Punishment and Reconciliation: Augustine

Punish the sin, not the sinner; easier said than done. Preaching on the second Psalm and purporting to address \u27all who judge the earth,\u27 Augustine wrestled with the problems attending punishment and reconciliation. The results recorded in his sermons and correspondence as well as in a few treatises perplex yet are worth considering before we investigate Augustine\u27s more explicit remarks on the punishment of Donatist dissidents resisting reconciliation with the African church from which, he insisted, their predecessors had seceded in the early fourth century. At stake during Augustine\u27s tenure as bishop, toward the end of that century and three decades into the next, was the influence of Catholic Christianity in provinces that supplied Italy with much of its grain, with many delicacies, and with olive oil, prepared for export in Augustine\u27s see, at the port of Hippo, as well as in Carthage.

To Assyst the Ordynaryes : Why Thomas More Agreed to Become Chancellor

Revisionists\u27 explanations for Thomas More\u27s willingness to serve as Chancellor have him scheming to support the Aragonese faction at Court-or conspiring with Hapsburg agents to revive papal influence in England in the wake of Campeggio\u27s departure and Wolsey\u27s fall. In late 1529, More was obviously concerned with lay disaffection, troubled by the prospect that sectarian dissidents might capitalize on it to reform the church recklessly, and confident that the realm\u27s bishops, assisted by the government, could outmaneuver the critics of Roman and English Catholicism, whose arguments for an alternative ecclesiology and soteriology he had opposed earlier that year. To Assyst presents More\u27s concern and confidence as a more plausible answer to the question in its title, more plausible than rival responses on offer

The Confessing Animal on Stage: Authenticity, Asceticism, and the Constant Inconstancie of Elizabethan Character

For persons persuaded by the rhetoric of sixteenth-century religious reformers, authenticity was a complex matter of access to the reality of divinity. George Levin\u27s paper on empiricist habits of mind seems a strange place to start elaborating on that observation, for such habits look to be worlds apart from what I study, the sixteenth-century Calvinist adaptations of patristic and medieval ascetic spirituality. Yet Levin maintains that he has identified empiricism\u27s near-ascetic techniques. To know nature, he claims, one must make it alien ... and deny one\u27s own desire. If he is correct about the programmatically self-alienating character of the positivist model of knowledge and about the empiricist assumptions it extends and refines, then perhaps asceticism, Calvinism, empiricism, and positivism someday will file companionably through sweeping histories of the human imagination. If he is correct, that is, and if the historians of that someday are still reupholstering old ideas and long-standing habits of mind. I cannot pronounce authoritatively on the first condition and am only slightly tempted to guess about the second. Not so George Levin, who crosses cavalierly from self-alienation to self-annihilation, sure that the religious/moral implications of that tradition of self-annihilation continue to thrive in the practice of science and the language of the social sciences

[Introduction to] Church, Book, and Bishop: Conflict and Authority in Early Latin Christianity

Beginning with the organizational difficulties that faced the post-resurrection communities of Jesus\u27 followers and concluding nearly six centuries later as many regional representatives of the universal church came increasingly under the influence of Roman bishops, Church, Book, and Bishop is the story of leadership-- its successes and frustrations. It is a book about the managerial elites largely responsible for overcoming the theological, political, and social obstacles to organization. Through a series of scenes drawn from clerical life, Peter Iver Kaufman identifies and illustrates these executive strategies for conflict management and consensus-building. Whereas many accounts of this period emphasize nonconformity and conflict, Kaufman studies the distribution and exercise of authority that made if possible to articulate the conformists\u27 positions effectively and to achieve an appreciable measure of institutional coherence. This story is told in a way that will appeal not only to scholars of the early church and their students but also to generalists interested in the development of Latin Christianity. It will be especially useful as a supplement to courses on the history of Western civilization and on the history of Christian traditions.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1280/thumbnail.jp

Opinion: Education for Professional Leadership and the Humanities: Exhortations and Demonstrations

The complaint: pre-professional, para-professional, and professional programs occupy large slabs of the undergraduate curricula in colleges and universities in the United States. Core courses in which the arts and humanities were introduced to first- and second-year students are extinct in places, replaced by distribution requirements or specialized seminars that occasionally--but not often--expose students to a broad range of studies from classics to cultural anthropology, history, philosophy, music, literature, political theory, and other precincts in the liberal arts. Undergraduates wishing to enter the professional programs in journalism, business (finance, accounting, and marketing), education, energy, environmental sciences, health care, and health sciences fill their “dance cards” during their initial two years with prerequisites; then, successful, they complete their undergraduate educations, rarely, if ever, returning to the arts and humanities for an elective. During sessions of “lifelong learning” courses that I have been privileged to teach, I frequently hear retired professionals lament that they had been yanked from the liberal arts into prescribed pre- or para-professional studies to regain consciousness only after returning, late in--or at the conclusion of--their careers, to art history, comparative religion, medievalia, philosophy, or somesuch

Clerical Leadership in Late Antiquity: Augustine on Bishops’ Polemical and Pastoral Burdens

