Conybeare, Catherine

English

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Review of Creatio ex nihilo and the Theology of St.
Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond,
by N. Joseph Torchia
Catherine Conybeare
Bryn Mawr College, cconybea@brynmawr.edu
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Conybeare, Catherine. Review of Creatio ex nihilo and the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond, by N.
Joseph Torchia. Church History 70, no. 4 (2001): 777-778.
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 777 
Christian world, but for anyone interested in the construction and represen- 
tation of "holiness." 
Megan McLaughlin 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Creatio ex nihilo and the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean 
Polemic and Beyond. By N. Joseph Torchia, O. P. American University 
Studies Series 7 (Theology and Religion). Vol. 205. New York: Peter Lang, 
1999. xxvii + 279 pp. $49.95 cloth. 
What is the exact role of the copula in the main title of Torchia's work? 
Does the "and" indicate mere juxtaposition, or some closer connection be- 
tween creatio ex nihilo and Augustine's theology? This may seem a frivolous 
question; but it captures, I think, a fundamental problem in the conception of 
this book. 
I at first took the title to indicate that Augustine's theology of creation was 
to be discussed in relation to, and as a product of, earlier thinking on the 
subject (especially given that the sub-title clearly refers to the development of 
Augustine's own thought): the "closer connection" version of the copula. But 
Torchia spends over sixty pages of this book-a quarter of his total text--on an introduction which, as he notes, could very well "stand on its own as a 
concise history of the development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo from the 
first through the fifth centuries" (xv). It could indeed: the various strands of 
this complicated tradition are laid out with admirable clarity, and the chapter 
could readily be recommended as a handy survey of the topic. However, the 
sources mentioned are almost entirely Greek. It is highly unlikely that Augustine 
read Greek well enough to encounter these ideas at first hand, and there is no 
serious discussion of the issue here (Torchia contenting himself with such 
observations as that "Augustine had a rich patristic heritage at his disposal" 
[37-38]). Material that might have had a direct influence on Augustine is 
either underplayed (as with the discussion of Ambrose's Hexameron homilies 
[19-21], which pushes into a footnote the crucial question of whether they 
were delivered in a year when Augustine would actually have been at Milan 
to hear them), or omitted altogether. For example, we have much discussion 
of Plato's Timaeus and its reception, but Cicero's translation of the work is not 
mentioned-even though that must surely be where Augustine encountered 
the ideas. Cicero's De Natura Deorum, which we know Augustine knew well, 
is another conspicuous omission. Cicero's influence is alluded to only in a 
couple of sentences (36); the possible influence of Lactantius, for example, is 
not mentioned at all. (What about Inst. 2.8.10, for example, and the image- 
which Augustine uses several times-of the faber?) 
What, then, of the remaining three-quarters of Torchia's work? The final 
chapter and the epilogue lay out, again very lucidly, the "broader theological 
implications" (231) of the teachings on creation that Augustine formulated in 
response to the Manichees. This leaves us with six central chapters, which 
deal directly with Torchia's subtitle, "the anti-Manichaean polemic." The first 
of these takes the important step of laying out the Manichaean cosmogony 
against which Augustine was presumably reacting. Here and elsewhere, 
Torchia usefully contrasts the essential pessimism of the Manichaean world- 
view with Augustine's determined optimism about the world and the flesh- 
a basic refusal to repudiate them, which he developed his theology of 
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778 CHURCH HISTORY 
creation, inter alia, to capture. But the chapter is marred by two things. First, 
Torchia shows a remarkable naivety with regard to his sources, choosing to 
base his outline on Manichaean sources from the eighth and tenth centuries, 
in Syriac and Arabic respectively. (For his justification of this choice, see 
80-81.) Yet there are far earlier sources available, of which the citations in 
Augustine's own work are not the least-though they would, obviously, have 
to be read with a circumspect alertness to their polemical context. Second, the 
picture of Manichaean cosmogony we glean from this chapter is so contorted 
and absurd that it is hard to see why Augustine would ever have taken it 
seriously-and the question of how he could have done so, though crucial to 
the point at issue, is never addressed. 
These reservations notwithstanding, we return in chapters 2-5 (with a 
reprise of salient points in chapter 6) to what Torchia does best: a clear 
marshalling of salient passages from his sources. Thus we move swiftly 
through Augustine's various commentaries on Genesis (Contra Manichaeos, 
Imperfectus, Ad Litteram, and Confessiones XI-XIII), the Contra epistulam 
Manichaei quam uocant Fundamenti, the De Natura Boni, and the Contra 
Faustum. Throughout this section, major themes are established and reiter- 
ated: Augustinian optimism against Manichaean pessimism; Augustine's 
determination to assert the priority and omnipotence of God against the 
challenged and defensive God of the Manichees; Augustine's sophisticated 
use of language, and especially his interpretation of nothingness (a problem 
in the Western tradition at least since Parmenides in the fifth century B.C.E.) 
as exactly that, a simple non-existence upon which nothing can be predicated, 
and not the terrible moral obscurity of Manichaean dualism. But again, 
Torchia's treatment of his sources militates against a deeper development of 
his-or Augustine's-ideas. His notes are swollen (usually almost doubling 
the length of a given chapter) by giving in their original language the 
passages translated in the main text; and yet there is almost no close reading 
of these passages to lend subtlety to his treatment. (In one place-211 n. 24- 
we simply have a string of references listed, despite the fact that the concept 
being elucidated is the extremely slippery and significant one of "purely 
fictitious realities.") Moreover, the citation and translation are, troublingly, 
often mismatched (e.g. 167 n. 5, 179 n. 67, 199 n. 30; there are also places [150, 
246] where the Latin title of a work is given incorrectly). It is hard not to feel 
that Torchia would have been better off cutting these vast quotations out of 
the notes and instead taking some space to give proper details of his primary 
sources in his bibliography: it is unhelpful simply to list all the volume 
numbers of CCL, CSEL or PL that contain works of Augustine, rather than 
listing by individual titles, with editors and page or column numbers where 
applicable. This is, then, an extremely useful survey of ideas about creatio 
ex nihilo juxtaposed with an oddly cursory examination of those ideas in 
Augustine's writings. The function of the copula in Torchia's title is, alas, 
more disjunctive than associative. 
Catherine Conybeare 
University of Manchester 
The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiq- 
uity. By Georgia Frank. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 
xiv + 219 pp. $40.00 cloth. 
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Review of Creatio ex nihilo \u3ci\u3eand the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond\u3c/i\u3e, by N. Joseph Torchia

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Review of Creatio ex nihilo \u3ci\u3eand the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond\u3c/i\u3e, by N. Joseph Torchia

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