Prayer after Augustine

Abstract

Prayer after Augustine explores the place of prayer in the works of Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict, three figures critically important to the development of Latin medieval philosophical and theological thought. Part I offers a chronologically ordered reconstruction of Augustine’s understanding of prayer, tracing both theological reflections and practices from his early philosophical dialogues to his late anti-Pelagian polemical works. Part II investigates how Boethius in his Opuscula sacra and De consolatione Philosophiae and Benedict in his Regula take up Augustine’s understanding of prayer. For all three authors, the virtue of patience emerges as the means through which they struggle to confront the chasm between time and eternity, mortality and immortality, and humanity and divinity. At the heart of this book’s approach is an argument for a more complex understanding of religious and moral traditions that appreciates the subtleties with which late antique authors draw on their predecessors’ works and lives. By proposing a distinction between two levels of tradition—Augustinianism 1 and Augustinianism 2—this book argues for a distinction between the act of citing, referencing, and alluding to another author, and the use of general orientations and constellations of thought borrowed from another author. As Boethius and Benedict exemplify, the development of a religious tradition may oftentimes be less an affair of dialectical reasoning and more an expansion and refinement of devotional sensibilities.