vessey2015 ‘la patristique, c’est autre chose’ andré mandouze, peter brown and the avocations...

8/19/2019 Vessey2015 ‘La Patristique, c’Est Autre Chose’ André Mandouze, Peter Brown and the Avocations of Patristics as a…

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PATRISTICS, LITERATURE,AND HISTORIES OF THE BOOK


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MARK VESSEYVancouver

‘LA PATRISTIQUE, C’EST AUTRE CHOSE ’:ANDRÉ MANDOUZE, PETER BROWNAND THE AVOCATIONS OF PATRISTICS

AS A PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCE

‘Ask your fathers and they will show you, your elders and theywill tell you’ (Deut. 32, 7). With this line from a song of Moses,a certain Vincentius, pen-name ‘Peregrinus’, writing from anisland on the Gallo-Roman riviera, launched the first method-ological essay in ‘patristics’ avant la lettre , a work later knownas the Commonitorium and nowadays remembered chiefly for itsauthor’s beguilingly uncontroversial definition of orthodoxy

as ‘that which has been believed everywhere, at all times, byall persons’. 1 Composing his treatise under the double impactof the complete works of Augustine (d. 430) and the acts of thefirst Council of Ephesus (431), in a milieu in which the routinesof monastic conference or collatio were being skilfully blendedwith those of written discourse, Vincent was among the earliestthinkers to project a plenary text of the Christian ‘Fathers’,understanding the latter to be approved teachers providentiallyspread throughout the Church in time and space (‘in ecclesiadei divinitus per tempora et loca dispensatos’), whose teachingshad been, or would be, transmitted in writing to persons livingin other places and times. 2

1 Vinc. Lirin., Comm. 1, 1 – ed. R. Demeulenaire, CCSL 64, p. 147:‘Dicente scriptura et monente: Interroga patres tuos et dicent tibi, seniores etadnuntianbunt tibi ’ [...]; 2, 5, p. 149: ‘In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnoperecurandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus

creditum est’.2 Vinc. Lirin., Comm. 38, 10 (CCSL 64, p. 188); H. J. Sieben, Die Kon-

zilsidee der Alten Kirche , Paderborn, 1970, p. 149-170 (‘Der Konzilsbegriff desVincenz von Lerin’).


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Vincent drafted his Commonitorium on the island of Lerinum(Lérins) in 434. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mediter-ranean, in Hippo Regius, the man who had lately come to play

Tiro to Augustine’s Cicero, Possidius of Calama, was wrappingup his biography of the most prolific of Latin-writing ‘Fathers’with a few well-chosen tropes of orality, insisting for examplethat Augustine had always been more than just an antitype of theevangelist’s ‘scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven,which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old’(Matt. 13, 52, KJV). 3 It did no harm that the same biblical versehad already been used by Augustine himself – to capture the

figural, polysemic quality of divine ‘scripture’ – at the beginningof one of his most writerly, least oratorical works, the De Genesiad litteram or ‘Literal Commentary on Genesis’. 4

Passages and paradoxes like these may now be seen as mark-ing a critical threshold for Western or Latin-Roman conscious-ness of the textuality of the far-flung Christian community asa cognitive, social and political phenomenon. Critical thresholdmarking is an activity to which historians even of the latestfashion are still prone, and anniversaries confirm our weak-ness for it. Here the half-centenary of an international scholarlyorganization provides an opportunity to mark such a thresholdin the recent history of scholarship on the Fathers as scriptoresecclesiastici , ‘writers of the church’, as Jerome called them in thetitle of his influential catalogue of their company, otherwiseknown as the De viris illustribus. 5 Though styled ‘plenary’ in theconference program, this paper will encompass no great tractsof time, space, thought or bibliography. Its coordinates will

be fleeting and provincial. It means to open, without circum-scribing, the space for a discussion that will then find its ownway between other papers to follow, under the rubric of ‘Patris-tics, Literature, and Histories of the Book’, according to theinterests – in the first instance – of those whom the providence

3 Possidius, Vita Augustini , 31, 10, in Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vitadi Agostino – ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Roma, Milano, 1975, p. 240.

4 Aug., Gen. ad litt ., I, 1 – ed. J. Zycha, (CSEL 28/1, p. 3).5 Hier., Epist . 112, 3 (to Augustine) – ed. I. Hilberg, (CSEL 55, p. 370);

M. Vessey, ‘Augustine among the Writers of the Church’, in A Companionto Augustine – ed. M. Vessey, Malden, MA, 2012, p. 240-254.


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of our hosts has gathered from around the world for a collatio or ‘conference’ on the Fathers in (of all places) Jerusalem.

Patristics at the limits

A collective instinct for the plenary seems to have been a fea-ture – if not a ‘note’ – of ‘patristic studies’ since the time ofVincent of Lérins, or whenever we date the beginning ofsuch activities. We might begin by asking our own fathers.My ‘father’ in patristics, whether he knew it or not, was thatgreat and genial scholar of Augustine, André Mandouze, in

whose seminar at the Sorbonne as an auditeur libre , more thanthirty years ago, I was introduced to a discipline until thenunknown and unnamed to me. André Mandouze was a peer -less impresario of the Fathers. Some of you will have relished,if only on video, his presentation of Augustine’s Confessions inStrasbourg Cathedral during ‘ l’année de l’Algérie en France’of 2003, co-starring Gérard Dépardieu. 6 Rarely has an actorof Dépardieu’s gifts been so completely upstaged by an elderly

scholar. Mandouze was a brilliant publicist for the causes thathe espoused, as well as an impressively conscientious academic. 7 Four and a half decades earlier, in 1959, he had delivered a ple-nary report to the Third International Conference on PatristicStudies in Oxford. Its title was ‘Mesure et démesure de la Patris-tique’ (‘The Proportions and Disproportion of Patristics’ or‘The Extent and Excesses of Patristics’). 8 In those days, as Adolf-Martin Ritter has reminded us, French was still the interna-tional language of patristic studies. 9 ‘Written to be read’, the textof Mandouze’s report was published unaltered. Even in printit is an unmistakably Mandouzian oration: sinuous, allusive,

6 G. Dépardieu, A. Mandouze, Approches et lectures de saint Augustin [video-cassette], Paris, 2004; G. Dépardieu, A. Mandouze, Lire Saint Augustin,Paris, 2004. The ‘live’ performance was also given in Paris and Bordeaux.

