John C. Cavadini is Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He also serves as McGrath‐Cavadini Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life. His scholarship and teaching is focused on the theology of the Church Fathers, Origen and Augustine in particular. Appointed by Pope Benedict XVI, he has served one term on the International Theological Commission. He was also the 2018 recipient of the Monika Helwig Award for Outstanding Contributions to Catholic Intellectual Life, from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Among other publications, he is the author of The Last Christology of the West: Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul, 785–820; the editor of Gregory the Great: A Symposium and also of Explorations in the Theology of Benedict XVI; and co‐editor, with Danielle Peters, of Mary on the Eve of the Second Vatican Council.

Genius tends to be doubly rare – in its occurrence on the one hand, and in its being understood on the other. The rarity of the latter is too often the case for St. Augustine, the greatest of the Latin Fathers. I remember my introduction to this great Churchman. I learned that he was to blame for his pessimism regarding original sin, guilt, and sex; for his presumptuous psychological speculations on the Trinity; for his Platonist intellectualizing of the Gospel; and, finally, for his supposed genesis of later theories of double predestination (inter alia). But then, when I actually read Augustine under the tutelage of the author of the current collection of essays, I found myself encountering a very different Augustine. Far from a bleak pessimist, Prof. Cavadini helped me to discover an exegete who believed in the essential goodness of creation and who preached a God who freely made man, even while knowing that this same man would send him to the cross. Instead of someone suffering from a neurosis about human intimacy, I found, with Prof. Cavadini's help, a preacher whose vision of Christian marriage and sex was profound – indeed, who knew them to be so lofty that he also realized the extent to which the tragedy of sin had marked them and thus required redemption by Christ. Rather than a navel‐gazer discovering the divine essence through audacious reflections on his own “self,” Prof. Cavadini led me to see a priest, on his knees, gazing at the wounds that he knew himself to have inflicted. Far from a philosopher dreaming about Platonic ideas in the ether, we met a theologian who spoke powerfully of history – and of the fact that, in Jesus Christ, God had entered into it. And, finally, I did indeed find the massa damnata of the City of God. However, with Prof. Cavadini, I also found a broken but redeemed pastor who knew from his own experience the power of grace to transform even the hardest of hearts, and who in his homilies tries passionately to persuade the members of his flock to accept this grace so that they might find themselves in the City and not with the massa – even as he himself realized the full gravity of the Gospel's teaching about the narrow way, and that all of them might not make it.

Prof. Cavadini's Fall 2015 Seminar on Augustine was thus a formative moment in my graduate career, and one for which I remain grateful. In what follows, then, it is my honor to provide a synopsis of and introduction to the chapters in this volume, in which Prof. Cavadini has set out for us a new framework for reading Augustine – thus adding his voice to the symphony of scholarly efforts to recover the theology of this great pater patrum of the Church Universal.

I History Has Meaning: Augustine's Development as a Theologian of the Incarnation

The chapters in this volume start off in the early 1990s with much on De Trin., a work that was not really in vogue then. As noted in the first chapter, titled “The Structure and Intention of Augustine's De Trinitate,” few at the time wanted to deal with this work, because it was, supposedly, too speculative and abstract: it was read as being about how to make a philosophical (in particular, Plotinian) ascent to God. On the one hand, this reading is correct. De Trin. is about this kind of ascent in a way, but not as many have understood it. De Trin. is indeed about making an ascent, but what Augustine shows is that our attempts to ascend on our own (i.e. that which philosophy attempts to do) are totally futile. There are, in fact, two attempts to make an ascent in De Trin. – both of them fail. These failures are not accidental, but rather the point of the work, as Augustine himself says in the comments that he added to the beginning of the work later on. Through these failed attempts at a philosophical ascent, Augustine shows us that we cannot ascend on our own, but rather need Christ as our way to reach God as our goal. But what Augustine also realizes by the time of De Trin. is not only that Christ is the way by which we come to God, but also the goal himself. Christ is God incarnate, and therefore the goal of our ascent is not a God of metaphysical speculation – an essence somewhere behind and beyond the Trinity – but rather the real God: the God who is eternally Love, and who is made known to us only through the historical, temporal economy of our incarnate Lord, Jesus Christ. Thus, in De Trin., Augustine shows a stronger interest in the historical and temporal. As he shows, we do not have to flee from that which is temporal in order to know God (as Augustine seems once to have thought). Rather, we come to know God in the temporal and historical. God has acted in history, and so history has meaning such that it cannot be sloughed off as we ascend to some impersonal divine heights.

