De bello intestino: In Search of Tyconius' and Augustine's Use of a Term (AUGUSTINIANA, MID-2018) (original) (raw)
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The verse from the Song of Songs, " I am black and beautiful " , quoted by Tyconius in the Rule II of his work Liber regularum, represents a famous passage considered a characteristic of his concept of the bipartite church. The African Donatist lay theologian became famous mostly for his seven rules of the interpretation of Scriptures as well as for his arduous critique of the Donatists who denied the universality of the church and limited her exclusively to the territory of North Africa. The aim of the present article is to analyse to which extent Augustine had got use of Tyconius's book in the period of his polemic with the Donatists, and whether its reading could, eventually, have stood at the origin of his choice of biblical texts, the ones he commented on as a preacher between the years 406–407. In the selected texts I have observed a certain predilection for a particular set of scriptural quotations used both as an argument and as an illustration to support Augustine's and Tyconius's thought concerning the universal-ity of the church. Despite the fact that we have no direct proofs about the inspiration sources of Augustine's anti-Donatist preaching between the years 406–407, the similarities in the use of scriptural citations used by both authors show that Tyconius's Book of Rules might have stood at the origin of Augustine's inspiration and argumentation. However, it does not prove a direct influence of Tyconius on Augustine's teaching on the ecclesia permixta and on the ecclesiastical tolerance since the bishop of Hippo, unlike Tyconius, does not see the church as a twofold body, rather he understands it as a mixture in which the good and the bad are in time mixed in together.
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Much work has been done in the last half-century to shed some light upon the historical background of (and the intellectual motivation for) St Augustine's composition of his great hermeneutical treatise the De doctrina Christiana-1 Li particular, the reason for the work's interruption and its subsequent completion some thirty years later has been the subject of some debatE. Perhaps die most useful examination of this problem, as well as the most convincing conclusion, is found in the essay by Charles Kannengiesser, "The Interrupted De doctrina Christianaa paper delivered at the international colloquium entitled "De doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture" held at the University of Notre Dame in 1991. 2 Professor Kannengiesser argues that the interruption of the De doctrina Christiana was a direct result of a confusion in Augustine's own hermeneutic, precipitated by his investigation of the hermeneutic of the Donatist Tychonius (whose Liber re/jularis Augustine examines in the conclusion to book III of De doctrina Christiana, under the title of Liber reffttlarum). While this insightful and important article postulates answers to many questions about the Bishop of Hippo's intellectual motivation, both for the interruption of his work and for its resumption, it implicidy raises a further question of no litde significance-namely, given the interruption of the work and Augustine's personal intellectual development in the intervening years between its interruption and completion, does the De doctrina Christiana present a unified argument or a coherent philosophical understanding of die work of doctrina ? For the purposes of this paper