Elizabeth Clark: Augustine and American Professors in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: From Adulation to Critique

The reception of Augustine by American seminary professors saw some dramatic shifts between the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.  From a strong endorsement of Augustine’s theories of original sin, predestination, and damnation of the unbaptized by Princeton Theological professor Samuel Miller in the early and mid-nineteenth century, confidence in these doctrines eroded.  Subsequent professors at Union Theological Seminary (Henry Boynton Smith; Philip Schaff; Arthur Cushman McGiffert) and Harvard Divinity School (George LaPiana) attacked Augustine’s sanctioning the use of coercion against the Donatists, his neglect of public and social ethics, his downplaying the role of the human will in the Pelagian controversy, and his high ecclesiology that had led to unfortunate tactics on the part of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popes.  By 1917, McGiffert at Union Seminary could respond to an inquirer that there was perhaps one professor in America who still believed in Augustine’s theory of predestination: Benjamin B. Warfield at Princeton.  The sharper critique of Augustine was supported by newer views of God’s benevolence, human nature, and individual liberty.

Joan Hart-Hasler: Bede’s Use of Textual Criticism in his Exegesis: The Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum

Late in life, following the lead of St Augustine, Bede wrote his second commentary on Acts, calling it the ‘Retraction’.  Bede’s  Retractatio in Actus Apostolorum is a work of exegesis, but not of the kind one usually encounters in a medieval interpretation of a biblical book.  In its preface, Bede, alluding to his earlier commentary, says “I will now write on the same volume [Acts] a little book of reconsideration, desiring especially to add to what had been less well said or to correct what seems to have been improperly said.  I have also taken care to note certain things in the Greek which have been set down differently, or with more or fewer words.”  The Retractatio’s avowed intention is to correct errors in the biblical text and misunderstandings of its meaning that Bede had discovered while working with various texts of Bibles, both Latin and Greek. Bede’s work, however, is not a list of errata but a commentary, endeavoring to uncover through the specific differences of words the genuine and full meaning of the early experience of the Apostles. My paper will illustrate how Bede utilizes the variations in different biblical texts, both Latin and Greek, to develop an exegesis of Acts that relies on a form of internal textual criticism for its understanding of the text it interprets.

Francine Cardman: Augustine Preaching Charity and Poverty: The Beatitudes

This paper examines an emerging shift in Augustine’s preaching of the work of charity, as it relates to poverty and almsgiving, in his commentary on The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount in 394 and a group of sermones ad populum from around 410-416.  It compares his commentary on the Beatitudes in Book 1, which he characterizes as being about mercy, with sermons from the 410s, particularly sermons 53 and 53/A, explicitly on the Beatitudes, and related sermons, including four on the Lord’s prayer (56-59) and several others on isolated verses.  In analyzing in these works, I give primary attention to the examples and motivations Augustine appeals to in explicating Mt 5:7 (the merciful),  5:1 (the poor in spirit), and 5:8 (those who hunger and thirst for justice/righteousness). When Augustine steps aside from his critique of the Donatists’ false charity and good works, on the one hand, and the formality of his structural analysis of the beatitudes and the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, on the other, he opens a space for considering more material works of mercy in loving one’s neighbor.  I argue that, in conjunction with his use of related Matthaean texts, we can see in these sermons from around 410 to 416 the beginnings of a larger shift in Augustine’s preaching of mercy that will become prominent in the last decade of his life.

Julia Beier: Sin as a Structural Principle of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus' De spiritalis historiae gestis

Bishop Avitus of Vienne is one of the great authors of the biblical epic genre in Late Antiquity. His epos De spiritalis historiae gestis consists of five books. Until now, there are only unsufficient models in the science regarding the coherence between these, because most of the papers and researches are only based on philological items without focussing on the conception of the complete work and its theology. This being one of the reasons why this epos is often poorly evaluated. However, the connection between the books is provided by the alternation of 'sin stories' and 'order stories'. Thus, my working assumption is that in a very paradoxical way the elimination of order by the sin is the structural principle of the epos. In my contribution I would like to show that the epos is a poem about the good and the bad, probably in the tradition of Augustine. Therefore, just like the church father, the epic poem illustrates that the good cannot exist without the bad and, even further, that the malum has a regulatory effect within the cosmology.

Volker Henning Drecoll: Augustine's Letter 184A

Augustine’s letter ep. 184A, transmitted only in one manuscript, is an important witness to the complexe situation of Augustine in 417/418. The paper aims to show how Augustine uses anti-Pelagian and anti-pagan strategies in order to convince the (otherwise unknown) addressees of his own theology. For the anti-Pelagian topics a set of standard arguments is introduced that was developed in the years 416/417 in the Anti-Pelagian controversy and can be compared with sermons and other letters. Against the pagans, the letter refers to the first eleven books of De civitate dei. The paper will raise the question how these two fields fit each other. In preparation of a philological and historical commentary the methodological problems of such a commentary will be discussed.

Peter Toth: The Questions of Pseudo-Justin: New Manuscripts, New Texts and a New Author?

The collection of some 150 chapters, originally entitled as Answers to the Orthodox faithful (QRO) and attributed to Justin the Martyr, is one of the earliest Christian representatives of the Late Antique genre of question-and-answer literature. The importance of the work stands in that it is the first known example of a new patristic type of erotapokriseis which constitute an encyclopedic collection of all available secular and religious knowledge of the time.
The paper presents a survey of my latest research on the manuscript tradition of the work, resulting in the discovery of two new witnesses. These manuscripts, one from the early tenth and another from the thirteenth century, contain not only some portions of the QRO, but also two hitherto unknown and unedited series of questions and answers that seem to represent new items of the Pseudo-Justinian corpus.

In the second part of my paper I will present a closer study of these new texts, a collection of cosmological erotapokriseis and a series of Christological aporiae. A deeper analysis of the philosophical terminology of the first text with its explicit quotations from Aristotle and Julian's Contra Galilaeos, sheds new light on the philosophical background of Pseudo-Justin. While the further examination of the Christology and textual transmission of the second work, which also seems to be connected to the QRO, may help us to shed new light on the date and identity the mysterious author hiding behind the name of Justin the Martyr and Philosopher.

Marius A. van Willigen: Why did Augustine change his perspective on baptism?

The sacrament of Holy Baptism was an initiation rite for every new Christian in early Christianity. Many baptisteries were built as invaluable testimonies of this initiation-rite at the end of the fourth century. At the same time however, this initiation-rite was seriously threatened by a devastating lack of interest for baptism in general. Many Christians listened to the exposition of the Bible, without wishing to be baptized. Receiving the initiation-rite of baptism seemed to thoroughly change in this period. Baptism was retarded until death. To receive baptism appeared to be equal to getting a passport to heaven. Christians decided en masse to be baptized just prior to death.
 It was the Church Father Augustine who had considered this a dangerous turn of events. He did not forbid the practice of adult-baptism, but simultaneously encouraged infant baptism.
What was his motivation for this? Was he afraid of depriving Christians of their privilege to choose for adult-baptism, or did he stimulate parents to baptize their children deliberately? What was his theological reflection on this subject and what was his motivation to change practice of baptism?The paper will explain Augustine's motivation to promote infant baptism along with Ambrose' and Origen's reflections on infant baptism. The continual theological reflection on baptism in relation to original sin will be mapped out, starting with Origen and ending with Augustine.