This change in perspective is key for understanding Augustine and his development as a theologian. It is also something that helps us to understand his other works. In this vein, the second chapter, titled “The Sweetness of the Word: Salvation and Rhetoric in Augustine's De doctrina christiana,” shows how this transformed perspective shapes Augustine's soteriology. In his earlier works, Augustine was mostly concerned with Christ as a teacher of interior knowledge – even when, as is the case in one early work, he does speak about Christ’s passion. By the time of De doctrina, however, Augustine is concerned with the ins and outs of daily life, we might say; namely: the transformation of human affect or emotion, which takes place through the transformation of the human will. This transformation happens only through the grace of Christ, by means of looking to his passion and cross. The same theme is discussed in Chapter 3, titled “The Quest for Truth in Augustine's De Trinitate,” which also expands upon how Augustine thinks about the relation of the human being to his or her culture. Our transformation in Christ is not something that matters for us alone. Rather, all human experience is cultural. In De Trin., Augustine traces the roots of culture back, first of all, to our pre‐linguistic inner word, and shows how our will shapes this word either in pride or love, such that its exterior expression leads to a culture that is either truly bound together in charity or perverted by pride. We are not reducible to our cultures, but are in fact the generators of culture. On the other hand, the wrong “encoding” of our inner word in its exterior forms generates cultures that are marked by ungodly pride, which ensnare us in turn. For Augustine, it was for this reason that the Word became incarnate: so that we could be conformed to his example and so that he could persuade us by his blood. In his earlier works, Augustine perhaps thought too readily that the disciplines of the liberal arts and philosophy could be used to ascend to God. By the time of De Trin. and De doctrina, however, he realizes that these disciplines themselves are (in their current states) generated from our sinfully disposed wills, and thus require healing. To be sure, Augustine does not write culture off as meaningless. Rather, he realizes more acutely that it needs healing through Christ, to whatever extent this healing is possible in this life.

II Reading Scripture: Augustine on the Re‐Creation of the Person in the Totus Christus

In De Trin., Augustine's new focus on Christ as the goal and as the end of our journey led him to emphasize the perpetual validity of the historical economy as that wherein God has worked our salvation. Within this perspective, Christ as a historical agent becomes central in Augustine's thought. Christ saves us not only by living and dying for us, but also by providing us with a model of godly human life. But to know what we must become in Christ, we must also see that from which Christ has rescued us. In this vein, Chapter 4, titled “Augustine's Book of Shadows,” on Book Two of the Conf., shows how, for Augustine, Scripture's narrative is also our own narrative. This book, which is prima facie about Augustine's sexual improprieties and his infamous theft of pears, has been the subject of much psychologizing on Augustine. Is not its rhetoric just too much? No, in fact, for what Augustine narrates is not chiefly his acts of licentiousness or thievery (although he does tell us of them), but rather his own descent into shadowy nothingness. He is thus, paradoxically, narrating a non‐narrative of “total” insubstantiality, which is only possible by virtue of the fact that he actually has a real story now; namely, that of receiving God's grace and mercy, and so being given back himself. Book Two of the Conf., beyond tales of sex and pears, is Augustine's exegesis of Genesis in light of his own life viewed from the perspective of Christ's story, according to which Christ obliterates the fallen solidarity of Genesis and restores humanity into a new solidarity with and in himself. This understanding of Genesis and its narrative of the Fall as key to understanding the person and work of Christ, and thus our own lives, is a key feature of Augustine's theology. Understanding what was lost in the Fall is particularly important for Augustine – not because of a gloomy pessimism, but rather so that we can know more truly both that from which Christ saves us, and also that which Christ has transformed in his death for our sake.

