Augustine in Renaissance Humanism

Reviews in Religion and Theology 21/4 (2014): 454-62

This review article explores a new indispensable reference work on the reception of Augustine. It offers an overview of its content, structure, and methodology, as well as a critical assessment of its overall contribution to the study of Augustine. Goethe once remarked that, in the world, there are just a few voices, yet so many echoes. Augustine is definitely among the ‘few voices’, which have provoked all manner of friendly and unfriendly echoes. It is particularly important to realize that, apart from explicit citations and references in western literature, Augustine has also profoundly shaped medieval and modern culture through the subtle dissemination of his ideas into various spheres of life. This reference work not only provides a description of the current state of the reception of Augustine, but also adds the new results of the diligent work of the contributing researchers and identifies several topics that still need to be investigated.

Vessey/A Companion to Augustine, 2012

Because of the immensity of Augustine's corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine's engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical points, and philosophical arguments that have not received much attention in the literature up to this point, despite their centrality to Augustine's own philosophical interests. Discovery of the new philosophical material I present here is possible thanks to the use of a method only recently beginning to gain currency: that of looking for philosophical arguments and developments in Augustine's sermons and other exegetical texts (see e.g. Atkins and Dodaro 2001: xi-xii; Byers 2003: 433-4). In the past, philosophical scholarship on Augustine has treated the genre of a text as indicative of its discipline, an approach that has resulted in a fairly strict separation of philosophical research from rhetorical, "theological," or "pastoral" texts (this approach relies on methodological assumptions more appropriate to medieval scholasticism than to Augustine). In contrast, the alternative "integrative" method employed here yields a more complete picture of Augustine's relationship to various philosophical traditions. The reliability of this method is clear from the fact that its results cohere with what Augustine says on the same topics in his other, more systematic or straightforwardly philosophical works, as we shall see below. Thus the new claims here do not concern whom Augustine read (Plotinus in the translation of Victorinus or someone of similar interests and abilities, Apuleius, Cicero, Varro, Gellius, and Seneca), but rather to what degree he assimilated what he read. We turn first to what is perhaps the most controversial question, that of Augustine's Aristotelianism.

Nova et Vetera, 2021

2021

Augustine and the Humanists investigates the reception of Augustine’s De civitate Dei in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Augustine and the Humanists fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the urgent call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, the De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

The recent debates about justification have compelled scholars to reassess the traditional understanding of the doctrine, particularly considering whether the interpretation of the New Testament have been overly shaped by a sixteenth-century lens. These critiques indicate the need not only to revisit what the biblical texts say, but also to properly understand the history of Christian witness in the development of our theology. In important ways, it is accurate to say that the historiography of the Reformation is "no more and no less the historiography of the Renaissance." 1 Paul Oskar Kristeller paved the way for recognizing this reality in his groundbreaking study that overturned the prevailing view that Renaissance Humanism was an anti-Christian philosophical system distinct from the Reformation. 2 He demonstrated that Renaissance Humanism is better understood to have been a cultural and educational program which was influential on the emergence of the Reformation movement. 3 Two of the most important elements of humanism for the Reformation were the textual and philological return to 1 Bard Thompson, Humanists and Reformers: A

"Augustine and the Humanists" fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the urgent call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, the "De civitate Dei," has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the "City of God" at the dawn of the modern age. "Augustine and the Humanists" focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history. https://www.lysapublishers.com/book/augustine-and-the-humanists/4

Et Amicorum: Essays on Renaissance Humanism and Philosophy, 2018

This volume is offered as an affectionate tribute to Professor Jill Kraye, long one of the intellectual lights of the Warburg Institute, London, as well as one of the world's leading scholars of Renaissance philosophy and humanism, the two interconnected subjects of this volume. Jill supervised each of our doctoral dissertations, Margaret's in 1997-2001, and Anthony's in 2007-10, and has remained close to us since then, continuing to offer her friendship, professional guidance, and expertise, not to mention stepping in now and then to solve Latin quandaries. Of course, Jill has had a host of other students at both the master's and doctoral levels, all of whom have fond memories and the deepest respect for her. For this volume we have assembled as many of them as were able to participate:

This entry examines the humanist articulation of three key philosophical relations: being and seeming, virtue and fortune, and stasis and mutability. These relations address matters of epistemology (knowing), ethics, and ontol-ogy (reality). Humanists, when grappling with these concerns, resorted to alternative approaches. They identified reality on the basis of the stability of reason, which could ground an objective view of things. In this sense, they became finders of wisdom. Or, as seekers of wisdom, they acknowledged the transience of phenomena, which they confronted in their awareness of illusion and limited vision. If they grounded their role as objective expositors of the truth of things on the traditional concept of the animal rationale, they also celebrated the new force of the homo ludens, the philosopher at play, who participates in the unveiling of reality through masking and seeming, and also intersubjec-tively, through conversations with others.

On Augustine’s Vision of the Human Being as it evolved through his polemics, 2024

This is a thesis on the topic of Saint Augustine of Hippo's vision of the human being as it developed and evolved throughout his polemics against the Pelagians and Manichees. It explores his views on the person of Adam, the first few chapters of Genesis, and happiness, and it explores his arguments on free will, free choice, and original sin.