7 For a scholar’s autobiography like no other, see A. Mandouze, Mémoiresd’outre-siècle , I: D’une Résistance à l’autre , s. l., 1998; II: (1962-1981) À gauche

toute, bon Dieu! , Paris, 2003.8 A. Mandouze, ‘Mesure et démesure de la Patristique’, in Studia Patristica,3 = TU , 78 – ed. F. L. Cross, Berlin, 1961, p. 3-19.

9 See his contribution to this volume, p. 195-207.


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provocative, baroquisant . It occupies a place of honour at thefront of the published proceedings, under the Latin heading‘Introductio’, a section-title used there for the only time (so far) in

the exponentially expanding series of Studia Patristica. Yet already,as we shall see, that touch of editorial decorum risked upsettingthe brinkmanship – the calculated mesure en démesure – of Man-douze’s plenary discourse.

His lecture began comfortably enough:

Since our collective enterprise belongs to a tradition thatultimately goes back to the Fathers themselves, it seems tome fitting, in order to situate more precisely the succession

in which we stand (le relais que nous prenons), to begin withthe conclusion reached by Father de Ghellinck at the closeof his survey of the ‘Progress and main directions in patristicstudies over the past fifteen centuries’. 10

That survey of de Ghellink’s being then of recent date, this sen-tence by itself already effortlessly reunited the present companyin Oxford with fifth-century collatores of the Fathers like Vincentof Lérins. The quotation that followed now fills a page, endingwith de Ghellinck’s last words in 1947:

What is beyond doubt [he had written] is that the con-tinuation of this research, and a fortiori of the progress of thesestudies, is only possible at the price of indefatigable labourand of a technical mastery, the necessity of which makes itselfever more keenly felt with the expansion of the field to becultivated and the multiplicity of new disciplines of knowl-edge called upon to exploit it with sober competence. 11

Steady, well-coordinated professional expertise was the prereq-uisite for any patristic science that would not sooner or lateroverflow its own measure, as – already in 1947 – this sciencepromised and threatened to do. It was almost as if, speakingof the immediate post-War crise de croissance in patristic studies,

10 Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 3.11 J. De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age: Études d’histoire littéraire et

doctrinale , II: Introduction et compléments à l’étude de la patristique , Brussels, Paris,1947 [repr. 1961], p. 180.


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de Ghellinck had foreseen the need for the Oxford patristicconferences – ‘our Oxford “conferences” ’, as Mandouze col-legially called them on that early autumn day in 1959. 12

Indefatigable labour, technical mastery, sober competence,following in a tradition as old as the Fathers themselves... Anotherplenary speaker in Jerusalem, reading a paper to be revised forthis volume, might with perfect justice begin by placing thisweek’s collective enterprise and its sponsoring Associationsquarely and ecumenically in the tradition evoked by Mandouzein 1959 after de Ghellinck in 1947. That was not my purpose inbeginning where I have. Nor can I add anything to the accounts

that other speakers have given of the genesis and early historyof the Association, by reading (as one might) between the linesof Mandouze’s Oxford plenary for early hints of an initiative thatwould come to fruition in Paris six years later. Instead, I wantto press this text of Mandouze’s a little harder in a directionthat it already takes from the start, with its founding referenceto a work of le Père de Ghellinck, in order to suggest that thatreference should now be interpreted as a sign of – if not in factthe signal for – a historic break in the relais or succession of textsdescending from the Fathers towards ourselves.

Patrology, history of ancient Christian literature

The work of de Ghellinck’s in question had been subscribedby its author from Louvain on the feast of St. John Damascenein 1946 and published the next year as the second volume in the

series of his collected studies, entitled Patristique et Moyen Age:

12 Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 4: ‘nos “conférences” d’Oxford’. Cfr. Man-douze, Mémoires, I, p. 36: ‘Je ne me doutais pas, à ce moment-là [in 1934],que mes délices, ce serait, à partir de 1959, de me rendre, sauf exception, tousles quatre ans en Angleterre, non plus à Wimbledon, mais à Oxford pourparticiper à ce que j’appelle irrévérencieusement “la foire aux Pères” (de l’Église). J’aurai sans aucun doute à en reparler.’ A later reference (p. 238) to participa-tion in ‘le “marché aux Pères” (de l’Église, bien sûr)’ shows that Mandouze infact already attended the second Oxford conference in 1955, and that he did so

in the company of H.-I. Marrou, whose paper that year, ‘Civitas Dei, civitasterrena. Num tertium quid?’ (Studia Patristica, 2, p. 342-350) announced a newunderstanding of Augustine’s sense of the saeculum as ‘le temps de l’histoire’.See also below, n. 36.


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Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale . 13 At least four volumes wereplanned, but the difficulties of the time, and the author’s deathin 1950, restricted the actual series to three. The first contained

researches on the origins of the Apostles’ Creed. The second,to which Mandouze would refer in Oxford, was separately titledIntroduction et compléments à l’étude de la patristique and presentedpart of a larger body of material that de Ghellinck had beenassembling and revising in view of a unified ‘Introduction’ thatcould serve as a supplement to standard handbooks of patristicsor patrology. In the meantime, as he explained in a preface,the chapters in the present volume dealt mainly with histoire

littéraire , offering a ‘summary tableau of the general transmissionof patristic works, their immediate mode of diffusion, [and] the usemade of them either soon after their appearance or in later ages’.He expressed a hope that veterans as well as novices in the studyof theology would benefit from seeing the gradual, centuries-long process of ‘Christian education’ documented in this waythrough ‘the history of the books’ that had nourished the thoughtof generations before their own. 14

This, then, was to be ‘literary history’ as ‘history of the booksof the Fathers’ as ancillary discipline to theology. De Ghellinck’soutline of that history is a tour de force comparable to Wilamowitz’sGeschichte der Philologie , and better documented. 15 It has not beensuperseded as a general treatment of the subject.