For Augustine, then, the Genesis narrative provides a key to understanding the human person and his need for Christ. Our need to engage in scripture is a constant focus of Augustine, in fact. In this regard, Chapter 5, titled “Simplifying Augustine,” shows that, whether Augustine is writing a treatise for the more learned or preaching to the unlearned, his basic intention in either case is the same. He is not giving his audience pre‐packaged doctrine that they must blindly accept. Rather, he is inviting his readers and listeners to make a journey together with him, in faith, to a greater understanding of the economy of Christ so as to come to know God. If in his early works Augustine thought that the liberal arts and philosophy could help one to make the ascent to God, by the year 400 he simply does not. Rather, the way to ascend is to look in faith to the Crucified, and to meditate on Scripture so as to come to a deeper understanding of the mercy and love of God for us that are narrated in them.

It is precisely this mercy which alone can transform our lives – including those aspects of them that are affected most deeply by the Fall, as we discover in Chapter 6, titled “Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire.” In thinking about sexual pleasure in marriage, Augustine turns to consider what man is supposed to be. In paradise, sex would have been by our totally unhindered free will and without lust – that is, without that unwilled, impulsive sexual desire which goes against our rational nature, and which seeks to have intercourse for the sake of power and for the sake of gratifying one's own perverse libido dominandi. Many would criticize Augustine and say that such a view is too cold and unemotional. But Augustine does not think that, in paradise, we would have been unfeeling or inhuman; in fact, he criticizes the apatheia of the Stoics precisely as inhuman and unfeeling. Rather, he distinguishes between emotions (which are neutral in themselves) and passions (which are emotions that are “pathologized” and thus become sicknesses). Sex in paradise would not have been characterized by unruly and irrational passion, but that does not mean that it would have been emotionless. Rather, it would have been truly emotional. How would that have even looked? We can only speculate from our post‐fallen position, but for Augustine, following his insights about the full significance of the incarnation and the full humanity of Christ as the model for what our genuine humanity looks like, Christ again provides the key to understand real human psychology. As Scripture shows, Christ willed his emotions out of solidarity with us. They were felt truly by his own free willing of them, and thus they became a sign of his compassion for us, and so give us a model to imitate in turn. And again, exegesis of Scripture is key in this regard. For Augustine, the locus theologicus for understanding what real human emotion looks like, as shown by Christ, is the psalms, in which we find the whole Christ (Head and Body) speaking to us. What and who we are as human beings – as our real “selves,” if we were to use this term (more on which, later) – is really known only in and through Christ. This point is absolutely key for Augustine, and is emphasized especially in Chapter 7, titled “The Darkest Enigma: Reconsidering the Self in Augustine's Thought.” As this chapter shows, many people have imported into Augustine notions of the “self” that are modern. In fact, Augustine never discusses “the self” expressly. Modern theories tend to think of the “self” as an individual cut off from all others. In such understandings, the “self” is taken to be some sort of private center of being that is interior and inaccessible to all others. Bluntly put, Augustine does not think of the self in this way. Rather, according to Augustine, who we are can be understood only with respect to the incarnation as revealed to us in Scripture. The only identity that we have is not some permanently stable center that we must somehow access through interior speculation, but rather our perpetually restless heart that is continually being recreated by Christ. Therefore, it is not by becoming more interior that we become our real “selves,” but rather by turning to him. We have no real identity apart from him. Rather, apart from him, we would have only non‐identity, non‐being, non‐subsistence – that is, the state of shadowy un‐reality discussed in Conf. book two. We never have a stable “self,” even eschatologically, for in fact Augustine thinks that, the more we love God, the “more intense” our search for him becomes. Furthermore, this transformation in Christ is not some private encounter, but rather essentially communal and ecclesial. This point comes across especially in how Augustine thinks about the relationship of intimacy between man and woman in marriage, as shown in Chapter 8, titled “The Sacramentality of Marriage in the Fathers.” Whereas some ancient Christian writers thought that the husband's task was to educate his wife in a philosophical or ascetical manner, Augustine understands marriage to be the place where Christians are transformed in Christ by means of their mutual participation in the life of Christ, as that life is experienced in the Church. Thus, we cannot divorce Augustine's teaching on marriage from his ecclesiology. For Augustine, Christians encounter the transformative love of Christ first of all in the Church, and then in marriage – in that order. In his view, marriage mediates the love of Christ for his Body the Church to the married couple, and thus transforms them; it is in that sense that marriage is a sacrament in a real way, even if Augustine does not theorize on it as a later scholastic might do. It is for this reason that marriage can be the place where one's healing in Christ takes place: not principally through the husband's “educating” of his wife, but rather through their shared participation in Christ's love. Thus, for Augustine, the chief locus for our growth and reform in Christ is always the Church. This idea is stressed especially in Chapter 9, titled “Eucharistic Exegesis in Augustine's Confessions.” In Augustine's view, we are re‐created through the mercy shown to us in Christ, which mercy leads us to know God the Trinity (because God is mercy). Therefore, we are re‐created in the Church, especially through that sacrament which is the memory of Christ's mercy shown to us on the cross – namely, the Eucharist. We are re‐created through Christ, but since Christ has a body that includes many members, we are also re‐made, in some way, through the lived examples of their lives in him. Not only Christ, but they too show us what it means to be human beings made in the image and likeness of God, as God intended us all to be from the beginning.

