Providing excellent reading and suggesting substantive grist for further research, these fourteen papers were presented at, or commissioned for this volume after, a 2009 conference held at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).
The first section, “Visualizations of Augustine,” includes Karla Pollmann on Augustine as an authoritative figure in life-cycle commissions in the high Middle Ages by competing religious communities. Each used the Augustine narrative to promote its claim and status as the true order purportedly established by Augustine. It also includes Vladimir Cvetkovic, who does not use Augustine's teaching in icon theology because his theology of divine light, free will, and grace does not match the Orthodox theology of uncreated light and thus lacks the notion of synergy between God and human beings in their process of deification. Cvetkovic provides a cogent tutorial on the characteristics and theological significance of the dialectics between light and design within distinct forms and functions of the icon. Meredith J. Gill describes convergence of Augustinian themes in Counter-Reformation depictions of living spaces of wealthy patrons that presented fictionalized iconography of Augustine's saintly attributes personifying the Liberal Arts and the active/contemplative dilemma. In these scenes, his shadow is a metaphor for his “almost nothing” before Creation (as ambivalence, abyss, and falling away), and light for apprehension of God and divine grace.
In “Dramatizing Augustine on Stage,” Dorothea Weber writes about Augustine as a frequent protagonist in medieval and early modern plays, which were probably intended to strengthen Christian resolve (rather than convert Jews or, laterally, Protestants). Until the mid-eighteenth century, the omniscience attributed to Augustine as auctorial character corresponds with his enormous general regard as a teacher of the Church. Thus in plays featuring nothing about his life, Augustine was frequently the figure who interpreted the sequence of events and supplied crucial backstories. In later centuries, the Confessions became the primary text for portrayals of an erring man searching for truth who is finally converted. Goran Proot recounts the importance of drama to the Jesuit and Augustinian schools established in the Low Countries in the years following 1574. Bound volumes of detailed performance programs were resources for teachers creating plays for their own classes. Some tens of thousands of school dramas all served both political authorities and the church by robustly affirming Catholic doctrine in splendid festival programmes, processions, and public pageants.
The third section, “Augustine in Confessionalized Contexts of Spirituality and Devotion,” includes Carolyn Muessig on Augustine in manuals of sermons for preachers, and how Augustine was referred to by lay people who had absorbed pastoral depictions. Julia D. Staykova tells why the early seventeenth century translations of the City of God and the Confessions depended on the widespread popularity decades earlier of St. Augustine's Meditations (or his Manual, or his Soliloquies), an inauthentic compilation of devotional materials drawn from the Confessions, various medieval meditative sources, and the Bible. Feike Dietz demonstrates the devotional effect of widespread distribution of particular distillation of Augustinian (or Pseudo-Augustinian) thought via early modern printed collections of emblematic mottoes, pictures, and epigrams. The visual material representing the devout feelings between God and the believer simplified devotional reading of Augustine for a broad audience of Catholics in the Dutch Republic. John Exalto considers transmission of Augustine's thought via (semi-) public and more private types of communication among Reformed godly (lay and ordained) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dutch Reformed Church pastoral training featured Augustine widely referenced in university lectures, student disputations, and as the final authority supporting complex theological arguments. Even though pseudo-Augustinian Medititationes was widely circulated, reading primary sources was encouraged, for the Church Fathers were exemplars for pure Christianity, with Augustine the most important. Translations of Augustine were available to anyone, Protestants and Catholics alike, so believers were free to make their own judgments.
The fourth section, “Musical Variations on Augustine,” includes Eyolf Østrem using the full-text database Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML) asking what of Augustine was used and what for in fifteenth and sixteenth century Latin and Italian music treatises. Interestingly, missing are references to sermons and commentaries on the Psalms. De Musica, of course, plus the themes of music's mysterious power (which can be negative force, but correctly used enhances understanding) in books 9 and 10 of the Confessions, all enable presentation of Augustine as the ideal authority who voices serious concerns, but with a positive verdict at the end. Sabine Lichtenstein discusses the libretto for the oratorio La Conversione di Sant'Agostino, translated by the aristocrat Maria Antonia Walpurgis (1724-1780) from the Latin text of a popular paraphrase of the Confessions and set to music by Johann Adolf Hasse (1699–1783) and staged several times in Dresden and restaged in his lifetime in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Hamburg, Mannheim, Padua, Rome, Riga, and Prague. Because the protagonist is aided by intimates, Maria Antonia included many family scenes as dialogues interrupted by monologues. The music of good composers like Hasse was itself an interpretation of the text. Nils Holger Petersen discusses the use of text by musicians and audience during performance, how musical discourse defines or controls how text should be understood, using Soliloquia Sancti Aurelii Augustini by Swiss composer Klaus Huber (b. 1924) and The Vision of Saint Augustine by Michael Tippett (1905-1998).
The final section, “Augustine beyond Himself,” extends to geography and psychotherapy. Pablo de Felipe considers Augustine's denial of the existence of Antipodeans in City of God 16.9 in the context of ancient geography, and Augustine's long shadow cast on geography as far as the Renaissance, a veritable thumbnail primer on flat/spherical earth (who believed what when and why—it comes down to Augustine versus Columbus). Alexandra Pârvan observes that Augustine's ideas on time, memory, history, experience, auto-reflexivity, and self-consciousness are so much part of common lexicon that their source is little known. Indeed, his thought is so often quoted out of context without citation that it comes to mean whatever the new author might wish to intend. Augustine fades away when psychotherapists pastiche their own theories from sayings like “if no one asks me, I know”; “our heart is restless until it rests in you”; “hate the vice and love the human being.” In the end, she concludes, we never know the real Augustine, only our own.
Page-turning stuff, all of it.
