Augustine through the Ages. An Encyclopedia (review)

Augustine through the Ages. An Encyclopedia. Edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1999. Pp. il, 902, $75.00.)

The great African Doctor of the Church is doing well by the encyclopediasts. Alongside the stately progress of the Augustinus-Lexikon (over 1900 columns to reach 'Donatists,' in German, French, or English), Augustine through the Ages presents in some 500 articles by 150 scholars Augustine's life, work, thought, and influence for a readership ranging from the academic researcher to the merely curious. Users with nothing but English will find a few bibliographies beyond them, and have to negotiate around some untranslated Latin, but for the most part this volume will prove accessible to serious monoglott students. It is not Augustine for the masses.

An editor of such a work cannot avoid decisions on what to include or exclude. Many of the entries suggested themselves: each of Augustine's writings (with valuable accounts and tabulated information on his letters and sermones), family, friends, colleagues, and opponents, his controversial engagements, leading events of his life, the resources of the North African Christian tradition he fell heir to, influences on his intellectual and religious formation, the world in which he lived and the church history of his day--and much more besides, including an inevitably selective coverage of major figures and phases illustrating Augustine's extraordinarily wide and diverse influence through the ages (which the Augustinus-Lexikon does not encompass). This, then, is a splendidly comprehensive encyclopedia, drawing on Augustinian scholarship worldwide but chiefly the increasing depth and breadth of American patristic learning. This book must find a place in every institutional library in the humanities, and numerous individual scholars in history, theology, and philosophy in the Western tradition will invest wisely in a copy.

Not that it is beyond improvement. Since it is indubitably set for a long life, what follows may serve as a contribution to a revision agenda. First, the absence of any treatment of editions (and translations) of Augustine's works is disappointing. A huge gap yawns between 'Manuscripts' and 'Cyberspace, Augustine in.' The good article on Erasmus barely mentions his Augustine edition, and Amerbach, the Maurists, and other milestones in the publishing of Augustine are absent. (We are told that Amerbach's edition of 1550 [read 1506] was available to Luther--who died in 1546, not 1540 as given here.) A survey of centers of Augustinian research, including today the editor's two homes in Villanova and Rome and of course the Paris Institut, would have been welcome. There is no general guidance on the present availability of Augustine's works, although bibliographies provide the detail of most (but not all) of them individually. On a related point, the catalogue (Indiculum) of Augustine's collection of his own writings made by Possidius soon after his death is not discussed.

Secondly, the historical, geographical, and social context of Augustine's career is only patchily covered. We miss an article on Roman North Africa, or any particular province of the Empire, except oddly Aquitania. 'Hippo' (identified still as Bône, superseded years since by Annaba), is narrowly archaeological (and done better by William Frend in 'Archaeology'), and 'Carthage' much the same. Other cities or towns are given ampler treatment, but Milevis is here only for its synods; Hadrumetum is in but not Massilia, nor Rome or Caesarea (Mauretania), but Arles found favor in editorial eyes.

Not unconnected is the sketchy portrayal of Augustine's diverse ministry in Hippo, his multifarious sarcina episcopatus. 'Clergy, North African,' and 'Preaching' and a few others fill in corners of the picture, but we scarcely glimpse Augustine the pastor, intercessor, trustee, monastic paterfamilias (monasticism is only rule[s] and asceticism), trouble-shooter, ombudsman, and city father--roles so starkly exposed in the Divjak find of letters. 'Roman Legal System' does not touch base with Augustine at all, but 'Roman Laws' does. The pagan religious background...