Joshua McManaway: Possidius' Vita Augustini and the Literary Corpus of Augustine

Without too much hyperbole, one could call Possidius of Calama the inaugural figure in Augustinian studies. A longtime friend of Augustine and fellow monk in Augustine's community, Possidius wrote the very first Vita of Augustine within less than a decade of Augustine's death in 430 A.D.. Despite Possidius' proximity to Augustine, he has too often been criticized by modern scholars of early Christianity as being an unreliable biographer. In particular, the Vita's lack of the miraculous has actually counted against Possidius, typically on two fronts: he is either thought to be unimaginative in his writing, particularly when compared to the various Christian vitae he would have known, as well as Augustine's own Confessiones; or Possidius is celebrated only on the grounds that the lack of the miraculous in his work corresponds to modern concerns and methods of history, distancing him from his own 5th century setting.
Possidius' Vita may well lack the miraculous healings and visions of the vitae popular in late ancient Christianity, but it is inundated with miracles of a particularly Augustinian sort: the literary works and sermons of Augustine. Possidius develops a theology of persuasiveness as part of the charism of Augustine's priesthood and episcopacy and shows how Augustine is graced with this gift in abundance. This persuasiveness takes on a particular literary character in the Vita and is summed up in Possidius' Indiculum, an index of the Augustinian corpus.