In the last of nine differently authored essays on the late (more or less wild) Augustine, Christopher Blunda, also one of the volume's co-editors, introduces us to Gennadius of Marseilles and his cagily subversive book of bio-biblio notices on illustrious, but not always trustworthy, religious authorities. In De viris illustribus, Augustine rates at least a mention in five of the notices, one of which, notice 39, is devoted entirely to his legacy. It is Augustine's theological authority — particularly its presumptive status as exceptional or privileged — that is up for some subtle subverting. Gennadius writes nearly fifty years after Augustine's death, and he is in no mood as heir to a moderate Massilian tradition of monastic piety to bend the theology of southern Gaul towards Augustine's dire notions of sin-wrecked sexuality, posthumous healing and the arbitrary selectiveness of divine love. There may be less dire ways to parse original sin, grace and predestination, but — to take a page from Blunda's exacting notice of Gennadius — why go there? Augustine's capacious, endlessly wordy, unruly genius is arguably as much a source of dangerous confusion as it is a well of edifying invention. But as to whether De viris illustribus makes such an argument, Blunda, the historian, is circumspect: ‘while De viris illustribus certainly found a well-disposed and sufficiently erudite readership in Marseilles and its surrounding environs, its attempt to make Augustine wild by subverting his status as a theological authority was largely but not entirely (if the number and nature of textual variants in notice 39 is any indication) unsuccessful.’
None of the authors who have contributed to this handsome Brill volume (which can even boast of sporting a Cy Twombly illustration) has a vested interest in subverting Augustine's theological authority. Or, if any of them do, they are being more subtle about their business than a Gennadius. But if neither theological nor some other analogously big-picture authority is centrally at issue for the wilding of the late Augustine, what has wilding come to be about? All of the essays in The Late (Wild) Augustine have a genealogical connection to a 2018 conference at Berkeley, hosted by Susanna Elm and inspired by her collaboration with Mark Vessey. In minimalist terms, the conference aimed to rescue the writer of Retractationes, De haeresibus, Opus imperfectum contra Iulianum and Speculum from scholarly disdain and uninterest. Most students of Augustine have a passing familiarity with John Burnaby's sober assessment in Amor Dei of Augustine's last years: ‘Nearly all that Augustine wrote after his seventieth year is the work of a man whose energy has burnt itself out, whose love has grown cold.’ While more seasoned students hesitate before picking up that refrain, few would go as far as Elm does in the other direction. In her introduction to The Late (Wild) Augustine, she describes the septuagenarian as ‘a man, conscious of the powers of his writings, fearless in his contemplation of mortality, in full control of his formidable intellect, and ready to push concepts that had excited his curiosity and that he had contemplated, rejected, fought for, pushed and pushed against, to their limits, to the edge of the conceivable.’
It is the last bit that surprises me most: the late Augustine as wildling explorer, almost giddy to push his best, most articulate sense of things to the brink of undoing. Elm further characterises him as ‘an Augustine who labors for and rejoices in unpredictability and an astounding creativity.’ I would love to meet this wildling old man and be reassured that the religious impulse, even at an advanced age, can be rejuvenating and open-ended and not always a call to retrenchment. But I have to wonder what has happened to the overtaxed perfectionist who has grown impatient with deep but intractable questions (e.g. the origin of the soul) and is more than ready, within the constraints of a shifting finitude, to hold on for dear life to belief — make that correct belief. Shades of this familiar late Augustine make an appearance in most of the essays in the volume, and there they are accorded substance and nuance, mostly in the form of some sort of historical contextualisation.
Here are some snapshots. Johannes Brachtendorf holds the Retractationes in high regard. It is Augustine's showcase for the development and correction of his views over a long career; it is prep for posterity. (Correction may be hypothetically endless, but for this Augustine one corrects where one can.) Brachtendorf cues his essay to Augustine's seemingly trivial correction of Contra Iulianum 5.14.51 (retr. 2.62), a passage that discusses conception, and from there he follows Augustine's retrospective trek through a grand correction: from mind-body dualism to something more like body-love. In his essay on Augustine's De haeresibus, Richard Flower dispels the impression that the treatise is a simple list of heresies. Augustine makes use both of previous heresiology and also ancient technical literature to stake a claim to having produced the best, if necessarily incomplete, book of heresies out there. (Still more perfectionism, albeit chastened.) Patout Burns, in his essay, carefully and concisely sets out the developmental logic of Augustine's increasingly strident insistence, against Julian primarily, on the heritability of guilt. Since the logic is historical, Augustine's position is not inevitable, but nor is it (sorry, Gennadius) wild. It has roots in a complex reading of scripture. To see how a scripturally formed perception can reshape a social and legal imaginary, look no farther than Darcy Tuttle's essay on Augustine on the rape of the Sabine women in De civitate Dei 3.13. She writes: ‘Just as Augustine believes that all people are born enslaved to Adam's sin, so too all Roman citizens are born enslaved to Romulus's sin, bearing the state of their Sabine forebears.’ Erika Hermanowicz, in a bravura piece of historical reconstruction, lends all the essays that gesture toward an historicised late Augustine a thickened context. Specifically, she makes a case for thinking that the Council of Hippo, called by Augustine in 427, had everything to do with the messy, unfinished business of Catholic and Donatist reunification. (The late Augustine had too much social fabric to repair to be fully Burnaby's burnt-out, cold-hearted theologian.)
By my count, four of the nine essays in The Late (Wild) Augustine, including Elm's introduction, explicitly take on the problematic of wilding Augustine. I have already mentioned Blunda, who helpfully historicises the notion. That leaves Mark Vessey's meditation on the death scene in Possidius's Vita Augustini and Catherine Conybeare's attempt, by way of Cy Twombly and graffiti, to fathom a question of genre; if the Opus imperfectum contra Iulianum is not dialogue or commentary, then what is it? Those two essays are frightfully hard to encapsulate, and I will not try to do so here. The key take-away is that both speak to a wildness that Augustine evokes more than he possesses. I am not as sceptical about this kind of wildness, in that it emerges less out of projection than the intensification of readerly attention. In that regard, the wildness is generous. One need not have a wildling Augustine of one's own in order to play.