This second, ‘literary-historical’ volume of de Ghellinck’sPatristique et Moyen Age took the form of a diptych. Its lattersection gathered the evidence for the ‘diffusion and transmission’of patristic writings in the early centuries and drew up a balance

sheet of what had been lost and preserved, ending encouraginglywith the discovery of the Toura papyri (in 1941). But itwas the first section of the book, containing a survey of the‘Progress and main directions (tendances) in patristic studies over

13 See n. 11 above.14 De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age , II, p. viii.15 Cfr. U. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship

– tr. A. Harris – ed. with an intro. and notes by H. Lloyd-Jones, London,1982; first published in 1921 as Geschichte der Philologie . On Wilamowitz’s senseof the scope and obligations of ‘philology’, see the editor’s introductory remarks,esp. p. vii-xvii.


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[the previous] fifteen centuries’, that – in its closing sentence,already quoted – would provide Mandouze with his stately yet destabilizing opening gambit in Oxford. That section, too,

is almost exclusively ‘literary’ or ‘book-historical’ in content.The story that it told was one of the progressive recovery andcritical editing of texts, of the refinement of philological methodsfrom the Renaissance onwards, and of the gradual absorptionof the textual objects of ‘patristic’ study into the non-theological,philological sciences of antiquity as those had developed since theearly nineteenth century. (Wilamowitz is a constant reference-point.) The final chapter addressed ‘the latest consequence’

of these ‘new directions’ in scholarship, under a heading that,while equivocal, stopped a question-mark short of beingexplicitly interrogative: ‘Patrology or history of ancient Christianliterature’.

Patrologie ou histoire de la littérature chrétienne antique (?). Afterreviewing the debates in recent decades between Protestant,Catholic, and confessionally unaligned proponents of new-style‘literary histories’ that would include patristic texts within theirpurview and so potentially displace ‘patrology’ as a philologicaldiscipline, de Ghellinck came to a conclusion in which nothingwas concluded:

Despite all the – often meritorious – attempts reviewed in theforegoing pages, we are not yet close to possessing a definitive[literary] history, so diverse are the materials to be considered,so elusive or complex the ‘literary’ character of manyof the writers, and so poorly understood [...] the relationsbetween them and the ambient literature [of the time],

or their mutual influences on each other. 16

The ideal of a (new) ‘literary history’ that would take dueaccount of the Fathers of the Church, if ever it was to berealized, still waited on further research. That is where deGhellinck ended in 1947, with the rallying cry that Mandouzewould repeat – with a difference – in 1959.

16 De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age , II, p. 180.


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... or something else?

All this happened a long time ago. The fact that I wish to reg-ister today, in the interests of finally slipping these ancient dis-ciplinary moorings, is that Mandouze’s introductory summonsto his fellow scholars in Oxford in 1959 took for its pointof departure the point of non-arrival of an already decades-longexperiment in recasting patristics as a species or sub-class of‘literary history’. It was an experiment that, as would by thenhave been clearly apparent, had more or less exhausted itself bythe end of the Second World War. 17 There would not be any‘literary-historical’ alternative to patristics. There has not been

been. Instead, there has been (ever more) patristics ... and therecurrent prospect or promise of ... something else.

There is something else about Mandouze’s Oxford plenarythat is still worth underlining at this late stage, obvious thoughit may be. His call to order that day was self-consciously thatof a classically trained Latin philologist with a post in a Frenchsecular university (Strasbourg at the time, Algiers before that,Paris later in his career), for whom the actual or potential aporiai

of professedly ‘literary’ approaches to the Church Fathers helda charm that they could not have had for Fr. de Ghellinck, despitethe latter’s formidable qualifications as a Latinist and medievalliterary historian.

In the end, as from the beginning, de Ghellinck’s Introduc -tion et compléments à l’étude de la patristique were strictly that:elements of a propaideutic that, even when complete, must stillhave yielded before the plenitude of the theological science

to which it was meant to lead the way. The balanced termsof his higher-order title, Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale ,named not only a complementarity but also a supersession:

17 B. Altaner, ‘Der Stand der patrologischen Wissenschaft und dasProblem einer neuen altchristlichen Literaturgeschichte’, in Miscellanea GiovanniMercati , I = Studi e Testi , 121, Città del Vaticano, 1946, p. 483-520, marksthe nec plus ultra. See further H. C. Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristlicheLiteraturwissenschaft”? Eine historische Leitwissenschaft der protestantischen

Theologie in Deutschlands am Beginn der 20. Jahrhunderts’, ZAC/JAC ,15 (2011), p. 7-46; M. Vessey, ‘Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing’,in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. A. Harvey, D. G. Hunter,Oxford, 2008, p. 42-65, in partic. p. 49-55.


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‘literary history’, whether as a projected history of authors,styles and genres or an actual ‘history of books’, was stilla prelude – for the time being, and in de Ghellinck’s book –

to the history of doctrine. The third volume of Patristique etMoyen Age , as originally advertised on the flyleaf of the second,was to have opened with a ‘program of dogmatic readings in thefathers’ and been followed by another of ‘spiritual readings’. 18

Granted, André Mandouze in Oxford in 1959 did not appear to diverge by so much as a hair’s breadth from the theologicaltradition of patristics. On the contrary, he made delighted playwith all its tropes. Having begun his lecture in the footsteps

of de Ghellinck, he concluded it in the same style, repeatinga quotation already made by the latter from Bossuet’s Défensede la tradition et des saints Pères, in order once more to linkthe present company of patristicians across the centuries to theFathers themselves – those who, in the words of the bishopof Meaux, had received the ‘original spirit’ of the Christianreligion from its ‘very source’. 19 Yet, for all that, and eventhough his text would serve in due course as a preface to theby-then canonical divisions of Studia Patristica (sc. Editiones,Critica, Philologica, etc.), Mandouze’s lecture is ex professo notan ‘introduction’ to any discipline of patristic studies then or everexisting. While one cannot easily put a finger on it, there isan element of démesure in his own observance of the rulesof plenary patristic discourse, a witting excess of fidelity to thetradition, that we may have to call ‘rhetorical’ if we do not call

18 In the event, the third volume (Brussels and Paris, 1948) was subtitledUne édition patristique célèbre and had for its subject the Maurist edition of theworks of Augustine.

