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This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo‐Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.

The Introduction situates Donne on Augustine in its main disciplinary contexts: the history of religion and the history of reading. The chapter argues for the importance of attending to the theological heritage of early modern thought: Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was heavily indebted to the patristic tradition. Among the Fathers, Augustine's influence was paramount, but his doctrinal legacy could be construed in multiple and complex ways. For the preacher and poet John Donne, Augustine's most significant contribution lay in his theory of interpretation. Reading, to Augustine, was more than a simple scholarly technique: it offered an intellectual method, spiritual discipline, and even a form of philosophy. Donne's engagement with Augustinian models of interpretation calls attention to a neglected aspect of Renaissance reading culture, and uncovers a tradition of theological reading that has been obscured, to some extent, by the current scholarly focus on humanist reading practices.

This chapter discusses the early Middle Ages. It begins with a reading of Saint Augustine’s two cities, and reads him, along with Jerome and Paulus Orosius, in the context of the barbarian invasions. It moves to an analysis of the work of Boethius and Isidore of Seville and their attempts to preserve the classical heritage. The political context of the time is the fracturing of the West following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yet this time is unfairly characterised as the ‘dark ages’. Christianity was in the ascendant, and there was a flowering of national histories of various Germanic tribes including Gregory of Tours on the Franks; Bede on the English; Isidore on the Goths; and Saxo Grammaticus on the Danes. These texts are not merely accounts of these people, but actively shape their sense of identity and consequent political practice. The chapter also provides an analysis of the land politics inherent in the Beowulf poem, both in terms of the economics of exchange, gifting and inheritance, but also a more ’geopolitical’ sense of conflict over land.

The Conclusion summarizes the main ideas of the book, focusing on Donne's engagement with the Augustinian theology of charity. In Donne’s, as in Augustine's writing, charity is a Christian virtue, but it is also a potent polemical weapon and a complex habit of thought, which encompasses doctrinal, epistemological, and moral dimensions. The Conclusion also outlines the chronological and thematic development of Donne's Augustinian reading in the sermons preached between 1615 and 1631, stressing the importance of the period 1624/5, when Donne's recovery from a near-fatal illness encouraged him to rethink his relationship with Augustine's texts. The Conclusion re-situates Donne's Augustinianism in the wider context of Renaissance scholarship and re-emphasizes the role of Augustine's thought in Donne's philosophy of time. Her study highlights, for the first time, the depth of Donne's reflections on human and providential history: Augustine's texts help him negotiate the linearity of fallen time and enable glimpses of God's eternal love in the resurrection.

For both Thomas Aquinas and Joseph Albo, hope becomes a response to an outpouring of divine presence. This chapter considers the Jewish and Christian traditions from which Aquinas and Albo drew, and against which Benedict Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche fought, on their own merits. It looks first at hope in the Hebrew Scriptures and in rabbinic Judaism and then in the New Testament and in Saint Augustine. Jewish hope, articulated in the Torah, prophets, and writings, and refracted through the rabbinic literature, is a complex and variegated concept. Jewish hope and biblical hope have to do both with what is termed ‘conserving hope’ as well as with emancipatory hope. This chapter also analyses the shape of hope in early Christianity, the balance between conservation and emancipation, endurance and transformation, private and public, mundane and extra-mundane, and contrasts this with Jewish formulations. It concludes that despite the differences, the underlying structure — the structure of hope as a virtue — is the same for both traditions.

This chapter analyzes the theological roots of secular understandings of erotic temporality and fidelity. It begins with a discussion of Saint Paul’s Epistles, in which the radical humiliation that manifests divine love is necessarily beyond human capacity. It then turns to Saint Augustine’s conviction that the divided human will renders confession incomplete and conversion provisional. Based on the premise that as a human creature he can always change, Augustine’s depiction of faith as a result of miraculous passion is cause for optimism as well as anxiety about who he will be in the future. Salvation for Augustine inheres in the consequent realization that professions of faith are in fact ambivalent prayers for it. Finally, this chapter traces the centrality of Pauline and Augustinian theology to the structure of fidelity in Francesco Petrarch’s secular love lyrics, which limn in excruciating detail the mille rivolte—the thousand turns, revolts, and returns—of his competing attachments to Laura, God, and his own worldly ambition. These poems confront a fragmented self incapable of the conviction and fidelity to which it desperately aspires but does not entirely want.

At the opening of Book 3 of Confessions, Saint Augustine declares: “I was in love with love”. This chapter suggests that Augustine stays in love with love—more exactly, that he seeks a constant and potent seduction of and by his God, and that the Confessions is mutually illuminating when read with contemporary theory on seduction. Augustine's relation to God exemplifies at least three characteristics of seduction: the manipulation of the will beyond a simple opposition of consent and coercion; the persistence of the elusively promising within the representational and discursive; and, relatedly, the necessary incompletion of both meaning and desire. The fires of worldly lust are too easily quenched for one who wants to be seduced, and the complexities of seduction in relation to desire, complexities of coercion and pleasure alike, are fully present in Augustine's complicated quest. This chapter exposes the power of the divine seduction that lies at the heart of Augustine's complex theories of love and subjectivity, desire and submission.

