Author Description

As a Doctor of the Latin Church, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) has usually been viewed as one of the founders of medieval and later traditions of biblical interpretation, and hence too of Western hermeneutics in a more general sense. At various times, if less confidently in recent years, he has also been assigned a leading part in the transmission of the disciplinary system of the 'liberal arts'. Yet there is a tension between these two roles. Augustine himself abandoned the liberal disciplines, as a system, on the way to formulating his theory of biblical interpretation. Though championing their use by Christians in the philosophical dialogues that he composed or projected soon after his 'conversion' in 386, he had radically revised his position by the time he came to draft his hermeneutical treatise On Christian Learning and Confessions a decade later. What prompted the change? How did it work itself out? What were its wider contexts? After a period in which such questions of intellectual history have been relatively neglected in Anglophone scholarship on Augustine and his milieux, this collection of essays seeks to restore them to the centre of interest, without repeating old arguments. Rather than asserting the representative nature of Augustine's response to the challenges of his culture and religion, as has been done in the past, the present writers emphasize the idiosyncrasy of his choices. In place of another episode in the unfolding of Western high culture between the Ancients and the Moderns, they present the story of Augustine's disciplinary-theoretical progress from Cassiciacum to Confessions as a chapter of curious accidents, albeit one of considerable historical consequence.