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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of St John Cassian's profile in historical theology. It argues that Cassian was a creative and synthetic thinker who was perfectly capable of developing the themes that he learnt in one place, in order to deploy them in a subtly different form somewhere else; as such, he was an adept promoter of a monastic tradition of theology. Cassian's advocacy of the ascetic cultivation of Christian understanding, the problem of anachronistic interpretation of Cassian, and allegations for anti-Augustinianism and the consequences for reading Cassian are discussed. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is presented.

In replacing monarchy with republicanism, the American Revolution set the stage for the growth of a variety of upstart groups united by their back‐to‐the‐Bible mentality and their conviction that scripture testified against Calvinist absolutism. This chapter examines this antebellum diversity, from the Universalists, who insisted that God would save all people in the end, to the Methodists, who taught that God granted prevenient grace enabling all people to choose or reject Christ. The chapter also surveys other groups driven by anti‐predestinarian zeal, including the founders of the Campbellites, Stoneites, Adventists, and Christian Scientists. The anti‐Calvinist backlash reached a dramatic culmination in Mormonism, which radically extended human free will into premortal and postmortal life. Yet the Mormon appeal to preexistence was not the era's only radical rebellion against Augustinianism. Opposition to predestination even led the era's most famous Protestant family, the Beecher clan, to reconsider the benefits of old heresies.

Augustinian asceticism ceded in the course of the 17th century to a more accepting attitude towards pleasure and the enjoyment of corporeal beauty, including the beauty of women. Platonic ideas were often invoked in defense of love, but the Epicurean revival was also significant. Epicurean views on the equality of men and women and their capacity for mutual friendship stood in stark contrast to Aristotelian moral and social philosophy and patristic theology. Lucretius's descriptions of nature, his invocation of Venus, and his treatment of sexual passion helped to form and legitimate his readers' responses to the world. The Cartesian analysis of the passions as playing a functional role in human life, licensed emotional expression, and predicted the rise of the ‘man of feeling’ of the 18th century.

Staupitz is best known for his supervision and pastoral advice to Martin Luther, when Luther was an Augustinian friar. In his theology, Staupitz represented a form of late medieval Augustinianism that separated him from nominalist theologians like Gabriel Biel, who Luther studied, and the Augustinianism of the Protestant reformers. Luther claimed to have been influenced by him in his view of grace, especially his doctrine of predestination, which contradicted Biel on several points that Luther found important.

The key themes of the book are recapitulated in the course of a general assessment of the relationship of Augustinianism and Cartesianism in 17th-century moral thought. The writers discovered are defended against the Sartrean-Barthesian critique that they concentrate on psychological and moral issues, and thus obscure social and political ones. Nicole in particular develops a theory of the working of an individualist (‘modern’) society, in which he draws on an Augustinian ethic that prevents him from justifying this state of affairs. There is a link between theology and a critical social vision.

Scholars have attempted to understand 17th-century writers’ interest in self-knowledge and self-deception in historical terms by linking it to ideological conflict with a class dimension (Paul Bénichou), or to the emergence of an absolutist state centred on the court (Jean Rohou). The stress on self-deception in a Jansenist writer like Nicole has been linked to a Jansenist hostility to mysticism. This view is queried and it is pointed out that mystical writers themselves (St François de Sales, Fénelon) are strongly aware of the perils of self-deception. Augustinian moral theology and Cartesian dualism also nourish this awareness in different ways. There is no one school of thought, ideology, or social factor that can explain 17th-century writers’ fascination with the difficulty of self-knowledge and the risk of self-deception.

This chapter problematizes the interpretation of Augustine and Augustinianism on theoretical and historiographical grounds. It argues that when we seek to understand the Augustine of the past, contemporary interpretations cannot be the basis for the analysis. The problem is one of hermeneutics. Moreover, Augustine created himself in his Confessions, thus making the endeavour to recover Augustine himself fallacious. This makes the interpretation of ‘Augustinianism’ all the more confused, as scholars have used the term to refer to different historical phenomena, including a political Augustinianism. If a late medieval Augustinianism is to be identified, it must be based on the historical understanding of Augustine, which is to be found in the late medieval understandings of the religio Augustini, rather than in what has been seen as the schola Augustiniana moderna. Thus the Introduction sets the stage for the entire work in pointing to a historical understanding of Augustinianism.

The Conclusion sums up the argument, and offers definitions of the terms ‘Augustinianism’, ‘Late Medieval Augustinianism’, and ‘Augustinian’, based on the historical reconstruction of the historical referents. ‘Late Medieval Augustinianism’ must be based, for a historical interpretation, on the religio Augustini and the textual matrix of the late medieval OESA. This thenalso has consequences for our understanding of Augustine himself, and of his reception, influence, and appropriation in the later Middle Ages. It then points to the ramifications of this reinterpretation and new understanding, offering points of departure for future research, which needs to reinterpret Augustine’s late medieval heritage, as well as its relationship to Martin Luther and the emergence of the Reformation in light of the evidence for the requisite heremeutics here presented.

