Augustin au XVIIe siècle: Actes du colloque organisé par Carlo Ossola au Collège de France les 30 septembre et 1er octobre 2004 (review)

This elegant collection is divided into three sections, the first consisting of three essays, by Jean-Louis Quantin, Gérard Forreyrolles, and Martine Pécharman, largely historical in nature and treating of texts and language in the main. The second section contains essays by Emanuela Scribano, Vincent Carraud, Laurence Devillairs, Hélène Michon, and Jean-Robert Armogathe on a range of philosophical topics and issues of spirituality. The final, shorter division examines issues concerning memory, poetry, and prayer, with essays by Benedetta Papasogli, Brian Stock, and Carlo Ossola. Not all the essays look completely content in their particular corrals, but a general coherence is maintained. It is impossible even to survey here this rich and varied collection, but a number of essays are especially representative of the high standard and great interest of recent and current work in this field.

The first section is dominated by Quantin's masterful "L'Augustin du XVII ^esiècle? Questions de corpus et de canon." One is struck by the paucity of new discoveries of Augustinian texts in the seventeenth century (one of them, the De Gestis Pelagii, by the peripatetic Irish cleric David Rothe, in Fiesole) and by domination of very imperfect sixteenth-century editions. In the latter context, Quantin comments on Jansen's attempt to "substituer à l'Augustin flou, incertain, semé de pseudépigraphes et de contradictions, un Augustin rigoureusement determiné et resserré, tout en revendiquant plus que jamais pour lui le statut et l'autorité de docteur des docteurs" (p. 73), adding that this can, of course, be argued by some to constitute "une historicisation de la tradition" ( ibid.) and by others as an example of the "terrorisme subtil qu'exerce l'érudition sur la théologie" ( ibid.). Quentin's careful historical account never neglects the theological dimension of these processes, a fact that makes him less surprised than some patrologists at the conflictual nature of St. Augustine's seventeenth-century reception.

Carraud's essay on the anti-Augustinianism of Pascal, dedicated to the memory of Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, is, for the Augustinian neophyte at any rate, one of the most usefully unsettling. Carraud's forensic examination, within a limited range of texts (the Pensées), of Pascal's dependency on Augustine's City of God, argues convincingly that Pascal neglected to read this text, which he did nonetheless cite, a fact Carraud links to a deep intellectual reservation on Pascal's part regarding the Augustinian tradition. Moreover, "en refusant le paradigme politique des deux cités, Pascal (ne) rejette-t-il (que) le paradigme lui-même, ou n'est-il pas conduit à invalider la doctrine augustinienne des deuxamours comme telle?" (p. 161). Carraud explores the ramifications of this omission with an examination of what "se recontrer avec" or more precisely "dire la même chose" (pp. 155 ff.) actually signify when Pascal uses the locutions to compare and contrast Augustine's and Descartes's cogito. This forms the context for a discussion on apparent and real authorship. Regarding Descartes's cogitoCarraud writes:"dans deux cas qui inversent ses exemples: c'est le dernier venu qui invente, le répétiteur est le novateur réel" (p. 170). He concludes, "il n'en permet pas moins d'en finir avec l'opinion abstraite d'un augustinisme non problématique de Pascal" (p. 190), a statement likely to upset not a few received opinions.

A slightly different view of Pascal features in Michon's fascinating "Le cœur dans la tradition augustinienne," where, notwithstanding Carraud's reassertion of Pascal's "le coeur de l'homme est creux et plein d'ordure" (p. 188), the...