Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology

NOTES

     L  A The following are abbreviations for series names that are used in the notes and bibliography: EETS Early English Text Society PL Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina,  vols., ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, ‒. Cited by volume and column numbers. WSA Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the st Century P The epigraph is taken from William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C Version. Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best, ed. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press, ). . Quotations from the Bible in this preface are from The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). . William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ..‒, The Riverside Shakespeare , ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ). Subsequent citations to this work are given in the text. . For very different attempts at this, compare Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform between Reform and Reformation, ‒ (Leiden : Brill, ); Risto Saarinen, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought from Augustine to Buridan (Leiden: Brill, ); William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), ch. ; Heiko A. Oberman and Frank A. James, eds., Via Augustini: Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation (Leiden: Brill, ).  . This occlusion is perhaps partly due to the bizarrely reductive version of Augustine propagated by D.W. Robertson and his followers in a once influential school of “historical criticism,” a version simply accepted by the school’s opponents. . See Thomas Aquinas, In Oratorionem Dominicam Videlicet “Pater Noster” Expositio, in Opuscula Theologica, ed. R.A. Verardo, R.M. Spiazzi, and M. Calcaterra ,  vols. (Rome: Marietti, ), :‒, para.  (p. ). Here he observes that we must note how doctrine, Christian teaching, is given to us through a particular mode of talking, in the minute particulars of language to which we must, as he goes on to demonstrate, pay careful attention (“Notandum autem, quod ex modo loquendi datur nobis doctrina”). The demonstration he offers here concerns relations between divine and human agency, drawing both on the Lord’s Prayer and on St. Augustine’s homilies on John’s gospel, a demonstration whose guidelines I have sought to follow in my own exploration of Augustine in chapter . . For an excellent example of such a survey, see Courtenay, School and Scholars; for one with more doctrinal interests, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma (‒) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), chs. ‒. Given the role of Scotus in developing a form of voluntarism that often challenges St. Thomas explicitly, and given his role in some recent grand narratives of Western culture, he would obviously feature in such a survey . For an example of the place of Scotus in some recent grand narratives, see Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, ), ‒; John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, ), ch. . I have found the following particularly relevant in thinking about this version of Scotus: Bernardine M. Bonansea, “‘Duns Scotus’ Voluntarism,” ch.  in John Duns Scotus, ‒, ed. John K. Ryan and Bernardine M. Bonansea (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, ); Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford : Oxford University Press, ); Olivier Boulnois, Étre et representation: Une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scot, XIIIe–XIVe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires, ); André de Muralt, L’unité de la philosophie politique de Scot, Occam et Suarez au libéralisme contemporain (Paris: Vrin, ), especially ‒, ‒, ‒. . Here I reiterate observations made in the preface to David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), ix–x. . This is the place to acknowledge how my thinking about the practices of critical writing from within a living polysemous tradition such as Christianity has been profoundly influenced by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre;  Notes to Pages xi‒xiv here the most relevant books are Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London : Duckworth, ) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth , ). . Bob Dylan, “Beyond the Horizon,” Modern Times (New York: Sony BMG Music, ). Chapter . A P The epigraph is from Sermon , in Augustine, Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill,  vols., WSA, pt. , vol.  (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, ‒). . From the immense storehouse of scholarship on and around Augustine , the following are works that I have found especially helpful in writing this chapter: Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press...