19 Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 19: ‘ C’est ici qu’il faut en fin de compte aller jusqu’au bout de l’histoire, de l’histoire que nous ne pouvons quitter un instant , quinous relie aux Pères et qui relie les Pères entre eux, nous faisant remonterà ce que Bossuet appelait “cette pure substance de la religion ... de cet espritprimitif que les Pères ont reçu de plus près et avec plus d’abondance de la sourcemême” ’ (my italics). For the citation of Bossuet, Mandouze acknowledgesDe Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age , III: Une édition patristique célèbre , p. 105(see previous note). The close interrelation of Mandouze’s general reflec-

tions on mesure et démesure in patristics and his special concern with scholarshipon Augustine is already apparent from this train of citation. For the circum-stances in which he prepared his text for Oxford in 1959, see his Mémoires, I,p. 309-311.


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it ‘literary’. As Professor of Latin at the Sorbonne in later years,Mandouze was a legend among students for his ability to turntexts of classical French authors into any one of several classical

Latin idioms. He could have rewritten Bossuet in the styleof Cicero or Augustine, standing on one leg. Bossuet, in any case,was not his only confrère in Oxford that day. As Jean Cocteau,on being elected to the Académie Française in 1955, hadanswered the question ‘What is poetry?’ with ‘La poésie, c’estautre chose’ (‘Poetry is something else’), Mandouze offered uphis own anti-disciplinary definition of patristics: ‘La patristique,c’est autre chose’ (‘Patristics is – something else’). 20

Even then, none of the Oxford delegates that year could havebeen absolutely sure that he or she had heard this speaker assertin so many words that patristics was not the discipline that theywere all already practising, in supramillennial continuity withthe Fathers. Mandouze’s definition by deferral was perfectlytraditional in its deference to the ‘original spirit’ of the Chris-tian religion. Its patrologocentrism – to borrow a term soon to bemade current by Jacques Derrida – was still of an audibly classicaltenor. In any case, whatever it was that Mandouze was heard tohave said that day, it did nothing to trouble the apostolico-patris-tic succession from that Oxford conference to the next, in 1963,when plenary speakers, catching the mood of the Second VaticanCouncil, would open and close proceedings with serenereflections on ‘Tradition and Authority in the Early Church’(J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink) and ‘Les Pères de l’Eglise etl’Unité des Chrétiens’ (Jean Daniélou).

Augustines for our time

We have arrived at the backward horizon of this year’s(ante-dated) patristic half-centenary. 1963: a date too early for

20 Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 19. Variants of Cocteau’s mot were also ap-plied by Mandouze to other things he held dear: e.g., Mémoires, I, p. 43 (L’ÉcoleNormale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm), p. 60 (marriage); cfr. A. Mandouze, ‘Augustin

préfacier d’Augustin’, in Saint Augustin. Confessions – tr. L. de Mondadon,Paris, 1982, p. 11-25, in partic. p. 17, 22 (the Confessions). Cocteau’s speechcan be read at ‹http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-de- jean-cocteau›.


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the living memories of many here but one that already saw ourscholarly ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ hard at work. Some of themwere among the ‘zealous young’ whom Peter Brown speaks of as

being ‘everywhere’ at that year’s Oxford patristic conference. 21

Brown was there himself, though you would not know itfrom perusing the ‘Augustiniana’ of the published proceedings.His paper on Augustine’s attitude to religious coercion appearedthe next year in the Journal of Roman Studies, alongside an arti-cle by Alan Cameron on ‘The Roman Friends of Ammianus’and another by Ramsay MacMullen on ‘Social Mobility andthe Theodosian Code’. 22 That should strike us in retrospect as

a disciplinary alibi of the same order as Mandouze’s rhetorical‘othering’ of patristics a lustrum earlier.Mandouze, we have noted, was a classical (Latin) philologist,

one whose personal avocation for late Roman social and religioushistory was consecrated – as he himself poignantly relates in thefirst volume of his Mémoires – by the experience of living inthe land of Augustine. Brown, his younger by a generation anda historian by training, was already in 1963 a highly innovativehistorian of the religions and societies of the later Roman Empire,unawed by classical (or any other) philology but appreciativeof the intermittently useful labours of philologists. In 1967,Faber and Faber published his Augustine of Hippo, a ‘life’ as livelyas any ever written so long after its subject’s death and a workraised on so airy a scaffolding of footnotes as almost to bely thesolidity of its author’s erudition. 23 Mandouze’s Saint Augustin.L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce appeared the next year fromEtudes Augustiniennes: 800 densely printed, large-format pages,

many of them trailing only the slenderest thread of narrativeacross a carpet mosaic of secondary reference. 24 The contrast,

21 P. Brown, ‘Introducing Robert Markus’, Augustinian Studies, 32 (2001),p. 181-187, in partic. p. 182.

22 P. Brown, ‘St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion’, Journalof Roman Studies, 54 (1964), p. 107-116; repr. in his Religion and Societyin the Age of Saint Augustine , London, 1972, p. 260-278.

23 P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, London, 1967; new editionwith an epilogue, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2000.

24 A. Mandouze, Saint Augustin. L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce , Paris,1968.


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which few scholars of Augustine can have missed but fewer seemto have marked, conceals a powerful complicity of purpose evenas it reveals a deep-seated difference in approach. With good

reason, Brown’s scholarly oeuvre as a whole has lately been anobject of intense methodological reflection on the part of hisfellow historians, who have been encouraged in this by his ownoccasional retractationes of parts of it. Mandouze, whose com-plementary thesis, defended alongside his Saint Augustin in 1968,was a Rectratatio retractationum sancti Augustini , and whose mentorand friend Henri-Irénée Marrou inaugurated the genre of themodern scholarly (Augustinian) ‘Retractatio’ with his 1949 post-

script to the reimpression of his Saint Augustin et la fin de la cultureantique (1938), was an instructively reflexive scholar from early inhis publishing career. He also wrote two extraordinary volumesof memoirs before his death in 2006. 25

Reading or rereading Brown and Mandouze on Augustineand ‘late antiquity’, 26 in the light of each other, almost fifty years after their Augustine-books appeared, may help us definethe present scholarly epoch with respect to long traditionsof the Fathers as scriptores. 27 What, in particular, can Mandouze’s‘Augustine’ tell us about our times in the ‘history of the booksof the Fathers’?

