In this volume, E. puts forward a refreshing, original and persuasive thesis regarding Augustine's epistolary practice. She argues, with respect to three principal case studies (Augustine's correspondence with Jerome, with his Donatist adversaries and with Pelagius – the last as a surprising counter-example) that Augustine invents and attempts to give traction to a new epistolary genre with respect to the classical and late-antique models. Specifically, she argues that Augustine attempts to incorporate into the well-known friendly letter exchange (the colloquium absentium amicorum, or the epistula ad familiarem) the practice of rebuke and correction. She emphasises that the novelty lies not in epistolary rebuke per se, but in its integration into an otherwise friendly exchange, and in the expectation of a response in which the rebuked addressee enters into a discussion of his supposed error, and is induced to a written retraction of it. She highlights, in addition, that while rebuke might have been acceptable within face-to-face encounters between friends, its transposition into the epistolary medium daringly broke the bounds of convention (pp. 7–8, 56).
After a chapter on Augustine's initial experiments in corrective correspondence, E. uses the first two case studies to exhibit Augustine's ultimately doomed attempts to put this new genre to work. Augustine's provocative introduction of rebuke into what are otherwise letters of friendship is met by lack of response, evasion, resistance and defensiveness. Augustine again and again spectacularly fails to induce his would-be dialogue partners into the mutually corrective correspondence he desires. The third case study serves a rather different, and equally original, purpose in E.'s thesis. Where one would pre-eminently have expected Augustine to enter into friendly epistolary rebuke – with Pelagius, with whom he was already on friendly epistolary terms – he refrains from doing so. E. argues that this is not because Augustine has finally learnt his lesson, but uses the surprising fact as evidence towards her daring hypothesis that Augustine only begins to associate Pelagius with the views on grace he has been combating (with Caelestius and his Sicilian disciples, not Pelagius, as his conscious target) as late as 416, when Orosius returned from Palestine with reports of the hearings of Pelagius in Jerusalem and Diospolis – by which time the controversy is at its peak and it is too late for Augustine to enter into friendly, corrective epistolary exchange. Like his Confessions, Augustine's De gestis Pelagii is his retrospectively constructed account of events, not to be taken at historical face value. In the latter case, Augustine retrospectively seeks to justify his tactics in relation to Pelagius to date: his friendly letter exchanges with him and his failure thus far to name Pelagius in any of his ‘anti-Pelagian’ treatises. Reinterpreting the former as subtle attempts at correction and the latter as his attempt to avoid humiliating a friend, he hides his ignorance of Pelagius' association with the ‘heresy’ eventually named after him.
A third and subsidiary upshot of E.'s larger argument is her placement of Augustine's endorsement of legal coercive measures, first in relation to the Donatists and then in relation to Pelagius, within a wider trajectory in which it can be made sense of as a last resort, after Augustine has exhausted (among other friendlier strategies) the more personal method of epistolary correction. Only because of the failure of the latter in the case of the Donatists (pp. 154–5), and its retrospectively reconstructed failure in the case of Pelagius (p. 215), does he sanction harsher measures.
E.'s thesis, in each of its dimensions, undoubtedly makes new and significant strides within Augustinian scholarship, both in its establishment of a fresh and generative lens through which to view relatively well-worked material (Augustine's exchange with Jerome), and in its consequently compelling treatment of relatively neglected material within Augustine's corpus (his letters more generally). Its advances are at once literary and historical. On the one hand it identifies a new epistolary genre, which although it did not catch on in Augustine's time, may well turn out to have later incarnations with roots in Augustine's own practice – as E. hints in her conclusion (p. 230). On the other hand, it dramatically recasts Augustine's historical relationship with Pelagius in a way which promises in time to become standard fare within Augustinian scholarship, just as has acknowledgment of the rift between historical fact and Augustine's retrospective account of it in the Confessions.
Also on the historical side, E. sheds new light on Augustine's biography. Her analysis shows a sensitive psychological reticence, in which she acknowledges various conceivable motives behind Augustine's desire for corrective correspondence with prominent Christian figures: ambition at one end of the spectrum and the pastoral aim of fostering a healthy, mutually corrective Christian community at the other end. And given that her method is largely a literary one, this reticence is entirely appropriate (without being reductive). But there nevertheless emerges in new colours an Augustine who is daring, tenacious, psychologically bold (at times) to the point of blunt insensitivity, and whose worldly ambition and Christian charity are fascinatingly, and ultimately indecipherably, intertwined.
E.'s case is made through descriptive narration, with frequent citation from the letters of Augustine and his correspondents. There is surprisingly little fine-grained literary analysis, despite what the introduction seems to promise (pp. 20–5). In other words, while E. is relatively thorough in her setting out of contemporary epistolary conventions and the way in which Augustine manipulates and flouts these at the macro-level, there is not as much as one would expect by way of detailed attention to the particular words and phrases he uses and to their configurational dynamics. This is perhaps a result of the fact that, as E. judges, Augustine's letters are on the whole ‘relatively unadorned, textualized speech acts that aim primarily to communicate and produce action’, by contrast with those of Paulinus and Jerome, which serve to ‘[advertise] their literary talents’ (p. 229).
However, the much more prominent dimension lacking from E.'s treatment is the theological – a deliberate bracketing on E.'s part (e.g. pp. 103 n. 7; 137 n. 101; 192). While her literary-historical approach fully justifies itself as a self-contained treatment (which is at the same time non-reductively open to the theological), I wonder, as a theologian, how her argument would be affected by a systematic integration of the theological dimension which is never far from the surface. As E. senses, the subject of mutual, loving rebuke or correction within the Christian community is a vital, although underexplored, topos within Augustine's theology. She draws attention to the only treatise of Augustine's with rebuke as its central focus (the late De correptione et gratia), but clearly recognises that it is a theme of much more pervasive importance for him, informed in particular by his reading of Paul's rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2:11–14 (pp. 224–5). Thus the potential of a theological analysis – which takes into account both his theoretical reflection on the role of rebuke and his own practice of it in epistolary form – is huge. It is so not only for the specifically theological fruit it could bear in relation to Augustine's doctrinal thinking (e.g. on grace, free will, predestination, the Holy Spirit, etc.), but also for the extra complexity it could bring to the narrative E. tells. What would happen if one were to lend the literary, ambitious and pastoral Augustine a fully theological voice? How would this voice contribute to and transform the already multidimensional Augustine drawn by E.? And more specifically, how would attentiveness to Augustine's theology shed light on his bold manipulation of epistolary norms? Would his strategies emerge in renewed relief? These are questions E.'s exciting monograph invites but does not pursue.
