Augustine as a Reader of His Christian Contemporaries

Abstract

Augustine was not a great reader of his Christian contemporaries. That is to say, he seems not to have expended every energy (as might be expected of a modern scholar) in keeping up with the very latest to have been written on every topic on which he pronounced, or in which he could claim an interest. Part of the reason for this must be his relatively late conversion to Christianity. For as O’Donnell has pointed out, Augustine the professor of rhetoric – as he was by the time he reached his thirties – was inevitably better acquainted with the ancient Greek and Latin classics than he was with the far less sophisticated writings associated with Christianity (O’Donnell 2005a: 125). Indeed, his elliptical path to Christianity meant that the new convert was most familiar with the Christian Scriptures on account of their use by the Manicheans; and the contemporaries with whom he met to discuss ideas in Milan were more often Neoplatonists than Christians. Thus it seems clear that Augustine, unfamiliar with even the fundamental texts of his new religion, will have scarcely ventured into the writings of contemporary Christians.