25 See n. 7 above. Mandouze first met Marrou on the day of the latter’soral defence of his thesis on Augustine: Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 38;Mémoires, I, p. 43. His own Retractatio retractationum S. Augustini remains unpub-

lished; Mémoires, II, p. 81-82.26 Mandouze’s adoption of ‘ l’antiquité tardive’ as a period-concept post-dates his 1968 thesis on Augustine, where the latter still appears as ‘un enfantde cette fin de siècle qui, en un certain sens, est aussi la fin d’un monde etl’annonce de cet âge nouveau qu’on appelle le Moyen Age’ (p. 50). A thresholdfor the new usage among French scholars is marked by H.-I. Marrou, ‘La civilisation de l’antiquité tardive’, in Tardo Antico e Alto Medioevo. La formacritica nel passagio dell’antichità al medioevo (Roma, 4-7 aprile 1967), AccademiaNazionale dei Lincei, Quaderno, no. 105, Rome, 1968, p. 384-394; repr. inH.-I. Marrou, Christiana Tempora. Mélanges d’histoire, d’archéologie, d’épigraphieet de patristique , Rome, 1978, p. 67-77.

27 For fuller discussion of Brown’s early work, in this connection, seeM. Vessey, ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of“Late Antiquity”. From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’sHoly Man (1983)’, JECS , 6 (1998), p. 377-411.


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Other times: Augustine’s Confessions as a ‘literary’ text

André Mandouze once told a classmate of mine, ‘Augustin, c’estcomme le mariage: c’est pour la vie.’ 28 The life of Augustinethat he meant to render would be at once a life’s work (his own,among other works of an eventful life) and the life of a literaryand historical figure wrested back by huge effort from the forcesof ‘tradition(s)’ that threatened otherwise to overwhelm it.Mandouze prepared his readers to expect that he would ‘take hold’of the accumulated bibliography on Augustine and ‘wring itsneck’. 29 In less menacing terms, his aim was to make a criticaltraversal of Augustinian scholarship and mythography, on the way

back to Augustine’s own text(s) and context(s).It was an operation that he had demonstrated in miniature

but already on a grand scale in a paper given at the interna-tional congress held in Paris in 1954 to commemorate the six-teenth centenary of Augustine’s birth. The paper was devoted to‘The Possibilities and Limits of the Method of Textual Parallels’,as that method had been applied to the scene of the ‘ecstasyof Ostia’ described in Book 9 of the Confessions, by Pierre Cour -

celle, Paul Henry, and others interested in tracing Augustine’ssources. By pushing the latest, most technically ambitiousphilologico-philosophical exegesis of Augustine to its limits,then a little further, Mandouze meant to restore (as he put it)‘the literary originality’ of Augustine’s text. For only by respect-ing the ‘letter’ of that text in its linear, temporal sequencecould a reader begin to measure – with Augustine the mystic,according to Mandouze – the gap between human philology

and the ‘ineffable philology’ of the biblical God... 30

Augustin, c’est autre chose . If anyone was qualified to speak of‘Mesure et démesure de la Patristique’ by the end of the 1950s,

28 A short memoir of his was more tentatively entitled: A. Mandouze,‘Cohabiter avec Augustin?’, in Saint Augustin – ed. P. Ranson, [Lausanne, Paris],1988, p. 11-21.

29 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 30. See also p. 28, n. 1.30 A. Mandouze, ‘ “L’extase d’Ostie”. Possibilités et limites de la méthode

des parallèles textuels’, in Augustinus Magister. Congrès international augustinien(Paris, 21-24 septembre 1954), 3 vols., Paris, 1954-1955, I, p. 67-84, in partic.p. 83-84. The essence of the analysis would be subsumed in Ch. 12 of theauthor’s Saint Augustin (‘Rencontres avec Dieu’).


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it was the philological scholar of Augustine that Mandouze hadset himself to be. Before it could be anything else, patristicsor patrology was bound to be a kind of philology: Editiones,

Critica, Philologica (to cite the rubrics of Studia Patristica).The hazard of any philology, for the philologist Mandouzeconsidering the case of Augustine, was that it had the powerto multiply collateral texts in ways that were likely to distractthe eye from the literary economy of the ultimately singular textof primary reference, and hence risked nullifying the more-than-literary effects that such a text – precisely in virtue of itsimputed ‘literariness’ – might be supposed to work in the reader.

Mandouze’s practical solution to the problem was to appeal from those many texts through those many texts to that singulartext and its (not always textually substantiated) context. 31 Is thatnot what philology, at least in one of its modern kinds, has alwaysdone? Perhaps. But Mandouze’s sense of the specifically ‘literary’claims of a text such as Augustine’s Confessions was rare for thetime within the company of Augustinian and patristic scholars.A glance back at early volumes of Studia Patristica confirmsas much.

His treatment of the Ostia scene for the 1954 congress wascertainly sui generis in the miscellany of papers collected in thefirst section of Augustinus Magister under the rubric of ‘Histoirelittéraire’ (to be followed by ‘Philologie et critique’, ‘Sources’,and then by the far more numerous philosophical and theologicalcontributions). Introducing the whole, the editor had notedhow even the ‘critical’ and ‘historical’ pieces engaged directlywith questions of ‘theory’ (i.e. theology) and of ‘doctrine’. 32

31 Cfr. H.-I. Marrou (with the collaboration of A.-M. La Bonnardière),St Augustin et l’augustinisme , Paris, 1955, p. 180: ‘la tâche que nous est fixéedevient dès lors facile à définir (Étienne Gilson en 1930, Maurice Nédoncelleou André Mandouze en 1954 l’ont bien vu): en appeler sans cesse de l’augus-tinisme, de tous les augustinismes, à saint Augustin.’ Marrou cites an interviewwith Mandouze in L’Actualité religieuse dans le monde , November 1, 1954,on the appearance of the first two volumes of Augustinus Magister . Echoingthe title of Joseph Malègue’s 1933 novel about a modern French Catholic’s

crisis of faith, the piece was headed: ‘Le véritable Augustin ou le maître est là.’For the moment in Mandouze’s life – which was also that of the outbreakof hostilities in Algeria – see his Mémoires, I, p. 226-227.

