Augustine and Tradition: Influences, Contexts, Legacy. Edited by David G. Hunter and Jonathan P. Yates

Abstract

This collection forms a Festschrift to honour the work of J. Patout Burns, one of North America’s outstanding scholars of Augustine, early North African Christianity, and systematics, in the wake of his eightieth birthday. The warmth of esteem for their honorand shines out in the editors’ introduction, which pays tribute to Burns’s life and work. Many of the essays which follow make connections with his writings, or influence as a teacher or colleague. The ‘unifying theme’ of the volume is, to say the least, expansive: ‘To what extent did Augustine’s thought, teaching or exegesis converge with or diverge from the traditions of his day? How did the cultural traditions of late antiquity shape him and how did he shape them?’ (p. xii). A formula exposing what tradition and reception mean, and how to read them in and around Augustine, is everywhere absent from this volume. Differing, partial answers to that underlying question dance like shadows through the book, shifting shape in each of the 15 worked examples at hand. To these, the editors affix no conclusion. What results is a splendid, open-ended ensemble of interlocutions, which together illuminate the simultaneously polyvalent, aporetic, and lacunaic character of the creative inheritance of ideas. Although each essay will certainly enrich the study of its particular theme, the symphonic character of this volume repays reading as a whole, rather than as a series of isolated movements.