saints.  The exploration of these concerns leads to the conclusion that for Augustine coherence is Christocentric in the sense that it implies balance and harmony between seemingly opposed claims and conviction.