For Harnack, ‘the most important and marvellous fact’ in the history of the Church was its taking possession, ‘at the very time when it was setting itself to acquire the inheritance of the Roman Empire’, of ‘a religious genius of extraordinary depth and power’, namely Augustine (What is Christianity?, 257). In this affably but sharply argued book Jonathan Teubner develops that insight by studying the prayerful ‘Augustinianisms’ of Boethius and Benedict, in the process overturning Harnack's premature verdict on sixth-century Italy as ‘a theological no man's land’ (p. 119). This is a path-breaking study of theological (and, more broadly, behavioural) traditions for our post-Dogmengeschichte era. Its expansion – better to say, explosion – of the lex orandi, lex credendi paradigm gives it much of the feel of the classic work of Jaroslav Pelikan, which methodologically it supersedes. Not for that reason alone, the book should also command attention from scholars of histories and systems beyond or beside theology: specialists of Latin late antiquity, historians of the break-up of the western Roman Empire, anyone interested in the historical reception of Augustine's writings, teaching and ideas over the longue durée.

In the chapter already cited from What Is Christianity? Harnack harped on what he called ‘the Latin spirit’ of western Christendom, or even (with Hegelian capitals in the English version) ‘the Latin Spirit in the sense of Roman World-dominion’. The last gasp of that spirit in modern (Protestant) historiography was probably C. N. Cochrane's Christianity and classical culture: a study of thought and action from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford 1940), but Cochrane's reading of the City of God made no pretence of being historical theology, and in any case has been buried by other interpretations of Augustine's sense of the saeculum and subsequent ‘political Augustinianisms’, notably in the work of Henri-Irénée Marrou, Robert Markus and Peter Brown. These are among Teubner's guides and they guarantee the historical pertinence of his framing, for ‘the consequential years between Augustine and Gregory the Great’, of an account of ‘the Augustinian tradition’ that by accepting ‘the contingencies of the rough ground of human history’ can ‘allow for adherents of a tradition to be their own creative agents’ (pp. 121, 125).

In his articulation of the kinds of creative agency that individuals such as Boethius and Benedict may exercise within a tradition, Teubner makes a signal theoretical and methodological advance on existing work in patristic and, particularly, Augustinian reception studies. Despite the far longer history of theological doctrines of reception, recent practice in this area has been heavily affected and partly driven by Anglophone studies in classical (Greek and Latin) literary reception, themselves a hybrid of old-style detection of borrowing/allusion and newer-fangled diagnostics of ‘reader response’ and ‘intertextuality’. In the case of Augustine and Boethius, reliance on an instrinsically ‘literary’ or text-centred approach has been encouraged by the brilliant success of the méthode des parallèles textuels demonstrated decades ago by Pierre Courcelle in his mountainously footnoted accounts of the Confessions and Consolation of philosophy ‘in the literary tradition’. The frequent result of these tendencies, as Teubner observes in connection with the Oxford guide to the historical reception of Augustine, is a narrowing of studies of (patristic) tradition to exclude ‘cases where the literary evidence is not explicit but implicit in similar uses of themes, motifs, or constellated ideas’ (p. 14). With characteristic pragmatism, he tackles the problem head-on, discussing verifiable references to Augustine's writings under the heading of ‘Augustinianism 1’ and reserving for treatment under ‘Augustinianism 2’ his attempts to capture the ‘curious aspect of Wirkungsgeschichte’ that consists in an author's ‘appropriat[ing] a previous author's constellations of themes and concepts in connection with an ongoing communal and institutional practice’ (pp. 15, 25). The heavenly metaphor of constellation might have pleased Augustine, who sometimes thought of biblical hermeneutics as an alternative to astronomy. We are still in a textual universe, but one now in which it is easier to explain how texts – and inferences from texts, whether biblical, patristic or other – help make and remake communities of behaviour (p. 35; on ‘worldview’ see pp. 168, 187). Slighty clunky as it is, Teubner's binary device thus affords him the clarity and freedom he needs for this essay in the ‘kinematics of tradition’ (pp. 6–7, acknowledging Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout; also pp. 209, 214).

Harnack's Augustine was backward-looking and sin-obsessed. Teubner's, sourced from the texts, is forward-looking and prayerful: ‘prayer is the mode through which Augustine envisions the Christian existence as a hope that is caught between desiring the beata vita and waiting patiently for it as a gift’ (p. 85, prefacing a section felicitously entitled ‘Failing towards the beata vita’). This is a less ambiguous, more affectively focused description of a state of being that I once incautiously identified with Augustine's ‘secular imagination’. It provides the basis for a cogent reading of Boethius’ Consolation as an instance of ‘Augustinianism 2’, building (in ch. vi) from other recent research on Boethius’ use of Augustine to an analysis of the manifestly Augustinian imaging of the relation between human ratio and divine intellegentia in Consolation 5. (Less clear, as ever with Boethius, is how any of this might be connected to ‘ongoing communal and institutional practice’.) In similar fashion, and with a dexterity not to be conveyed in a short review, chapters on the Regula Benedicti show how the Augustinianism that ultimately counted there is the product not of its author's citations of Augustine ‘but rather of his constructive use of Augustine's Christology to inform an understanding of Christian existence’ grounded in a life of prayer (p. 204).

On a hint from Henry Chadwick, Boethius is styled by Teubner a ‘Latin Christian’. He and Benedict appear as partners in an ‘ongoing reflection on the identity of the Latin theological tradition’ (pp. 130, 167). Despite its ecumenism and de-essentialising (p. 21), Prayer after Augustine is still written after Harnack. That should not make it a niche work for historical theologians. It also deserves to be read, and to make its mark, alongside interdisciplinary studies such as Markus’ End of ancient Christianity (Cambridge 1990), Brown's Rise of western Christendom (Oxford 2003) and Ian Wood's Transformation of the Roman West (Leeds 2017), as a contribution to Kirchengeschichte als Kulturgeschichte.