Abstract
This book is essential, but challenging, reading for anyone to whom Augustine matters. It is the result of 25 years’ profound thinking and lecturing on the questions it covers and has a depth and range which mere historians of Augustine’s lifetime will struggle to follow. The approach is theological, humanely intellectual and sharply aware of the danger of slipping from one question to another. From Augustine’s interpretation of the Psalms to the place of self-knowledge in his Trinitarian thought, it addresses issues of evil, creation, Christology and love. Throughout, it is concerned to set Augustine’s views in the context of ‘the theological scheme within which he works’ (p. 205). Augustine, a lover of wisdom (or ‘philosopher’) never described himself as a theologian and never studied ‘theology’ as a subject, but Williams engages with his thinking as if these categories came naturally to him. I leave it to Anglican theologians to discern where exactly Williams and his Augustine belong in modern Anglican theology.
It is hard to discern what debt they owe to much of the most penetrating scholarship on the texts discussed, especially scholarship in French. Williams well stresses the value of reading Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos as companion pieces to, say, the Confessions, the De Doctrina Christiana and even the De Trinitate. He also respects how ‘research on Augustine as a reader of the Psalms has continued copiously and fruitfully’ (p. 38), but does not happen to mention the transformative contribution of the continuing volumes in the Bibliothèque Augustinienne series by Bochet, Dulaey and others. Whereas the French editors transform our grasp of each Enarratio and the ideas and texts brought to bear in it, Williams moves at a level which can assume that Augustine gives ‘definitions of holiness’ (p. 34) and can summarize Augustine’s ‘theology of the Psalms in terms of learning not to regard the soul as an object of contemplation but as a “sign”’ (p. 35). As a mere historian I am reassured to be told that ‘central to nearly all of Augustine’s theology is the assumption that we think about God and speak to God only from our setting within time and the body’ (p. 32). I am incredulous, however, when Williams simply states that ‘what is distinctive about any hermeneutic of the Psalms is that singing them is quite simply and literally an appropriation of Christ’s life, in history and eternity’ (p. 30). But what about Jews’ hermeneutics of these fine texts? There is no such ‘appropriation of Christ’s life’ when Jews sing them. Unlike Augustine, they engage deeply with the Psalms in Hebrew, whereas Augustine’s ‘theology’ of them is based on the multiple mistakes and mistranslations of Latin translators and a view which is ludicrous to historians, that Christ is speaking in these superb texts from ancient Israel. I wait to see what impact Williams’s theological decoding will have on the remaining volumes of the French series. For the moment, I prefer their textually grounded readings and explanations.
Chapters on ‘politics and the soul’ in the City of God, ‘Augustine on Christ and the Trinity: An Overview’ and two on Trinitarian relations extend the book’s theological range far beyond the Confessions and will be widely read with profit. Another on ‘Wisdom in Person: Augustine’s Christology’ begins acutely with what J. M. Le Blond described in 1950 as Augustine’s deepest and most significant ‘conversion’, one from ‘Gottesmystik’ to ‘Christusmystik’. Williams’s engagement with this neglected theme is, for me, the best in the entire book. In general, his starting-points are recent works of theology, volumes like ‘Werner G. Jeanrond’s wide ranging A Theology of Love’ (p. 191) or Kathleen Sands’s Escape From Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology. Even those of us who have missed these titles will find him an appreciative but brilliantly acute critic. They can, however cause him to leave less elevated questions untouched. The chapter on ‘Insubstantial Evil’ never so much as mentions original sin, present though it already is in the Confessions, and still leaves me wondering what Augustine could say of any interest or plausibility on, say, the sufferings of small children when wracked by cancers or on the distress of their onlooking parents. When Williams asks of the Confessions, ‘above all, in Books VII and VIII, why the delay in accepting the Catholic faith?’ (p. 15), I wonder if he is rewriting Augustine’s ‘conversion’ and relating it to a ‘faith’ which was not the central issue.
The range of this book cannot be summarized in a review. It is stratospherically intelligent and a heartfelt appreciation of Augustine’s similar strengths.