III The Self‐Sacrifice of Mercy and the Pride of the World: The City of God and its Shadow

The mystery of our re‐creation in Christ is thus fundamentally ecclesial for Augustine. Correlatively, and as Augustine highlights in City of God, there is a connection between the kind of persons that we are and the kind of society that we will have, as Chapter 10, titled “Spousal Vision: A Study of Text and History in the Theology of Saint Augustine,” shows especially. In his evaluation of the Roman Empire and its character as a society, Augustine again turns to Genesis as a key text. As he sees it, the Roman Empire is a society dominated by its own lust for power (libido dominandi). The empire is in a state of being thoroughly “confused” – a confusion with its roots in Adam and Eve as those who became confusi because of the Fall. In choosing to worship himself in his own pride, Adam brought about the fall of our original human solidarity. In choosing himself and in forgetting God (that is to say, in willing into being a perverse state of affairs wherein he made himself out to be God), Adam destroyed our original, spousal solidarity. It is this solidarity that Christ came to restore. Importantly, the key to understanding this solidarity is, for Augustine, the real value of the historical as that within which God acts, and thus also the reality of embodiment. Christ restores our broken solidarity in himself because he enters into history, thus taking upon himself a narrative in which we can also partake by grace. His story is one of mercy, inasmuch as he became weak and emptied himself for our sake. We can become partakers of his narrative now through our membership in his Body, the Church, and through partaking of the sacraments. But the fact that we become members of him does not mean that, ipso facto, we should look for the reality of a perfected society in this world. Augustine does indeed correlate the transformation of the human person and his society, but Augustine's eschatological perspective is also essential to note. Since Christ chose to come into our company, sinful though it was (and sinful though it will remain), we cannot expect to have a pure Church in this world. Belonging to this new society does not mean that we should look for perfection in this life, but rather that we should learn to see everything from the perspective of his mercy and compassion.

If we were to locate any single theme that forms a hermeneutical key for Augustine, it would in fact be “mercy.” Chapter 11, titled “Trinity and Apologetics in the Theology of St. Augustine,” brings this idea to the fore. This chapter highlights how we must look at the City of God in order to understand De Trin., especially in regard to considering the apologetic context of the former as that which must shape our reading of the latter. In both texts, Augustine speaks of many of the same issues, and even in the same order. One issue that is particularly important is the question of worship. In book 10 of the City of God, Augustine speaks about philosophers such as Porphyry who seem to be closest to the Christian proclamation inasmuch as they do appear to know the true God. But if that is so, then why do they still allow for the worship of many gods? In fact, Augustine shows that, although it seems that these philosophers come near to the Christian proclamation, they are also the farthest from the Gospel in other ways. Although it would seem that Porphyry (for example) knows the real God, in fact Augustine shows how Porphyry actually rejects Christ and the mercy that he shows, because he rejects the humility of the cross. But this is key, for the real God is the God of the cross. The key issue is that Porphyry does not know what kind of God the real God is, and this makes for all the difference. The real God is the God who is humble mercy – the mercy that is made manifest in the incarnation and passion of the Christ. Thus, in spurning this mercy, Porphyry spurns the Trinity.

