Thursday, August 11, 2005
Augustine: Simply Seeking Understanding
From John Cavadini’s chapter “Simplifying Augustine” in the Eerdmans compilation Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities:
[I]t is my intention to compare De Trinitate with Semones ad populum. De Trinitate is arguably one of the most difficult or “esoteric” works Augustine ever wrote. He himself remarked that he expected it to be understood only by ‘few’… On the other hand, the nearly 550 Sermones ad populum verfiable as Augustinian are some of the most accessible or exoteric [see footnote on p.66] works we have from Augustine ...
Augustine’s audience varied with time and place, but generally included both educated and uneducated, literate and illiterate members, and he developed a homiletic style that was intentionally simple, shorn of rhetorical intricacy, plain and vivid, specially created to reach just such a heterogeneous group. ... [A] close reading of the homilies reveals that ‘faith seeking understanding’ is as much a homiletic principle in Augustine as it is a theological principle. What emerges from a comparison of the homilies with De Trinitate is not that Augustine is popularizing, or “exotericizing,” the results of the inquiry when he preaches, but that he recontextualizes inquiry itself for the people. In his homilies such inquiry is no longer the exclusive province of the liberally educated elites. ... Seeking for understanding, we are to look ‘in the books of the Lord’ and knock on the Lord’s door for understanding by praying. ... As for those who have not been schooled in the liberal arts, they are nevertheless not uneducated since they have been raised ‘on the Word of God’ [in sermone Dei nutriti estis].
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