The Pilgrim City: Social and Political Ideas in the Writings of St. Augustine (review)

R. W. Dyson. The Pilgrim City: Social and Political Ideas in the Writings of St. Augustine . Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 217. $60.00.

I approached this review with a certain anticipation, keen to discover how R. W. Dyson comments on Augustine's social and political ideas since the author so recently produced a major new translation of De Civitate Dei for Cambridge University Press (reviewed in JECS 7 [1999]: 624), and he has a substantial foundation for analyzing Augustine's thought. Though the title, authorship, and external presentation might convey the impression that this is a monograph, the work is primarily a sourcebook, offering sets of extracts along standard themes with a brief narrative treatment by Dyson preceding each set of texts.

After a short introduction the author presents the texts in five thematic chapters: 1) Sin and Human History, 2) The State in a Sinful World, 3) Social Institutions, 4) War, and 5) Church and State. The narrative sections average ten pages in length each while the illustrative texts average thirty-one pages each. Dyson offers a wide variety of texts, most of which he has freshly translated in his quest to "offer as complete a reconstruction as possible of Augustine's political and social ideas" (xii). These are worthy translations though the DCD texts are slight revisions of Marcus Dods's 1872 translation with some rather archaic phrasing retained (particularly biblical texts).

The virtue of this work, much like earlier works of its kind, is that it draws together many texts in a very accessible format. Dyson helpfully assigns a number to each extract that he references in his narrative. Given this arrangement, one must assume that the book is intended as a resource for students, and in many ways it will be helpful to them.

Although many of us have certain texts which we care to emphasize—and so will quibble over the selections—I, nonetheless, found it curious that Dyson leaves out important texts, such as the correspondence with Nectarius and Volusian, De excidio urbis Romae, Book XI of De Genesi ad litteram (though citing it in the narrative), and that he offers only one minor extract from De doctrina Christiana (missing the important statements on uti/frui and on human institutions). However, this point is rather minor; of much greater concern is the way in which Dyson presents the extracts. They are arranged achronologically without any indication of either the date written (except for the texts on religious persecution), the context, the addressee/audience, or the genre. Given both the importance of these items and Augustine's changes of mind and development over his career, this format hardly does him justice.

The narrative sections are generally helpful, but I found some mistakes and simplifications that further reduced the book's usefulness. For example, in the chapter "Sin and Human History," Dyson begins with a short discussion of privation theory, but then, when he turns to a discussion of original sin, he ignores the influence of this theory on Augustine's view of original sin and the human condition after the Fall. Instead, he accounts for Augustine's position solely by describing him as a biblical literalist. Given not only the marked change in Augustine's exegesis of Romans in ad Simplicianum but also the dispute among scholars about the presence of this notion in patristic exegesis before him, this approach is an odd sort of assessment. Elsewhere, Dyson calls Augustine a "Christian neoplatonist par excellence"without explanation, qualification, ac-knowledgement of the scholarly debates involved, or the like (210).

The book's use as a resource for students is also limited since there is no subject index, and the bibliography is both very brief (two pages) and very out of date. Only one study after 1981 is cited. The only translations listed in the select...