Augustine Beyond the Book

by Pollmann, Karla; Gill, Meredith J.

• ISBN13: 9789004222137
• ISBN10: 9004222138
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-01
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

classicists; historians of ideas; historians of art; musicologists; historians of the Church; theologians; theater historians

Excerpts

IntroductionKarla Pollmann and Meredith J. GillAugustine of Hippo (354-430) is one of the most prominent and influential Christian thinkers in the history of the West. Indeed, he is probably the only writer whose impact spans such divergent fields as medieval canon law (in Gratian's Decretum) and twentieth-century pop music (in Sting's Saint Augustine in Hell). This reflects not only Augustine's iconic status but also the versatility of his authority, even as his legacy calls into question that very notion. Three factors help explain the broad and diverse character of his reception. The first is the historical figure of Augustine himself who seems to have combined in one person many different qualities. These resulted in a vast and varied oeuvre, comprising in its extant form around five million words. As canonical Church Father, saint, bishop, exegete, brilliant orator, original thinker, passionate fighter of heresy, and relentless soul-searcher, he produced works that lend support to widely divergent views and causes. A second factor centres on the identity of Augustine's numerous readers who, through the centuries, have appropriated him selectively and creatively in support of their distinctive agendas. The Augustine of Thomas Aquinas, for example, is very different from the respective Augustines of Petrarch and Martin Luther, or indeed from the modern Augustines created by Hannah Arendt or Jacques Derrida. The third factor, which has so far been much less studied than the other two, is the medium in which the reception takes shape. The manuscripts of medieval canon law, for example, allowed for a presentation of Augustinian content that is radically different from its presentation in the pop song composed by Sting. In each case, the medium shapes the reception and performs a particular function.This collected volume seeks to explore the significance of the medium for the reception process and, in a necessarily interdisciplinary manner, it brings together classicists, theologians, art historians, musicologists, sermonists, neo-Latinists, historians, and philosophers of religion and culture. Ranging in time from after Augustine's death to the twentieth century, fourteen papers partly deriving from a ground-breaking international meeting, address the following central questions: How is Augustine interpreted outside the medium of the book? What exactly happens when Augustine's ideas are translated from their written context to other forms, such as music, the visual arts, sermons, or drama? How does the medium affect the message? What is the significance of the medium for the appropriation of Augustine's authority and for his thought?In addressing these questions, this volume both explicitly and implicitly engages the concepts of intermediality, which for our purposes refers to the juxtaposition of at least two different media in the reception of ideas, and of transmediality, which in our context denotes the transfer of content from one medium to the other. While intermediality focuses on the interaction of various media of reception and is predominantly interested in the result of this interaction, the parameter of transmediality highlights the process of the transition from the original medium to the target medium (Meyer 2006). The contributions presented here do not intend to explore these concepts comprehensively, nor are the sub-sections of this volume derived from these concepts as a theoretical matrix. These notions highlight, rather, the dynamic nature of the transmission and reception of ideas, and they are, therefore, helpful in terms of a nuanced examination of how this affects the interpretation and transformation of these ideas.State of researchIntermediality was introduced as an investigative paradigm in the early 1980s, as, for instance, in 1983 by the literary theorist Aage Hansen-Löve. Since then, the concept of intermediality has been further developed, especially in Germany, and relative to the interpretation of media such as film and digital media, by scholars like Jörg Helbig, Jürgen Müller, Corina Caduff, and Joachim Paech. These scholars built on the model of intertextuality, according to which texts are not autonomous entities but fundamentally dependent on other texts, be it consciously or subconsciously. By introducing the paradigm of intermediality, they expanded the hermeneutical horizon, emphasizing the role of media other than the written text in the signification process. The concept also gained ground in studies of the connections between word and music, such as those by Werner Wolf, and, in theatre studies, by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt. Since 2003, the University of Montréal has published the interdisciplinary periodical Intermédialités (Méchoulan 2003). So far, these parameters have never been explicitly applied to the pre-modern period. In several contributions, this volume makes pioneering propositions in this direction, exploring thereby both the promise of these parameters as well as their limitations.Although intellectual historians have increasingly recognized the dynamic ways in which texts are appropriated across time, they have so far largely focused on the printed source. The case of Augustine is illuminating. While the transmission and reception of Augustine's thought has received increasing attention (Backus 1997; Bergvall 2001) and is currently the subject of the ambitious research project, After Augustine: A Survey of His Reception from 430 to 2000, directed by Karla Pollmann, and generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust (see www.st-and.ac.uk/classics/after-augustine; Pollmann and Lambert 2004), this research is largely focused on printed books as the medium of reception. Apart from this, Augustine's iconography has also received attention (Courcelles 1965-80; Schnaubelt and Van Fleteren 1999; Bourdua and Dunlop 2007), but without considering, on the whole, the specific relationship of the visual medium to the reception of his thought. A notable exception is the monograph by Meredith J. Gill (2005), which addresses Augustine's thought in the visual arts of the Italian Renaissance. Rare, too, is Wittekind's endeavour (2004) to explain how manuscript illuminations work as commentaries on their accompanying texts, an avenue already fruitfully applied by Schapiro (1973) to medieval religious narrative. Recently, the intermedial dichotomy of image text has produced various studies, both for ancient and late antique Roman culture (Elsner 1996; Squire 2009; Zimmerl-Panagl and Weber 2010); these, however, do not include Augustine. An area not covered in the volume presented here is the interaction between texts and architecture (Nasrallah 2010).The reception of Augustine in oral and often vernacular forms such as sermons, plays, and music has been virtually unexplored. Yet it is precisely these media that might be expected to play a central role in the reception and formation of Augustine as religious authority and role model, especially in broader, less educated circles. Moreover, these genres also place the literary evidence in a novel perspective, indicating thereby the interdependency of various media in the reception process. Finally, calling Augustine a saint is itself the result of reception processes. Thus, most contributors to this volume have chosen to call him Augustine, focusing on the historical figure as the object of reception. In some contributions, however, it seemed appropriate to refer to a Saint Augustine, emphasizing thereby that, for the respective period or field under investigation, this epithet was embedded in the reception process.Approaches and perspectives of the contributionsBy applying a new paradigm to the history of ideas, this volume aims to shed light on the reception of Augustine in five particular contexts: the cultic-dramatic, the visual, the spiritual-devotional, the musical, and the concep