32 F. Cayré, ‘Préface’, in Augustinus Magister , I, p. vii.


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Like all such tropes of editorial plenitude, this one opened itselfto its own questions. Mandouze’s sense of the ‘literary’ qualityof Augustine’s Confessions may indeed have been theoretically

inseparable for him from Augustine’s sense of God – and, moreparticularly, from Augustine’s sense of God speaking in him.That did not, however, make his essay a contribution to the historyof doctrine. How could it have been? Abstracting Augustinefrom the latter-day history – or histories – of doctrine, releasinghim from the competing Augustinianisms of aftertimes, replacinghim and his texts in their own place and time, so that they couldbe known and read again in the present, with as much as possible

of their original démesure still intact... that was the scholarly wagerof Mandouze’s personal aventure de la raison et de la grâce and therationale for the formidable mise en page of the work publishedunder that sub-title by Etudes Augustiniennes. 33

The speaker who summoned Cocteau to his aid in Oxforddid indeed bring a distinctly mid-twentieth-century literarysensibility to bear on the writings of Augustine. While no textof Roland Barthes or Gérard Genette could have found itsway into the bibliography of the theses that he defended in thesummer of 1968 in a Sorbonne under siege from anti-govern-ment protesters, Mandouze’s remarks on the Confessions at thebeginning of his Saint Augustin would already have primed hisreader for a work of structuralist literary theory such as PhilippeLejeune’s Le Pacte autobiographique . 34 ‘Bibliographical presup-positions and methodological postulates’ was the impeccablyprecautionary sub-title for the introduction to this aventureaugustinienne , and in no time its author was shoulder-to-shoulder

again with de Ghellinck, not only for that scholar’s view of the‘laicisation’ of patristic studies but also for his account of theMaurist edition of the works of Augustine, in the eventual third

33 The first side heading in Saint Augustin (p. 12) is ‘Mesure et démesuredes études augustiniennes’. Three pages later the author observes that ‘purepatristics’ – in the sense of a science that would be entirely disinterested – mustbe as elusive as ‘pure poetry’.

34 P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique , Paris, 1975. Lejeune finds no

autobiography before Rousseau, though his bibliography includes E. Vance,‘Le moi comme language. Saint Augustin et l’autobiographie’, Poétique , 14 (1973),p. 163-177. Mandouze proposes his own ‘pacte autobiographique’ in Mé-moires, I, p. 7-14 (‘Entrée de jeu’).


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volume of Patristique et Moyen Age . 35 For all that, there is nomistaking the distance already travelled by Mandouze apartfrom de Ghellinck. Both men were indefatigable students of

‘the history of the books of the Fathers’. Only one of them setthe end of that study – for the time being – as a shared literary experience. To re-apply the terms in which the orator intro-duced Bossuet at the end of his 1959 plenary: this was the waythat Mandouze had found, as a scholar of Latin ‘literary’ textsby vocation, to go jusqu’au bout de l’histoire , ‘to the very limitof history, a history that we cannot leave behind for a moment’. 36

Rhetorically satisfying as it might be to end again at that

point, it would be unfair to the memory of André Mandouze – and not only because his own, extraordinary literary historical jusqu’auboutisme seems always to have brought him back to atraditional assurance of continuity with the Fathers. There isalso the risk of staking too much on latter-day imputations ofliterariness. 37 Mandouze’s ‘literary’ sensibility, moreover, had attimes a distinctly documentary cast. 38

Other places: the Donatist files

Rejecting out of hand, for the work of a single author at so latea date, the task of providing an adequate summa of what couldbe known about Augustine, Mandouze proposed instead themodel of a map:

35

Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 15, n. 2-3.36 Above, n. 19. Mandouze was responsive from an early stage to Marrou’sreflections on Augustine and the Christian sense of time and history, which findtheir fullest expression in H.-I. Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire , Paris, 1968.

37 See further M.Vessey, ‘Literature, Literary Histories, Latin Late Antiquity’,in Spätantike Konzeptionen von Literatur. Notions of the Literary in Late Antiquity –ed. J. R. Stenger, Heidelberg, forthcoming, p. 19-31.

38 A notable feature of his Mémoires is the steady reference to ‘documents’of his own past, chiefly of his own composition. Each volume is equippedat the end with a chronological list of ‘textual milestones’ ( jalons textuels) forthe period in question. As he explains it (I, p. 10), his sense of the limitations

of his Mémoires was confirmed by the two outstanding experiences of hisscholarly career, namely ‘the elusive trace of a life’ in his study of Augustine and‘the intransigent exactitude of facts’ in the compilation of the Prosopogographie del’Afrique chrétienne (303-533).


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I believe [...] the moment has come to try to put togetherseveral kinds of itineraries to facilitate access to Augustine.This means providing equipment for orientation: instruments,maps and ultimately a real atlas for use by the enthusiast(l’amateur eventuel ) in preparing for the long, difficult andwonderful journey ahead. This book does not pretendto be such an Augustinian Atlas, but it would like to con-tribute to it. 39

His book would be a guide , picking its way through carefullyselected and presented textual topoi on the way to what was to be‘seen’ in the end – which, in the event, was Augustine’s mystical

vision of God, the goal set by Mandouze for his doctoral researchmore than a quarter of a century earlier.Extending the topographical figure of thought, he went

on to give an account of the book’s method, consistent withhis 1954 paper on ‘The Possibilities and Limits of the Methodof Textual Parallels’:

We refer here to ‘places’ (lieux) because the documents usedare texts, but what these texts in fact express are moments

in a person’s life and developing thought. The limitationsof our linear existence oblige us to use literary expedientsif we want to convey a character’s spiritual complexity(la densité spirituelle d’un personnage ). The author of theConfessions knew this well enough and did not wait for thecinema or the modern novel before employing ‘flashbacks’in order to reveal, by disconcerting his readers in this way,the uncertainties and riches of lived experience (la duréevécue ). 40

Readers of Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo were by thistime relishing their history in the future tense, as Augustine’scinematic flashbacks became Brown’s flashforwards. Mandouze’sreaders would take a different and in some ways more arduousroute. Extrapolating from Augustine’s hints, Mandouze con- structed the narrative of his Saint Augustin as a successionof three superimposed or interlocking stages of ‘confession’.Each of the three main parts of his book contains four chapters.

39 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 31.40 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 32.