Mercy is thus not accidental to God. This mercy is God. God is this mercy, because, from all eternity, God has willed the salvation of those called to his City. God has a plan, which even involved his ultimate act of foolishness on the cross. The last chapter, titled “God's Eternal Knowledge According to Augustine,” highlights the foolishness of God that is wiser than men, and thus further explores Augustine's critique of philosophy. Even though it may seem that philosophy may offer some understanding of God that approaches the biblical proclamation, what Augustine shows is that the difference between the two is ever greater. The key to understanding Augustine in this regard is his reading of Paul and his understanding of Wisdom. The philosophers reject the cross because it makes manifest the lowliness of God in an utterly unique historical and personal way. In rejecting it, however, they also show themselves to have missed out on the true Wisdom of God, which in the eyes of this world is simply stupidity or folly (as the Apostle says). This is the real tragedy of philosophy. As Augustine shows, the philosophers (e.g. the Platonists) do understand some attributes of God, such as his immutability. As Paul points out in Romans 1, however, they still do not worship him but rather allow for the worship of multiple gods, because (they think) it is only through theurgy that most people can get to the divine – a union that they themselves achieve (or so they think) by philosophical means. But this is wrong. They have deceived themselves, because, in fact, we cannot attain unto God apart from the economy of the incarnation. What the philosophers do not understand is that the God who is the goal of our ascent is the same God who became involved in history and time, and who became the way by which we come to himself as goal. Put otherwise, for Augustine, the fact that the goal of our journey is Christ is key. The God who became incarnate is the same God to whom we are to ascend. Therefore, one cannot truly know God apart from his historical economy – apart from the fact that he, remaining immutable and without change, entered into time (factus est!) and now has a narrative of real solidarity with us. The philosophers cannot imagine a God who could enter into temporality in this way. Thus, they treat God as if he needs to be protected (sc., by them) from history and time. But God does not require protection from history and time. Rather he is the God who knows all things that transpire within them – indeed, he has even willed them. Because God's knowing and willing of all things are one and the same, the temporal economy is not accidental, but rather planned from all eternity. Creation is freely willed, and so created things reflect this freedom. History therefore has significance. This is made most apparent in the fact that Christ died and rose again from the dead. In contrast with the theories of the philosophers who claim that time is cyclical, Christ's death is unique and unrepeatable. The Platonists are right, then, when they say that the divine nature does not change. But they also miss out on this fact: “Someone” divine does in fact have a narrative. And it is from this perspective of God entering into solidarity with us and taking a story into himself that we understand everything else about him, including his freely willed decision to create. What Scripture reveals, then, is not only the cross as a moment of God's folly in time, but the eternal foolishness of God, inasmuch as the cross has always been intended by God and tells us about everything else that God has done for us in turn. The real God is the one who, from all eternity, deigned to offer his blood as the price for his free creation. In facing any free act within history, therefore, we are faced with his eternal love in willing to die for us. This love is what makes our freedom possible. In seeing the freedom of the historical economy, then, we are faced with God's eternal foolishness for our sake.

The essays presented in this volume have all appeared to the reading public before, some more recently than others. They are only lightly edited to bring the notes up to date, especially those notes that involve cross‐references among themselves. Other than that, to avoid discrepancies between different published versions of the same article, the essays are, so to speak, “as is.”

