Augustine Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present

by Willemien Otten (Editor), Susan E. Schreiner (Editor)

Overview

In the massive literature on the idea of the self, the Augustinian influence has often played a central role. The volume Augustine Our Contemporary, starting from the compelling first essay by David W. Tracy, addresses this influence from the Middle Ages to modernity and from a rich variety of perspectives, including theology, philosophy, history, and literary studies. The collected essays in this volume all engage Augustine and the Augustinian legacy on notions of selfhood, interiority, and personal identity. Written by prominent scholars, the essays demonstrate a connecting thread: Augustine is a thinker who has proven his contemporaneity in Western thought time and time again. He has been "the contemporary" of thinkers ranging from Eriugena to Luther to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. His influence has been dominant in certain eras, and in others he has left traces and fragments that, when stitched together, create a unique impression of the “presentness” of Christian selfhood. As a whole, Augustine Our Contemporary sheds relevant new light on the continuity of the Western Christian tradition. This volume will interest academics and students of philosophy, political theory, and religion, as well as scholars of postmodernism and Augustine. Contributors: Susan E. Schreiner, David W. Tracy, Bernard McGinn, Vincent Carraud, Willemien Otten, Adriaan T. Peperzak, David C. Steinmetz, Jean-Luc Marion, W. Clark Gilpin, William Schweiker, Franklin I. Gamwell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Fred Lawrence, and Françoise Meltzer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268103484
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	05/30/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	476
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Willemien Otten is professor of theology and the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the College. She also directs the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Susan E. Schreiner is professor of theology and the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the College.

Read an Excerpt

How does the search for truth begin? By initiation – or rather by being seduced. Augustine uses the word admonitio to indicate the necessity of being drawn into a personal seeking of the truth by someone other, who already has experienced how important such seeking is. Someone, a teacher, must awaken me to discover the desirability of wisdom, show me a way, and encourage me to get engaged in the search. But if wisdom is one of the names of a fortunate life (vita beata) and if the desire of a fortunate life is inherent to being human, isn’t the desire for wisdom then constitutive of human existence as such? The search for wisdom thus seems to be inevitable.

It is important to distinguish the admonition that triggers my decision to seek for truth from the body of knowledge that, after my entrance into the realm of discovery, is handed on to me. Without being awakened and instructed, nobody would be able to assimilate parts of the culture accumulated in the course of history. We would not pursue the difficult work of learning if no one showed us the relevance of education.

Admonition is an exhortative mode of addressing. As with all modes of addressing – urging, instructing, summoning, commanding, and so on – its relevance does not primarily lie in the content it communicates. The content of my addressing someone can be almost nothing, for example when I direct my “Hello!” or “Hi!” to you. It is essential, however, that the addressor reach out and affect – or “do” something to – someone else, who thereby undergoes a certain change. When someone recruits me for participation in the ongoing search for truth, this endeavor can be distinguished from the teaching through which I am immersed in the content of a heritage I want to acquire.

As soon as I have accepted an invitation to participate in the search for knowledge, new provocations are going to keep me alert and actively engaged. A teacher’s words not only affect the students; they also urge them to respond. Speaking to someone is always a provocation, even if the allocated person reacts by walking away or falling silent. Answering in the form of a question or comment is the beginning of a dialogue, however. And dialogue is an ideal structure of the exchange between teachers and students, if both parties are concerned about truth.

Various levels and stations can be distinguished in such an exchange. Students are confronted not only with their teacher’s explanations, but at the same time with the realities and interpretations to which the teacher turns their attention. The students confront the teacher’s interpretation of the phenomena that are at stake with the phenomena themselves of which they have their own experience. Their responses to the teacher’s affirmations develop a scale of reactions that run from repetition, paraphrase and imitation to transformation, taking over the initiative, and experimental renovation.

If, after a solid initiation, I must go on without a teacher, I continue the dialogue within the inner space and time of a “voiceless dialogue of the soul within itself,” as Socrates called it. But in all phases of the learning process, I remain involved in a complex and growing network of relations: relations to one or more teachers and, via these, to their teachers’ teachers and authorities; relations to the linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and scholarly traditions available; relations to other students and researchers who pursue similar objectives; and, above all, relations to my own interiority where the words and thoughts of all those others not only echo, but also urge me to take a position towards their suggestions. All these relations together form a huge constellation of communication and multiple exchanges, but however much I can and must learn from them, in the end it is my own responsibility to determine my position with regard to the phenomena and the interpretations that are proposed to me. Until that moment, I keep a critical distance, while asking myself whether my teachers’ views indeed fit the realities that are experienced by me as well as by them. Perhaps my experience is different from theirs; perhaps their arguments show holes that still must be filled; they may have overlooked facts that shatter the coherence of their theories, or their descriptions and arguments may be inaccurate.