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Only the two middle chapters of the middle part (‘Confessiofidei’) of this text-bound topography have toponyms in theirtitles: ‘Metamorphosis of Rome’ (Chapter 6), ‘Africa of the

Lost Sheep’ (Chapter 7). For all its disclaimers, Mandouze’sguide was also already an atlas, with the meridian of itsmeticulously projected planar ‘Augustine’ running between‘Rome’ and ‘Africa’. 41 Meanwhile, independently but underthe impress of some of the same prior scholarship – notablyin the matter of Donatism – Brown was completing the seriesof studies that appeared in 1972 as Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine . The second and third sections of his book

are likewise headed ‘Rome’ and ‘Africa’. 42

In Brown’s view as in Mandouze’s, the articulation of thosetwo more-than-toponyms in respect of Augustine and thewider world of the late Roman Empire raised critical questionsof historical perspective. They were literally questions aboutwhat could be seen, then and now. More precisely, they werequestions about the kinds of historical seeing that written materials,duly transmitted, made possible and impossible. What came firstto the view of the parties arguing one side or another of the‘case of Donatus’, in Augustine’s time as in the late twentiethcentury, was a collection or dossier of more or less authentic,more or less datable documents.

For Mandouze, who, in 1961, as a prominent actor in recentevents, had published his own collection of documents entitledLa Révolution algérienne par les textes, the option of assimilatingthe Donatist cause to anti-colonialist movements in the contem-porary Maghreb was at once obvious and obviously mistaken,

another instance (however potentially anti-Augustinian) of theunhistorical Augustinianizing against which he had set his face.The word ‘colonialism’ appears on only one page of his book,

41 The design is made explicit at the beginning of Ch. 7: ‘Eussions-nousréussi sur ce point [viz. in satisfying critics of Augustine’s attitude to ‘Rome’]que nous ne serions pas plus avançé: au centre de l’univers augustinien et l’assiégantpourtant de toute part, l’Afrique pose derechef un problème, non point simple-ment analogue, mais bien autrement difficile’ (p. 332, my italics).

42 P. Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine , London,1972. The articles and reviews in Part 2 (‘Rome’) and Part 3 (‘Africa’) originallyappeared between 1961 and 1970. References to them below are to the 1972volume.


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entre guillemets at the end of a paragraph. The next paragraphbegins: ‘As for the dossier itself, all the documents ( pièces) havebeen scrupulously inventoried by Paul Monceaux in his Histoire

littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne .’ 43

In a parallel passage, noting howthe Roman Empire had been put ‘on trial’ by recent books onDonatism, Brown would contrast the picture of an ‘Africa of theinland plateau’, made newly visible by modern archaeology,with the more familiar one of an ‘Africa of [Christian Latin]literature , dominated by Carthage and by the Roman citiesof the Mediterranean seaboard’, ‘home of Augustine’. 44

Mandouze’s focus in Saint Augustin remained firmly on the

latter scene. As he saw it, recent epigraphic finds had supple-mented without substantially altering the picture presented halfa century earlier by Monceaux’s dossier :

This tableau allows us to glimpse, first of all, an Augustinewho is not closed off by his own genius or shut up in hisaugust personage but intimately part of a history and a milieu.Here he is ‘in real life’ (‘en situation’), inseparable from a localsetting of long date. 45

It is here, exactly at the mid-point of Mandouze’s book thatreaders of his Saint Augustin were (and are) most likely to findcommon ground with adepts of Brown’s Augustine of Hippo.The critical questions of historical perspective or optique withwhich Mandouze was grappling in those pages, having livedfor years in ‘Augustine’s ’ Africa and spent hundreds of hoursvisiting and guiding students round its Roman and earlyChristian sites, were the ones that also engaged Brown in the

studies that went to make up the ‘Africa’ section of Religion andSociety in the Age of Saint Augustine and helped pave the way

43 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 338, citing (n. 3) L. Duchesne, ‘Le dossierdu Donatisme’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome , 10 (1890), p. 589-650,as the inspiration for the inventory in (vols. 4-7 of ) P. Monceaux, Histoirelittéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne , 7 vols., Paris, 1901-1923.

44 Brown, Religion and Society, p. 239 (my italics). In another of the earlyarticles in the ‘Africa’ section of the collection he observes that ‘the ecclesiasti-

cal life of this province is exceptionally well-documented and has been thesubject of excellent monographs’, citing Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire as ‘basic’(p. 303, n. 2).

45 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 338.


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for Anglophone students to a fresh and vivid consciousness of theworlds of late antiquity. How did Augustine fit into the widercultural landscape of late Roman Africa, as it was then newly

coming to be seen? What might be the consequences of thatre sighting for longer histories of Christianity and of Westerncivilization? 46

‘It is true that we experience some difficulty in fixing animage of Africa in the time of Augustine’, Mandouze conceded:‘Africa does not let itself be easily “photographed” ’. 47 The dif-ficulty of reconciling different modern accounts of ‘Christianityand local culture in late Roman Africa’ (the title-phrase of oneof Brown’s articles) arose in large part from the nature of thedocumentation. The dossier transmitted to aftertimes was itselfa document of contested transmission:

The figures in this African tableau were first and foremostactors in a drama [...]. Each of the two groups – theCatholic like the Donatist – considered that the otherswere the ‘traitors’, traditores. To have handed over or givenup sacred books or liturgical objects to the police officersof pagan Rome [...], was that not tantamount to consenting

once more to hand over, give up, betray Christ? [...]The subtle ambiguity of a Latin word served, moreover, tosymbolize the tragic ambiguity of this situation. As traditio was already the ecclesiological concept par excellence,privileged guarantee of the universal Church, traditio was at

46 Note esp. Religion and Society, p. 246: ‘It may perhaps be shown thatDonatism – for all its local power – was part of a wider revolution, provokedby the rise of Christianity, in the Latin world; and that the history of this

African schism is relevant not only to the rise of Islam in the south, but to thedevelopment of medieval Latin Catholicism in the north.’