I have collected these studies at the request of students and colleagues who have, intermittently, asked me to consider collecting some of them. I have, equally intermittently, resisted collecting them. For one thing, readers can easily find scholarship on Augustine that they would read more profitably than my own. I feel the words of St. Benedict coming to mind, as he closes his Rule, directing the attention of those aspiring to perfection to the giants of monastic life and their teachings, the “teachings of the holy Fathers.” For “what book,” he asks, “of the holy catholic Fathers does not resoundingly summon us along the true way to reach the Creator? Besides the Conferences of the Fathers, their Institutes and their Lives, there is also the rule of our holy father Basil.”¹ It would be easy to paraphrase here, for those aspiring to the perfect mastery of Augustinian studies, substituting modern names for Benedict's ancient ones – “for what book of theirs would not more resoundingly summon us along the true way?” – and the list, were I to populate it, would of course be longer by far, even embarrassingly longer, than St. Benedict's short list!

In view of this, the only defense for publishing, perhaps, would also be inspired by St. Benedict, when he says in the same chapter that he had written “a very little rule, for beginners.” Perhaps one or two of the “very little” studies contained herein might serve as entry points into the study of Augustine for many readers who are beginners and would not have come across these smaller‐sized essays otherwise. Of course, I could also echo St. Augustine himself and his own defense for writing on a topic others have covered, he says, quite adequately before him. In Book 3 of On the Trinity, acutely aware that his predecessors who had written in Greek had already said “everything we might properly wish to know on the subject,” and yet also aware that not everyone will have mastered Greek enough to read them, he goes on to say that the more books there are written on the subject of the Trinity, “the more likely a reader is to find what they are looking for” (3.1).² It would be especially gratifying if some of these essays served to encourage beginners in the reading and interpreting of Augustine to “take a second look,” so to speak, at someone whom they may have dismissed on the basis of the caricatures and negatively stereotyped readings of Augustine that unfortunately still circulate despite their repeated unsaying and dismantling in so many excellent studies of others. Perhaps they will be pleasantly surprised by the startling sophistication and subtlety of thought, which urges itself upon the reader at almost every turn in one's travels through such a vast and luxurious textual landscape as Augustine is continually painting for us.

Another reason I had resisted collecting some of my essays is that a such collection could be taken to imply that each essay does not stand on its own, but rather is part of a logical sequence of parts that could then serve as “chapters” in a book. In fact, though they are thematically connected, each of these essays was conceived independently as a self‐contained meditation on the Augustinian texts they consider. They are invitations to the reader to engage in a similar meditation. They do not so much aspire to contributing to a settled body of knowledge called “Augustinian studies” as to serve, so to speak, as moments of encounter. But, fair warning, to encounter Augustine is not to encounter an inert element, one that is easy to reify as a stable object of study. Augustine, as a skilled rhetor, was trained to inspire, persuade, move, and maybe most of all, to unsettle. Our hearts may be “restless” but usually not restless enough. Instead, they harbor treasured complacencies that keep us from examining some of our heart's deepest commitments – treasured complacencies about our sex lives (including complacencies of those who renounce sex) that hide commitments to ingratitude; treasured complacencies regarding the quest for status and prestige that hide commitments to social structures of deception and of contempt for truth; and treasured complacencies about our own freedom that hide commitments to self‐righteousness and, even more deeply, an addiction to incoherence. Our contemporary prophets of suspicion – Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Durkheim – seem not to touch these complacencies very deeply by comparison. Alert to the pathologies of social structures, of intellectual endeavor even (and especially!) at its highest level, of passion and emotion, of the will to dominate, Augustine finds something even deeper at the base of them all, something discernible only from a perspective outside of the concentric circles of our own complacency, that is, from the perspective of revelation, and that is what he calls “pride,” or superbia, the desire to compete with and to replace God with ourselves, to assert a mythos of absolute self‐sufficiency, a fiction that we can generate meaning out of the nothing of ourselves independent of God. Pride is the “original” sin, and thus the original hermeneutic of suspicion, as deployed by Augustine.

