Augustine: Select Letters

"That’s a really nice segue. Because that’s precisely why they’re on the list. While most people come to Augustine through the Confessions , I came to him through his Letters . When I was in graduate school, working on a different figure with whom Augustine exchanged letters, I had a baby. And in the first months when I was at home with him, I sat down with the volumes of letters in CSEL (the Corpus of Ecclesiastical Latin Writers). And I read all of Augustine’s letters from beginning to end. And that’s actually how I got to know him. It was adaptable: when the baby went to sleep, I could sit down and read for a bit. And that’s partly why I see such an undogmatic Augustine because, right from the beginning, how I got to know him was through reading these letters and seeing him adapting to his audience and having very different conversations with different people. Sometimes, of course, in his letters he is dogmatic or embattled or dictatorial. But sometimes he’s also incredibly attentive to the recipient. Sometimes he’s even playful. The playful Augustine is not one that, again, most people would talk about, or think of first. And so, in selecting the letters, I wanted to give this more variegated impression of him. The letters are sometimes rather official proclamations, but they are very often truly written ad hominem , writing to a specific person to a specific occasion. And you can see on display the pliancy of Augustine’s mind and his attentiveness to other people. You see his attentiveness to their specific situations, predicament, questions, whatever it is exactly that they’ve engaged him about. And just occasionally again, you see these leaps of joy or of playfulness, that that can be hard to come by elsewhere in the works. Absolutely, yes. There’s a lot on Donatism in the Letters , though they are not the most exciting letters to read. Donatism is what emerged as the distinctively North African branch of Christianity. It emerged from a dispute about how different branches of the Church had reacted to persecution at the beginning of the fourth century. And the problem, once it became apparent that this was in some ways at odds with the Roman Christianity into which Augustine had been baptised, was that there was no real doctrinal difference between the Churches. The argument against Donatism as an alternative church and against individual Donatists turns on the stories they tell about this moment of persecution. And the whole question is: who handed over the sacred texts under threat of persecution? And who underwent torture or death, rather than hand them over? And then, the question is: who was baptised or ordained by that person who handed over the texts? And so, you can see how the whole controversy is ultimately just about a tracing of lineage. And the stories are repeated again and again. What is interesting is that Augustine repeatedly calls Donatists forth to public debate. So he urges them to debate him and it’s clear that this was a form of entertainment; you go to the forum, you go to the market square and you watch someone having a staged debate with an opponent. Unsurprisingly, the Donatists generally sidestep the invitation. This is, after all, the man who had been the official rhetorician for the imperial court. “Most of Augustine’s doctrinal, dogmatic positions are developed in combat” Pelagianism plays out in the Letters too. We have letters surviving from Pelagius himself and from Augustine to the mother of a young woman who Augustine feels is being too seduced by the notion of Pelagianism. In its extreme articulation, this is the doctrine that you can be saved by your own good works and you don’t need God’s grace. Augustine is extremely concerned that this young woman thinks that her own personal achievements in asceticism will suffice to save her and she is ignoring the importance of God’s grace in salvation. This another example of Augustine’s systematising thought—it’s all connected again with the theological rationale about why Christ’s death is justified."