Augustine and the Disciplines From Cassiciacum to Confessions

by Pollmann, Karla; Vessey, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780199274857
• ISBN10: 0199274851
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Karla Pollmann is Professor of Classics at St Andrews University. Mark Vessey is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	ix
Abbreviations	x
Introduction	1	(22)
Mark Vessey
PART I Honesta studia: Classrooms without Walls	23	(44)
Disciplines of Discipleship in Late Antique Education: Augustine and Gregory Nazianzen	25	(24)
Neil McLynn
The Duty of a Teacher: Liminality and disciplina in Augustine's De Ordine	49	(18)
Catherine Conybeare
PART II Disciplinarum libri: The Canon in Question	67	(98)
Augustine's Disciplines: Silent diutius Musae Varronis?	69	(44)
Danuta R. Shanzer
Divination and the Disciplines of Knowledge according to Augustine	113	(28)
William E. Klingshirn
The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts in Augustine's Confessions	141	(24)
Philip Burton
PART III Doctrina Christiana: Beyond the Disciplines	165	(67)
The Grammarian's Spoils: De Doctrina Christiana and the Contexts of Literary Education	167	(17)
Catherine M. Chin
Augustine's Critique of Dialectic: Between Ambrose and the Arians	184	(22)
Stefan Hebbruggen-Walter
Augustine's Hermeneutics as a Universal Discipline!?	206	(26)
Karla Pollmann
Bibliography	232	(13)
Index locorum	245	(10)
General index	255