Augustine returned from Italy to North Africa in 388, apparently elated to have found his calling. The cities he had known, Thagaste and Carthage, and would soon come to know, Hippo Regius, were relatively prosperous, despite taxes collected for the central government which had been making increasing demands since the time of Emperor Constantine. The funds available for municipal improvements were depleted (gravement amputés), Claude Lepelley calculated, siting the African cities in “a history of inexorable decline” from the 380s into the 430s. In the coastal city of Hippo, however, Augustine, as bishop was busy from the late 390s, exchanging ideas and insults with polemicists of various stripes. He had not meant to take a prominent part in African Christianity’s bouts with sectarians, secessionists, and pagans. He planned to retire to his family estate in Thagaste with several like-minded friends. He only traveled to Hippo to consult with a man whom he hoped to tempt to join his small company of contemplatives and perhaps to confer with the faithful about the prospects for locating another contemplative collective there. He tells us he disliked traveling. He feared that his reputation for eloquence and insight might tempt the faithful far from his home and friends in Thagaste to waylay him to fill a vacancy. He would be safe in Hippo, he thought; the incumbent, Valerius, was well respected. Yet, at that time (391), Valerius was thinking ahead. He had his parishioners seize Augustine, ordained him, and after several years nominated him as his coadjutor and successor

English Calvinism and the crowd: Coriolanus and the history of religious reform

Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt\u27s acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright\u27s histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars of succession he chronicled. Nonetheless, “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, and their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems,” Greenblatt says, “to have been Shakespeare\u27s first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s and to have been the inspiration for the “greasy aprons” and “gross diets” of “tag-rag people” or rabble in his plays. There, onstage, the glory that was Rome and the grit of fifteenth-century England were “suffused less with the otherness of the past than with the familiar coordinates of Shakespeare\u27s own present.” And familiarity bred contempt for “the sweaty multitude.” “All those people” were terribly, dangerously unpredictable or, as with Jack Cade\u27s crowd in the second part of Henry VI, just plain dangerous. Cade stirred his prole followers to kill the city\u27s more cultured citizens. Sinisterly self-interested tribunes—or so they may have seemed to some playgoers—swayed the crowd in Coriolanus against the play\u27s protagonist, Rome\u27s most noble soldier. And commoners could be “lightly blown to and fro.

How Socially Conservative Were the Elizabethan Religious Radicals?

Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals--puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics--were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish promoted a sense of social distance between themselves ( the better sort ) and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson\u27s and Levine\u27s study of social discontinuity, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, seemed a splendid occasion to revisit the intersection of religious conviction and social practice and to ponder the precision with which puritanism\u27 s supposed contributions to social stratification-and the stratification itself-have been, and can be, measured

Clerical Leadership in Late Antiquity: Augustine on Bishops’ Polemical and Pastoral Burdens

Augustine returned from Italy to North Africa in 388, apparently elated to have found his calling. The cities he had known, Thagaste and Carthage, and would soon come to know, Hippo Regius, were relatively prosperous, despite taxes collected for the central government which had been making increasing demands since the time of Emperor Constantine. The funds available for municipal improvements were depleted (gravement amputés), Claude Lepelley calculated, siting the African cities in “a history of inexorable decline” from the 380s into the 430s. In the coastal city of Hippo, however, Augustine, as bishop was busy from the late 390s, exchanging ideas and insults with polemicists of various stripes. He had not meant to take a prominent part in African Christianity’s bouts with sectarians, secessionists, and pagans. He planned to retire to his family estate in Thagaste with several like-minded friends. He only traveled to Hippo to consult with a man whom he hoped to tempt to join his small company of contemplatives and perhaps to confer with the faithful about the prospects for locating another contemplative collective there. He tells us he disliked traveling. He feared that his reputation for eloquence and insight might tempt the faithful far from his home and friends in Thagaste to waylay him to fill a vacancy. He would be safe in Hippo, he thought; the incumbent, Valerius, was well respected. Yet, at that time (391), Valerius was thinking ahead. He had his parishioners seize Augustine, ordained him, and after several years nominated him as his coadjutor and successor

Humility, Civility, and Vitality: Papal Leadership at the Turn of the Seventh Century

In 416, Bishop Innocent I of Rome sent a colleague in Gubbio what was to become one of the most important set of liturgical instructions in early Christendom. Innocent composed his remarks on, inter alia, penitential discipline and prescribed gestures during the administration of the Sacraments to deter other bishops and their priests from improvising. He claimed that bishops of Rome, as successors of St. Peter, had the responsibility to authenticate ritual observances and achieve uniformity in Italy and elsewhere. Churches could not be left to alter or surrender valued practices because presiding priests or bishops thought them superfluous or ill-suited to local tastes. Bishops of Rome, then and later known as popes, imposed order; their leadership should be as the apostle Peter’s was (Cabié 1973). Even before Innocent’s pontificate ended with his death in 417, he learned that he was expected to lead and, as the sacred text said, ‘feed’ flocks of Christians (John 21: 17) wherever they pastured. So when crises jarred church officials or lay patrons remote from Rome and concerted action there seemed either impossible or inadequate to resolve them, the locals often appealed to Rome. And when in one church or region a doctrine seemed odd or discipline shabby in another, popes’ opinions were summoned