Perhaps the reason why Augustine can afford to be so deeply suspicious is that he believes that healing is possible, and his rhetoric of unsettling is intended to disturb us enough so that we might, against all odds, be open to the healing that is available if we are humble enough to receive it. Are we open to the Church – so unlikely and seemingly unsuitable a prospect for anything much to speak of – as a kind of sacrament of the sources of true human solidarity? Are we open to Scripture as the two‐edged sword, the Word of God, that Augustine's heart‐searching rhetoric so searingly depends upon and deploys? Are we open to the sacraments as defying human attempts to achieve righteousness or communion as an accomplishment of our own, instead of as a gift? Are we open to the poor, enough to see in them trustworthy deposits of our hard‐earned wealth? How open? Augustine keeps asking. Reading Augustine is exposing oneself to the hope that healing is available to us by these means, perhaps the most unsettling of all of Augustine's unsettling rhetoric, because implicitly we are asked, do we believe we need healing? Do we believe we can be healed? Do we want it? It is not easy to encounter Augustine because, if we read in a way that hopes to understand him, it means reading our own hearts as well, and it may be that a scholar (like myself) is the last person likely to read this way, and rather more likely to generate a scholarship of resistance or of cultivated distance.

In his brilliant and beautiful chapter on the Confessions, Peter Brown famously concludes that, “Like a planet in opposition, [Augustine] has come as near to us, in Book Ten of the Confessions, as the vast gulf that separates a modern man from the culture and religion of the Later Empire can allow.”³ Perhaps, Augustine might comment, it is not only the vast gulf that separates us from Antiquity that is responsible for Augustine's coming no nearer than a planet in opposition. Perhaps, Augustine might comment, it is because he is allowed to come no closer, because that vast gulf is what separates “modern man” from our own hearts, and Augustine asks us to cross it. And it might therefore be true that, ironically, to truly treat Augustine historically means not to “study” him and objectify his thought as something frozen in the past, but to allow the encounter with Augustine to engage us in dialogue and thus in the development of his thought. The dichotomy between “history” and “theology” seems especially self‐effacing in the encounter with an ancient theologian who refuses to remain conveniently in the past.

It is tempting in writing about Augustine to re‐voice him, to “speak” him in a Thomistic language, or in a Lutheran language, or a Calvinist language, or even in the Nietzschean language of the death of God. I have tried my best to learn, out of an encounter with Augustine, to “speak Augustinian,” to think of the patient exposition of Augustinian texts as learning a kind of language, and to invite others to learn to speak Augustinian. Of course, one can ever and always speak only one's own language. Learning to “speak Augustinian,” though, is perhaps learning to allow one's own speaking, one's own language, to be transformed in the reception to the Word that Augustine's writing is always trying to mediate. If so, learning to speak Augustinian would be a lifelong project! Nevertheless, it would be the truest “historical” approach that is possible. Even an actor is most convincing when you can sense that the voice speaking any given part is truly his own, having been so open to the experience of the character that its own speaking has become an act of generosity that is inalienable.

And finally, another thing one learns, and something which perhaps ties these essays together as invitations to an encounter, is that encountering Augustine, the Christian theologian – and this may be surprising – is anything but narrowly parochial. Augustine's theology allows revelation to overflow the banks of the Church, without thereby relativizing these banks – and in fact, another irony, by featuring them. Perhaps then, just as Augustine is a good witness against attempts to interpret him that are overly “historicizing,” it may be that he is a good enough theologian to inspire the theological reader to avoid making the theological mindset narrower than it has to be. Yet he does that not by denying its specificity and its particularity as Christian and ecclesial, but by embracing it.

I owe many a debt of thanks in bringing this Foreword to a close. Lewis Ayres first suggested, and then paved the way, for this collection of essays to be published. Mark Therrien provided labor‐intensive and characteristically intelligent assistance in selection and editing, and he provided the ultimate in spurring on the project by writing an Introduction that tries to show some of the connections among the essays, despite their quasi‐self‐standing nature. Other debts are mentioned in the notes to the essays themselves. I do not remember who taught me to love Augustine, though I know I did not have the good sense to turn to him on my own. I would like to remember at least the late Stephen Crites, Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, who introduced me to the City of God when I was an undergraduate; and the late Jaroslav Pelikan, who, in some mysteriously unobtrusive but efficacious way, taught me to love Augustine by resisting simplification of his thought. I do not believe I have lived up to their hopes as I should have, but my gratitude is nevertheless undiminished.