This chapter examines the contests between Protestants and Catholics over the filial claims to Saint Augustine’s religious authority, as they played out in the competing translations of the Confessions into English in the 1620s. This was a constituent part of the battle that raged near the end of James I’s reign to establish religious orthodoxy and to maintain state control over it. The Confessions was not a useful polemical tool, but the chapter details the responsive confessional statements of one of its expert readers, John Donne. The two publications that framed his public life were Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). In them, Donne challenged Augustine’s resolution of a spiritual crisis with a change of church. Donne complied, but only in respect of the body politic. He became an improbable literary spokesperson for the Protestant nation.

This chapter considers a group of theologians who traveled widely and corresponded with each other. They developed a pneumatology which responded to certain anthropological concerns related to Pelagianism and certain Christological concerns related to Nestorianism. The Scythian monks exchanged letters with Fulgentius of Ruspe. This chapter argues that the Scythian monks are responsible for the Chapters of Saint Augustine, a document which was used at the Synod of Orange. Thus, this chapter closes the arguments made in the previous two chapters concerning the sources of the pneumatology used at Orange. It also shows a third set of Augustinian theologians. Fulgentius of Ruspe presents the fullest reception of St Augustine of all the theologians treated in this book. He understands Augustine’s response to multiple controversies and applies Augustine’s pneumatology to new controversies, including the Christological issues at play in 6th century Nestorianism.

In Saint Augustine's texts, bodies consistently evade wholeness, produce excess, affirm, and negate—and approach a God who likewise does all of these things. City of God describes several modes of what we might call corporeal excess—and in so doing, not only tends to textual versions but also pushes into the conceptual excess of paradox. His is a queer apophasis, then—an apophasis of confession, not least. In confession, there is always more to say—and to unsay. One never gets to the bottom of it all, for no utterance is ever quite right. The self eludes language as surely as God does. The fragmentation, the break not only between intention and expression but also between human and divine in the fallen world, produces excess, not merely by adding on lies to the truth, but by keeping us talking (perhaps fictively) toward a God our words can never reach: there is always more to say.

Benjamin Jowett, in his rendering of the Symposium, concedes the obvious as a condemnation: “It is impossible to deny that some of the best and greatest of the Greeks indulged in attachments, which Plato in the Laws, no less than the universal opinion of Christendom, has stigmatized as unnatural”. Daniel Boyarin's rereading of the Symposium brings us back to Jowett's claims. Boyarin's (Platonic) Socrates does condemn male–male copulation. This chapter looks at the juxtaposition of Alcibiades's courtship of Socrates with Saint Augustine's account of his “conversion” in Confessions, a piece of relatively early Christian writing full of consequences for Christian sex. In Socratic teaching, there are no unambiguous transits from the love of one body to all physical beauty, then to minds and customs or institutions and knowledge, so that one can swim at last in beauty itself. This chapter perceives in the highly ironized and powerfully seductive exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which the Symposium concludes an unsettling of the certainties of all of the prior speeches—not least Diotima's cited doctrine of radical sublimation.

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.

In a different reading of Saint Augustine's conception of the saeculum, there is a tradition of medieval political thinking that counterbalances the unstable temporality of the terrestrial civitas with the motif of the corpus mysticum, the mystical body of Christ. This chapter focuses on the temporal dimension of the Augustinian model, thus relating the question of politics to that of “finitude”. It examines the specific ways in which Augustine's The Confessions and The City of God address transience. In both works, the individual self and its voice, as well as the body politic and its institutions, depend for their shaky existence—characterized by personal sin and skepticism concerning communal forms—on the sustenance of their Creator, that is to say, on grace and authority. Out of the shifting movements of the city of God, the city of the devil, the image of the city of God, and the image of the city of the devil—and the possible images of those images—one concrete city emerges, the civitas permixta, which rightly lays claim to being secular, historical, and temporal.

Augustine used different words for love: caritas, amor, bona voluntas. This chapter follows the sequence of his argument in City of God book 14. It asks whether these words mean different kinds of love; how Augustine understood voluntas, which is often translated “will” but is better translated as “wish” or “choice”; what he meant by saying that all emotions are voluntates; and why he said that all emotions are loves. Focusing on voluntas, the chapter shows how Augustine draws on Platonic and Stoic theory, inflecting them both toward a view of emotion that makes it central both to our lives as humans, with other humans (especially in the form of compassion), and to the other life we will enjoy if a bona voluntas leads us to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves, according to God.