A creative scholar and teacher deserves a homage like this volume: creative essays probing domains that Roland Teske mapped out so carefully and extensively in “voluminous and many-sided scholarly contributions [with] his patient lucidity, his ability to introduce old texts to new readers, to help them see their central outlines and their distinctive originality” (Harmless, 280). Ranging from “The Nature of the Pelagian Crisis” (Bonner) to “Li or Ly, Marker of Metalanguage in Scholastic Latin” (Rosemann), nine stellar essays on Augustine are enriched by five studies in medieval philosophy, displaying throughout Augustine's adept dialectical interplay between what we dub “philosophy” and “theology.” Indeed, Frederick Van Fleteren reminds us that Augustine rarely referred to the mode of inquiry he virtually inaugurated in the West as “theology,” for that term had already been co-opted by philosophers in his milieu. And Gerald Bonner offers some useful insight into Augustine's role in the so-called Pelagian crisis, while Joseph Lienhard offers a window on his support for creedal use of Filioque. David Vincent Meconi details the “dynamics of Augustinian deification,” effectively dissolving a stark dichotomy between West and East in that regard. Ann A. Pang-White shows us how “matter matters” in the Confessions by adding depth to temporal unfolding.
Joseph Koterski offers a singularly creative essay, showing how Augustine's rich sense of memory can render a “thick description” of the action of The Tempest, while James Wetzel explores the way the Soliloquies contrast “memorable knowledge of God” with an austere sense of “ratio busy disassociating knowledge from memory and likening knowledge of God to the knowledge of any non-sensed item” (240), whereas “God is clearly an unsettling presence in Augustine's memory, always one step ahead of his desire, everywhere and nowhere at once” (244). Indeed, if “the aim of a confession is to exchange sterile self-presence for the illumination of love” (249), what emerges is an “aporetic selfhood”—a “self” more like Buddhist “no-self.”
Among the five studies in medieval philosophy, John Doyle explores natural philosophy in “The Falling Dog and the Numerical Unity of Motion,” John Laumakis outlines William of Auvergne on human being, Edward Mahoney parses late Renaissance discussions on the hierarchy of being, and Philipp Rosemann probes li/ly in Scholastic Latin. William Harmless crowns this section, however, by showing how deftly Bernard of Clairvaux adds the book of experience to those of creation and the Bible in his multifaceted commentary on the Song of Songs: “What takes place between God and me I can feel, but not express” (289). Yet by demanding that feeling to be internally structured by Scripture through a gentle yet penetrating lectio divina, Bernard “forges a new language for the Western mystical tradition, creating a whole repertoire of images and themes, [of which] the passions and loveplay of the wedding night provide the best analogy for describing the human encounter with the divine” (286), so outpacing even Augustine in this arena. So instructive a collection needs a roster identifying its authors, many of whom invite comment.
