Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters by Jennifer Ebbeler (review)

No one could accuse Jennifer Ebbeler of misdirection. Her sub-title tells us exactly the topic and scope of her book. Her study proves stronger on correction than community, but that is partly because Augustine’s audience proved rather less committed than he to “the idea that rebuke and correction … were necessary elements of a healthy Christian community” (5). Undeterred, Ebbeler says that her “primary aim … is to identify and explicate Augustine’s theory of corrective letter exchange as Augustine himself described and defended it in his letters” (8).

Ebbeler’s book builds on the chapter of her doctoral thesis that struck me at the time as the most fresh and exciting, in which she read the famously thorny epistolary exchange between Augustine and Jerome in a way that exerted itself to give full credit to Jerome’s unsympathetic subject position. That exchange, richly re-read and contextualized, is both formally and thematically at the heart of this work. Ebbeler still manages to represent both parties in this unseemly litany of hostility and dissembling: she shows how Augustine casts himself as Paul to Jerome’s Peter in the performance of public correction (following Galatians 2:11–14), and persists—because he thinks it is right, because he is incorrigibly earnest about biblical interpretation—in the face of Jerome’s various attempts at deflection and deferral. Not surprisingly, the ideal of correction as an integral part of caritas was less appealing to the person on the receiving end.

Nevertheless, Ebbeler argues that the Peter/Paul exchange lies at the heart of Augustine’s epistolary practice, and that throughout his life Augustine was casting about for a suitable interlocutor in such an exchange. Two things were quite odd about this, as Ebbeler points out, in the context of late antique epistolary practice: first, that the ongoing elegant and emollient performance of amicitia should be disrupted by rebuke; second, that the agent of rebuke should insist on a response in the same terms. (It is revealing that when Jerome, goaded past bearing, evokes Fabius Maximus wearing down Hannibal’s exuberance, he changes the verb in his Ciceronian source from molliebat to fregerit. Ebbeler cites the passage [126], but does not remark on the change.) Ebbeler traces (chapter 1) Augustine’s notion of the role of rebuke or correction in amicitia through various encounters in the Confessions; she suggests that Augustine’s friendship with Alypius is portrayed as corrective “even before he understood that this was the proper form for friendship between Christians” (36, my emphasis). Her reading of Augustine’s strange exchange with Severus (59–60) is fascinating: Severus writes in the most elaborate mode of amicitia, and is utterly rebuffed. But the suggestion that Augustine was inspired by Seneca to see that “a letter exchange focused on the goal of cooperative progress was possible” is far-fetched: to call Seneca’s letters to Lucilius an “exchange” would be like referring to De Rerum Natura as an “exchange” between Lucretius and Memmius.

Chapter 2 looks at the ways in which Augustine began “to explore new ways of engaging with his correspondents” through a sampling of the early letters (64). The exchange with Nebridius is flattened into an “epistolary conversation” about “solving disagreement” (66); the heuristic works better with Augustine’s epistolary challenge to the Donatist Maximinus, with a threat to read the letter aloud (unfortunately, we cannot know what role, if any, this might have played in Maximinus’ subsequent conversion, charted by Ebbeler in chapter 4). The letter exchange with Paulinus—Augustine’s most extensive surviving epistolary dialogue, bar the one at cross purposes with Jerome—is bizarrely resistant to the notion of salutary correction, especially given that Paulinus actually requests instruction: Augustine, it seems, was overawed to have an interlocutor of such breeding, and responds instead with probably his most unqualifiedly fulsome letter of friendship, letter 27: o bone vir...