This chapter introduces the reader to Augustine of Hippo and his varied reception in the long sixteenth century. It explains the aims, scope, and organization of the book and situates its main arguments in the context of recent research in the fields of Reformation history (including the confessionalization paradigm, the concept of Augustinianism and recent studies of the reception of the Church fathers), Renaissance Humanism, and the history of reading.

This chapter tracks the changing fortunes of a fundamental opposition between more Stoic and more Augustinian perspectives on human life, showing that as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, the patterns of Augustinian anti-Stoicism had often found expression in a more secular, Epicurean register. What Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempts, more strenuously than any other thinker of the period, is an extraordinary synthesis of Epicurean, Augustinian, and Stoic argumentative currents. In common with the modern Epicureans, Rousseau uses claims about self-love to illuminate all areas of human behaviour in modern times. But by presenting that self-love as inflamed amour-propre, Rousseau tilts sharply towards the more critical Augustinians than towards those Epicurean writers who were making their apology for commercial society.

The Maximes went through much revision. Among the most important changes are the discarding of the original prefatory discourse by La Chapelle-Bessé and the inclusion of expressions such as ‘souvent’ or ‘d’ordinaire’ which imply that the reductive analysis of the virtues admits of exceptions. The implications of these changes are analysed. They break, it is argued, the link between the text and the Augustinian critique of the pagan virtues. In particular the exact relationship of the Maximes to Augustinian thought is assessed. It is argued that though they can be said to draw on an Augustinian view of human nature, their critique of false virtue is very different from that propounded by Jansenist theologians, and has little distinctively Augustinian. The conception of virtue it presupposes is more akin to Aristotle’s and indeed Montaigne’s.

This chapter sets forth a theodicy of natural evil. General characteristics of theodicy are discussed, including the distinction between general‐policy theodicies and specific-benefit theodicies. There is also consideration of the relationship between theodicy and different theories of providence, including Augustinianism, Molinism, and open theism. It is argued that the ‘skeptical theist defense’ against the problem of evil should be rejected because it leads to an unacceptable moral skepticism. A theodicy of natural evil is presented, and it is argued that open theism makes the prospects for such a theodicy better than they are for either Augustinianism or Molinism

This chapter presents anti-Jesuitism as the negative face of Reform Catholicism while making a case for the utility of this concept in revisionist opposition to the current one of “Catholic enlightenment.” While one component of Reform Catholicism does indeed consist in those aspects of the European Enlightenment compatible with religious belief, these aspects are different from those appropriated by Jesuits, many of whom have an equal claim to have been “enlightened.” The other and more obviously anti-Jesuitical elements of Reform Catholicism are the liberties of both the secular state and the national churches vis-à-vis the papacy known as Gallican, in combination with the morally rigorist Augustinianism known as Jansenism.

The chapter starts with an analysis of Petrarch’s Secretum. In addition to its obvious Augustinian features, this work is influenced by the medieval debates on the will, coming close at times to Henry of Ghent’s voluntarism. Donato Acciaiuoli’s commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics is Thomist, but it also applies Walter Burley’s views. The influence of Aquinas and Burley is also evident in Virgilius Wellendorffer’s forgotten but erudite commentary. Thomist intellectualism likewise permeates John Versor’s and Lefèvre d’Étaples’s discussions of akrasia. More original is the influential discussion of Josse Clichtove, who quotes extensively Medea’s lines in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 7 to establish a commonplace Platonist view. According to this view, reason struggles with emotions in the akratic mind. The chapter closes with John Mair, who refines the late medieval position of John Buridan, and argues that Aristotle’s syllogistics is compatible with the Christian view of free will. Many Renaissance discussions on akrasia employ the term ‘struggle’ (pugna), but it seldom figures prominently.

This chapter details the religious identity of the OESA, based on the imitation of Augustine and following the religio Augustini. It examines how the Hermits sought to embody Augustine as the rule and exemplar of their every action, thus giving evidence of the religionization process in the later Middle Ages. The works of Henry of Friemar and Jordan of Quedlinburg come to the fore, espeically Jordan’s Liber Vitasfratrum, which was intended to serve as a mirror for members of the OESA to determine the extent of their ‘being’ Augustinians. The new appropriation of Augustine evidenced in the 1320s and 1330s served not only as the catalyst for the Augustinian Renaissance, but also as the hermeneutical principle of the religio Augustini, which provided the historical referent for the term ‘Augustinianism’ in the later Middle Ages.