The Nature and Destiny of Niebuhr’s Augustine

Abstract

AbstractThis essay poses a twofold question regarding the Augustine who influenced Niebuhr’s work: to which of the many versions of Augustine was Niebuhr drawn? What has happened to this Augustine across the reception of Niebuhr’s thought? As a first matter, I argue that Niebuhr was helped to resolve long‐standing questions not by Augustine the pessimistic realist, but rather by the distinctively analogical Augustine, mediated through the work of the Polish Jesuit Erich Przywara, who understands there to be an ‘in and beyond’ relation between God and creation, Church and world, the ultimate and penultimate. As a second matter, I argue that the reception of Niebuhr’s work is marked by repeating the structure that Niebuhr’s Augustine was intended to avoid. Niebuhr turned to Augustine in an effort to avoid a back and forth between exaggerated accounts of continuity and discontinuity between Church and world; but a Barthian reading depicted Niebuhr’s work as an inflated vision of continuity to which a strong statement of discontinuity was the appropriate response. This reading has, in turn, summoned forth fresh accounts of continuity from contemporary thinkers. I aim to show that accurately situating Niebuhr in relation to Augustine helps us to see that the reception of his work has perpetuated a difficulty that he sought to address, and that his Augustine may, all along, have presented an alternative.