Closer to Augustine: Speculating on the recent past,and future,of Augustine scholarship

Abstract

It is noticeable that Augustine has started to become a muse figure for the Western tradition; not at all unlike, say, like Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the way that Wittgenstein has become a guide to philosophical genius, Augustine is enjoying a similar renaissance as a guide to religious experience. It is a new, more neutral role for him. In this article, I look at how scholars are reflecting this general situation as they pay closer attention to the genres of his writing – specifically his pastoral and homiletical writings. In these he showed his greatest talent for appealing to the existential material of his listeners’ hearts. In turn, his fluent way of matching this material to its end in Christ suggests, at long last, a satisfactory means of defining Augustinianism. Up to now, this goal has eluded scholarship, due to the notoriously unsystematic character of his thought.