Via Augustini: Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. Essays in Honor of Damasus Trapp, O.S.A. (review)

The task set for modern students of Augustine by H.-I. Marrou in 1955 was clear: "en appeler sans cesse de l'augustinisme, de tous les augustinismes, à saint Augustin" (Saint Augustin et l'augustinisme, 180). In practice, as Marrou's little book perfectly demonstrates, the history of Augustinianism(s) is too interesting, and too important, to be regarded merely as the means to an end. Wilfully mistaking objects of use for those of enjoyment, today's Augustinians are all too likely to dally on the via Augustini instead of going straight home. Few have wantoned as fruitfully as the recipient of this collection of essays, whose work over the past forty years on Gregory of Rimini and other fourteenth-century "nominalist" theologians of the Order of Augustinian Hermits has enabled scholars to discern a late medieval schola Augustiniana moderna, "an intensive academic Augustinianism dedicated to the revival of the genuine theology of Augustine" (158). One of the defining features of the schola, as Trapp himself shows in an article on the Augustinian quotations of Johannes Hiltalinger of Basel, first published in 1954 and reprinted here with his bibliography, was a more "positive and historical-minded" approach to doctrinal authorities: specifically, a greater concern for the textual evidence for opinions cited from the Fathers or Authentici (191). Such concern naturally went hand-in-hand with an interest in procuring authoritative, standardized "editions" in which the citations made by one scholastic theologian could be checked by another. According to Trapp, Hiltalinger's "surprisingly scrupulous manner of quoting Augustine has nothing to do with an Augustinian's love for the founder of his Order: it is rather a characteristic of many fourteenth-century theologians" (211). In their respect for the patristic text, if not in their Latinity, these Augustinians anticipated the editorial labors of their humanist successors.

Not that printed texts of the Fathers, such as the great Opera omnia Augustini of J. Amerbach (Basel, 1506) altogether displaced "secondary" repertoria. Far from it. As Johann von Staupitz's modern editor, Richard Wetzel, points out in an exemplary essay entitled Staupitz Augustinianus, the reformer's "direct recourse to Augustine merges with the Augustinus receptus (via Lombard, Giles [of Rome] or others) and thus a quasi-humanist new experience emerges in which this ancient authority becomes quite contemporaneous" (78). While Wetzel would reduce Staupitz's debt to the schola of Gregory, Frank A. James III argues that the "readymade" Protestantism of one of his younger contemporaries, Peter Martyr Vermigli, is partly explicable as a response to Gregory's summons ad fontes Augustini; Peter's failure to cite Gregory alongside Augustine in support of his own (Augustinian) doctrine of predestination is thus a sign of how well he had learned the master's lesson.

Other essays in this volume deal with aspects of late medieval and Reformation Augustinianism less obviously related to the historico-critical achievements of the schola moderna. In one of the best of them, Eric L. Saak explores what he calls the "other side" of the Augustinian school, the world of the "common Augustinian" outside the university, through an analysis of the Figurae Bibliorum of a certain Antonius Rampegolus, O.E.S.A. The Figurae is a fourteenth-century "text book" of biblical exegesis organized alphabetically by topics ("Abstinencia-Temptatio," followed by "Xristus") and including material culled from Augustine's Soliloquies and sermons, as well as from Gregory the Great, Chrysostom, Bernard and other twelfth-century writers. Saak presents the work as a late medieval bestseller whose influence persisted well into the seventeenth century; it was continuously in print from 1473(?) to 1667. The market for such compendia clearly extended well beyond the friars of Rampegolus's order. The devotional literature of the Reformation and...