Leaves, Mice and Barbarians: The Providential Meaning of Incidents in the De ordine and De ciuitate Dei (original) (raw)

A stone in the Capitol: Some aspects of res publica and romanitas in Augustine

Transformations of Romanness

The Russian author Andrei Gorchakov travelled through Italyi no rder to follow the traces of the composer PavelSosnovsky,who, because he was desperatelyhomesick, had committed suicide. During his journey thath as led him to lieux de mémoire of Sosnovsky'spast,Gorchakov becomes depressed by the discrepancy between an idealized fiction of Italyand the nostalgic places that he visits, and-similar to his compatriot − he suffers more and more from homesickness. This tale, poeticallycaptured in Andrei Tarkovsky's1 983f ilm Nostalghia,s ensitively analyses the indissoluble dichotomies between imagination and reality. In his monumental book De civitatedei Augustine of Hippo follows emphatically the twisted traces of Vergil into an ostalgicallyp oeticized Roman past.T he young Augustine had left Carthagea nd his weepingm other Monnica in order to travel to Rome, just as Aeneas left Troy and the mourning Dido to found the new city.¹ In fact,A ugustine has another destination. The aim of his virtual journey to the City of God is the impassioned plea that the nostalgia for Rome has to be substituted by the desire for the eternal empire,t hati s, for the loveo ft he existential Good.I n the Church Father'sd ramatic cosmos Rome was ap lace full of dichotomies, as Italyw as for Gorchakov.A savital icon Rome symbolized ac omplex semantic field that incorporated lots of aspects − political and historicaln otions of the Roman Empire, antique literature and poetics, grammar and rhetoric, philosophy and erudition,t he intellectual centre of the known world. In short the Urbs had the potential to be ap rojection surface for manyl ate antiques ocial groups.² Romanization, the process that was supposedtoguarantee social cohesion between different groups,was mainlyacodeofsymbolic means, as Clifford Ando put it.³ The multiculturalw orld in which Augustine livedp rovided polymorphicc onceptso fi dentity that wereprocessuallyrelated to each other partlyincoincidenceand harmony, partly in diversification, contradiction, competition, and opposition.⁴ Thus, he had to confront tensions within his own complex rangeo fi dentities. To name just af ew, he was ac osmopolitan membero fR oman society,aphilosophicallyt rained heir of Romane lite culture, ar hetoricallye ducated political agent who wasp repared by his father for office in the Roman administration, aformer Manichean, amember of aR omanized north African-Mediterranean elite family, who spoke lingua Latina and Punica,a nd the Catholic bishop of at owni nAfrica proconsularis,who had to

"Caving into the Will of the Masses? : Relics in Augustine's City of God

Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 694, 2015

This thesis examines Augustine of Hippo's support of the cult of relics through the lens of Peter Brown's revision of the two-tiered model which was proposed in his 1981 book The Cult of Saints. More specifically, this thesis attempts to explain the introduction of saint's relics in the final book, book 22, of Augustine's magnum opus The City of God (De Civitate Dei). After providing proof of the theologian's opposition to the cult of relics in his youth, historical, biographical, and textual evidence is used to trace his later change of heart. This change in position is crystallized in a series of miracle accounts in the 8th chapter of the 22nd book. The analysis of this 'chain of miracles' is essential in understanding the purpose of the City of God as a whole and Augustine's own theories of death and resurrection

Augustine’s De ordine Revisited

Paper given at an interdisciplinary 4-day workshop on the theme Augustine’s De Ordine: Philosophical, Historical and Theological Perspectives,” organised by Dr Anna Marmodoro, The Throne, Weobley, Herefordshire, England, uk, 26–29 March 2018.