Several times, when faced with a difficult passage of scripture in Sermones ad populum, Augustine implores his audience, “knock and it shall be opened” (Matt. 7:7c; par. Luke 11:9c). Augustine uses this phrase to stress humility and the human need for God’s activity when interpreting scripture. Studying the archeological record of domestic architecture of locked doors in Roman North Africa elucidates Augustine’s message. Knowledge of the material culture shows that Augustine calls upon Christians to “knock” upon scripture as if it (...) were a door, locked and barred in such a way that it could only be opened from inside. Thus, a reader of scripture is like a petitioner calling from outside a locked door, needing God to open its meaning. Augustine’s use of “knocking” contrasts with the metaphor of “keys” to scripture, which was favored by Tyconius and other early Christian writers. In De doctrina Christiana, Augustine expresses concern that “keys” could lead a person into overconfidence, expecting to unlock obscure passages of the Bible by his or her own power. Augustine’s frequent use of Matt. 7:7c is a call for exegetes to approach scripture with humility. All members of the totus Christus, great and small, must humbly knock. The image of “knocking” provides a versatile theological message: human effort is important, but the meaning of the Bible is ultimately unlocked by God’s activity. (shrink)

Scholars do not agree on where Augustine exactly stands regarding capital punishment and whether his position is still relevant for debates today. This paper establishes Augustine’s starting point for his considerations on the death penalty, identifies the scriptural input into his views, both critical and supportive of capital punishment, and, finally, examines how he approaches concrete cases of people facing the death penalty. On this basis, it makes a somewhat new proposal for understanding how Augustine sees capital punishment as legitimate (...) in principle but problematic in concrete cases, in particular, cases involving the church. (shrink)

A recent study has argued from theological and classicizing parallels that the first, anti-pagan book of Augustine’s De consensu euangelistarum belongs between 406 and 412 CE. This article defends the traditional dating ca. 400–405 CE, implied by Retractationes. Uncertainty over the dating of parallels in De trinitate 1–4 cautions against reliance on theological peculiarities (a variant of John 5:19 and the phrase unitas personae, both otherwise paralleled in the 410s CE or later), while a close review of the patterns of (...) classical citation proves resemblance to De ciuitate dei to be superficial. Not only does Augustine demonstrably cite the same classical texts on widely separated occasions, De consensu euangelistarum 1 evinces little of Augustine’s later knowledge of Porphyry and Varro. The crowning proof comes, however, in a brief rebuttal to pagan complaints over contemporary misfortunes. Although he focuses on Rome’s religious history, Augustine omits any hint of Alaric’s sack (410 CE), the religious-political instability of 408–409 CE, or Radagaisus’ invasion of Italy (405–406 CE), all of key importance for later works. The book’s method, scope, and tenor place it neatly within the span 400–405 CE, as our first testimony to the interreligious milieu for which De ciuitate dei would later be aimed. (shrink)

This article focuses on the unresolved scholarly question of how Confessiones, book 10 should be interpreted, proposing a new explanation as to how and why the second half of book 10 is critically important to this text. Emphasizing important relations between the introductory chapters and the second half of book 10, the article revisits Augustine’s treatment of ambitio saeculi, interpreted as a state of will, with which author Augustine continues to struggle, even during his act of confessing publicly (i.e., in (...) composing the book 10 text for publication). As a corruption of the motive behind his act of public confession, ambitio saeculi threatens to undermine the moral integrity of this same act. After Augustine recognizes that he cannot solve this moral flaw, he despairs and considers abandoning his human audience, and so, the very publication of his text. However, he is made newly capable of remaining, as confessant, before his readership, through a new, deeper conversion. This conversion to a new humility is given in and through the confessant’s participation in the eucharistic sacrament, which provides a hopeful resolution to his ambitio saeculi. (shrink)

Noting how an hypothesis can turn into a truth simply by being repeated, this article examines carefully the basis for the date normally given for this sermon and the frailty of the textual tradition that is the basis for the Morin edition of this sermon. After a careful analysis of the factors that might help to date it, it is assigned an uncertain date. It remains, however, plausible to think that it was delivered ad mensam Cypriani. The analysis of the (...) transmission of this sermon includes several new manuscripts, a new stemma and several general observations about its transmission. This article concludes with comments about the content and a new edition of the Latin text of the sermon. (shrink)

St. Augustine, pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the massa damnata. This article will not explore the rationale or semantics of his arguments, nor the detail and nuance of the doctrines of predestination and perseverance. (...) Rather, I seek to understand, from Augustine’s last writings, how he reconciled his strong conviction that God is love with doctrines requiring belief in a God who determined the fate of individuals to eternal reward or punishment “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), a God indifferent to individuals’ actions, struggles, or longings. My primary interest is not on Augustine’s ability to render these two apparently opposing ideas of God intellectually compatible, but rather on his feeling, gathered from his last sermons, as he approached death. In brief, how could Augustine love the God in whom he believed? (shrink)

This article investigates the place of De magistro within Augustine’s developing theology of words and the Word through a reverse chronological reading. This is necessary because, despite its emphasis on words, De magistro never refers to Christ as the “Word.” It would be easy, therefore, to see it as unrelated to the theological emphasis on that title in later works such as De trinitate. A reverse chronological reading, however, establishes Augustine’s developing understanding of the relationship between words and the Word (...) in a way that moves us from a full-throated theology of divine and human speech backward into more exploratory engagements with nascent ideas. When this reverse trail is traced, we can begin to see De magistro as one key starting point for it by providing warrant for seeing the inner Christ as necessarily the Word of God, even if not explicitly named as such. Such a reading adds deeper theological significance to a text often read only in terms of its contribution to semiotics and epistemology. In this reading, De magistro is an essential text for understanding Augustine’s fuller theology of language not only because of its early sign theory but because it sets the soteriological stage for our growth into the likeness of Christ the Word. (shrink)

This article aims to offer an overview of the problem of suicide in Augustine of Hippo, from the anti-Manichean texts of the late 380s CE to De ciuitate dei and the rejoinder to Gaudentium (Contra Gaudentium). A transversal analysis of the evolution of the concept of voluntary death throughout the work of Augustine allows us to identify up to four different conceptions of suicide, each of them corresponding to a rather well-defined chronological period: a philosophical conception, that we find in (...) De libero arbitrio; a moral one, that we can excerpt from De mendacio; a polemical approach in the context of controversy against Donatism, which we can retrace in a set of writings from 400 to 412 CE, and especially in Contra epistulam Parmeniani; and, finally, the conception of suicide as homicide, that appears in De ciuitate dei and that will define the decisive and most widespread doctrine of Augustine in this matter. In this way, this paper aims to enrich, from a transversal and chronological perspective, the studies that have been carried out over the last decades on suicide in Augustine. (shrink)