(excerpted from chapter 5)

Table of Contents

Introduction: Susan E. Schreiner, Augustine Our Contemporary

1. David W. Tracy, Augustine Our Contemporary: The Overdetermined, Incomprehensible Self

2. Bernard McGinn, Semper agens/Semper quietus: Notes on the History of an Augustinian Theme

3. Vincent Carraud, Pondus meum amor meus, or Contradictory Self-Love

4. Willemien Otten, The Open Self: Augustine and the Early Medieval Ethics of Order

5. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Teachers Without and Within

6. David C. Steinmetz, Luther and Augustine on Romans 9

7. Jean-Luc Marion, St. Augustine, or the Impossibility of Any Ego Cogito

8. W. Clark Gilpin, The Augustinian Strain of Piety: Theology and Autobiography in American History

9. William Schweiker, The Saint and the Humanities

10. Franklin I. Gamwell, The Sources of Temptation

11. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and Political Theology

12. Fred Lawrence, Cor ad cor loquitur: Augustine’s Influence on Heidegger and Lonergan

13. Françoise Meltzer, Ruins and Time

Notes on Contributors

Editorial Reviews

"This original collection of essays by stellar authors in the field addresses the paradoxical question that animates the best of philosophical and philological inquiry into the future of the religious and theological past: To what current uses can the archive and apparatus of early Christian, patristic, and medieval thought be put, without yielding to anachronistic, myopic, and fundamentally narcissistic appropriations that are the standing temptation of scholars of all generations? Susan E. Schreiner and Willemien Otten frame the project in the most stringent and compelling terms. Their further organization of the material is effective, and the individual articles are well researched, steeped in the thorough analysis and interpretation of primary sources while paying minute attention to the voluminous existing scholarship on Augustine, those who influence him, and those whom he would influence in turn." —Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University, and director, School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University

"Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner's volume demonstrates how Augustine's pioneering struggles with the self provided fertile ground for subsequent Western intellectuals to come to their own conclusions about the essence of the human experience. Readers will be surprised at each turn as venerable themes resurface century after century, invested with new meanings and bearings. Rather than identifying a stable, easily recognized, human core, these essays return the issue to the reader in a most fruitful way, where the self remains an ongoing site of questioning whose boundaries are far from easy to determine." —Paul Kolbet, Yale Divinity School

“The present volume develops several specific themes within the broad Augustinian legacy and thus will be helpful to scholars.” —Choice

“The title of this extraordinary book, Augustine Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present, conceals the fact that it is editors’ Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner’s homage to David Tracy, long time Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Committee for Social Thought.” —Reading Religion

"Readily engaging an impressive range of Western thought, from the more obvious connections with classic philosophers and Augustine’s contemporaries to twentieth- century philosophy, it is perhaps no small surprise that the “self” appears as an overarching theme.... Such essays invite the reader to find fresh approaches to seemingly outdated concepts and emphasize the utility of engaging with the past in contemplating the present." —Religious Studies Review

From the Publisher

"This original collection of essays by stellar authors in the field addresses the paradoxical question that animates the best of philosophical and philological inquiry into the future of the religious and theological past: To what current uses can the archive and apparatus of early Christian, patristic, and medieval thought be put, without yielding to anachronistic, myopic, and fundamentally narcissistic appropriations that are the standing temptation of scholars of all generations? Susan E. Schreiner and Willemien Otten frame the project in the most stringent and compelling terms. Their further organization of the material is effective, and the individual articles are well researched, steeped in the thorough analysis and interpretation of primary sources while paying minute attention to the voluminous existing scholarship on Augustine, those who influence him, and those whom he would influence in turn."

Hent de Vries

"Otten and Schreiner's volume demonstrates how Augustine's pioneering struggles with the self provided fertile ground for subsequent Western intellectuals to come to their own conclusions about the essence of the human experience. Readers will be surprised at each turn as venerable themes resurface century after century, invested with new meanings and bearings. Rather than identifying a stable, easily recognized, human core, these essays return the issue to the reader in a most fruitful way, where the self remains an ongoing site of questioning whose boundaries are far from easy to determine."

Paul Kolbet

The title of this extraordinary book, Augustine Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present, conceals the fact that it is editors’ Willemien Otten and Susan E. Schreiner’s homage to David Tracy, long time Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Committee for Social Thought.

Reading Religion

The present volume develops several specific themes within the broad Augustinian legacy and thus will be helpful to scholars.

Choice