The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine

In the preface to the City of God, Augustine acknowledges how difficult it will be to persuade the arrogant of the virtue of humility. Citing Prov. 3.34 to demonstrate God’s approval of humility and hostility to pride, Augustine angrily observes that precisely those arrogant men whom God resists love to say in praise of themselves, “Spare the abject and conquer the proud” (Vergil, Aen. 6.853). Far from rejecting Vergil as a liar, Augustine shortly announces his intent to treat “this” Vergil—“whom little boys read”—as the preeminent exponent of the culture and history of the terrestrial city, one compelled by Veritas to confess the truth concerning his city and its gods (civ. 1.3).

As Sabine MacCormack shows in The Shadows of Poetry, this moment marked but one extreme in Augustine’s engagement with Rome’s greatest poet. A decade and a half later, Augustine confessed that “he was accustomed to marvel” that Vergil had understood something of “the intercession of the saints because his words paralleled in a remarkable way the words of Christ” (216–17, citing civ. 21.27; cf. 124 on civ. 14.8–9). As these episodes suggest, it would be easy to construe Augustine’s engagement with Vergil as a progression, from Christianizing readings at Cassiciacum, to the hostility aroused by critics of Christianity after 410, to a measured appreciation in old age. To her credit, MacCormack does not impose such a narrative on her material. The Shadows of Poetry is neither intellectual biography nor a history of reception, but the evocation of a conversation that was typical of its context only insofar as unique genius always defines its context for later generations.

MacCormack argues, naturally enough, that Augustine internalized Vergil because he “was a citizen of the Roman province of Africa and a reader of Vergil, and he always remained this” (229, but cf. 70 and 188, emphasizing Augustine’s fondness for Africa over Rome). “Put differently, Vergil formed part of the very shape of Augustine’s reality because he described reality in ways that Augustine found decisive” (xviii).

Yet, as MacCormack stresses, Augustine never wrote an interpretation of Vergil, nor did any of his contemporaries. Rather, the pagans regarded Vergil as an inspired expositor of many branches of knowledge and therefore explicated his poems piecemeal, for the discrete information that it could provide, while Augustine quoted Vergil “in order to pursue [his] own autonomous arguments. And thus this simple difference . . . amounted to a great gulf, for passages quoted from Vergil now became building blocks for new structures” (Chapter 1 at 37; see also 74–88, 180, and 225–26). MacCormack therefore studies the role that Vergil played in Augustine’s thought, over time, on several issues: the role of language and texts in leading the soul to God (Chapter 2), the relationship between the soul and the body (Chapter 3), the nature of the pagan gods and the rewards of their worship (Chapter 4), and the nature of human history (Chapter 5).

Along the way, MacCormack seeks to contrast Augustine’s readings with those of his contemporaries. This lends to each chapter an elegance of structure and complexity of argument that are all the more attractive for being understated. Chapter 2 opens with Augustine fashioning prayers to his God from verses in Vergilian prayers and closes with Macrobius expounding the Homeric antecedents of the same prayers, as though that exposition alone clarified the verses’ contemporary relevance (48, 80, and cf. 138). Augustine was familiar with the respect Macrobius paid to Vergil; indeed, Augustine likened faith in Scripture to love for Vergil (84.158). The chapter, like the others, thus describes the growth in Augustine’s thought in a way that reveals how much he once was a man of his time, and how greatly he changed in the four decades that we have his acquaintance.

MacCormack provides illustrations from the Vergilius...