47 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 339. See too the remarkable passage inA. Mandouze, ‘Encore le Donatisme,’ L’Antiquité Classique , 29 (1960), p. 61-107,concluding a trenchant review of J. P. Brisson, Autonomisme et Christianismedans l’Afrique romaine de Septime-Sévère à l’invasion vandale , Paris, 1958: ‘Je croisdevoir ajouter en terminant que je mesure le privilège singulier de ceux à quiil est donné de voir l’Afrique. Chronologie, théologie, économie, realia detoute sorte eussent en effet trouvé comme par enchantement leur vraie place,si la grâce de cette terre africaine, la vertu de ses sites et la grandeur de sesruines, romaines et chrétiennes, avaient pu, par le miracle d’une rencontre

bouleversante, d’une contemplation inlassable et d’une fidelité devenue instinc-tive, conférer à l’auteur de cette belle thèse [sc. Brisson, who was blind ] toutes lesvertus mystérieuses de l’antique vocable mérité par quelques-uns des plus grandsRomains: celui d’ Africanus’ (p. 107).


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the same time, in fourth-century Africa, the word denotingthe scandal of a schism that rendered the guilty party unfitto lay claim to gospel faith and apostolic continuity. 48

How could Mandouze’s meditations on Augustine’s dealingswith the Donatists not have formed an essential background tohis reprise at Oxford in 1959 of de Ghellinck’s plenary discourseof the history of Christian books? At the bottom of the Donatistcrisis, on his reading of the sources, lay the failure of both sidesto recognize the reality of their ‘situation’. In their polemics overtradition, they had lost sight of the history – and of a geographytoo – qu’ils ne pouvaient quitter un instant .

Needless to say, it was Augustine’s failure, betraying itselfin a polemical démesure proportional (!) to his apostolic zeal,that was heaviest with consequence. 49 ‘An error of perspective’runs the headline for the page on which Mandouze soughtto put his finger on the flaw. Committed as Augustine was toa certain exegesis of the history and eschatology of the Scrip-tures – an exegesis specified by Brown in 1963/64 as embodying‘the Prophetic viewpoint’ 50 – he had been constrained to over-

look ‘the strictly political, economic and social problem’ repre-sented by the separatist communion of the Donatists. 51 Preoc-cupied as he was by the vision of an eternal city, he hadneglected the temporal dimensions of the problem in hand.‘If ever there was a serious error committed by Augustine, thatwas where it lay and it was first of all an error of perspective.’ 52

André Mandouze never professed to be an historian except byavocation. There is no useful comparison to be made between

his account of Augustine’s ‘error of perspective’ in dealingwith the Donatists and the wide-angled views of the Christiandiffusion of Latin Roman culture in North Africa and of thesynergy of ecclesial and imperial structures of authority within

48 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 339, 340-341.49 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 334.

50 Brown, Religion and Society, p. 266-267 (in the article subsuming hisOxford paper of 1963).51 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 374, n. 5, citing an earlier study of his own.52 Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 374.


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which Brown would locate the same issues. 53 And yet for allthat, there is a striking affinity – indeed, a symmetry – in thetwo men’s respective senses of the perceptual limits imposed

by a pre-constituted dossier of the ‘histoire littéraire de l’Afriquechrétienne’.‘One need expect very little from [...] the ecclesiastical sources

of the Latin Empire [...] in terms of intellectual content’, Browncheerfully affirmed in the article encompassing his 1963 Oxfordpaper, as a preliminary to re-reading some of those sources insearch of Augustine’s ‘attitude to religious coercion’. Attitude to,not ‘doctrine of ...’. For, he suggested,

we may make some progress in understanding Augustine’sideas if we treat them as an ‘attitude’ – that is, as placeda little lower than the angels of pure Augustinian theology,and a little higher than the beasts of the social and politicalnecessities of the North African provinces. 54

There in a nutshell was the almost infinite space that the sameauthor would open for fellow students of late Roman historyin Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. It was also the space-timeof Saint Augustin. L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce , even ifthe author of that work took a somewhat steeper flight-paththrough it.

Patristics, literary history Num tertium quid?

It is now possible to coordinate the contrasting but complemen-

tary mesures en démesure of two of the founders of what passesas current for (or instead of) patristics in the early twenty-firstcentury: on the one hand, an Oxford-trained historian whoalways begins again with the documents, however ‘poetic’ hisown readings of them may appear to some; 55 on the other,a classically-trained Latinist and littéraire who also proved to be,

53 In the essays in Part 3 (‘Africa’) of Religion and Society, in the first instance.54 Brown, Religion and Society, p. 261.55 E.g. A. Murray, ‘Peter Brown and the Shadow of Constantine’, Journal

of Roman Studies, 73 (1983), p. 191-203, in partic. p. 202.


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time and again, an exemplary ‘documentaliste’. 56 The matterof Donatism, in which issues of tradition and authority – aboveall, of the authority of texts and/or documents of (the) tradition –

come to the fore as nowhere else in early Western ecclesiasticalhistory, was all but preordained for their rendez-vous.As a ‘conference’ (collatio) at Carthage in 411 announced

the final defeat of the Donatists, adjudged by the imperialcommissioner Marcellinus not to have carried their case on thebasis of documents produced and recited before him in the Bathsof Gargilius, so conferences at Oxford in 1959 and 1963 cannow be seen as marking a critical step towards the dismantling

of a plenary and traditional ‘literary history’ of Christianity. Thatthreshold may appear more sharply in retrospect if we take onemore sighting, this time on a work of scholarship still in progressa century ago. It has already loomed large in this account.

For Vincent of Lérins, writing barely a generation after theevent and nearly hypnotized by the written legacy of Augustine,the suppression of Donatism was the anchor (quod ubique !)for a text-, document- or (let us say) scriptum-assured masternarrative of the providential unfolding of orthodoxy per temporaet loca. 57 For Peter Brown, reckoning up new resources forthe study of Augustine four decades after he began reading hisway through ‘the Complete Works [...] in the wide pages of themonks of Saint-Maur’, the most precious single addition to thatstock was the Prosopographie de l’Afrique chrétienne , completedin 1982 under the editorship of André Mandouze, a reference-work minutely observant of the times and places of individualChristians living in those Roman or once-Roman provinces,

but without entries for Augustine and several other major figuresfrom the Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne . 58 For Mandouze

56 Mandouze’s own term in Mémoires, I, p. 341, used with reference to hisLa Révolution Algérienne par les textes.

57 Vinc. Lirin., Comm. 4, 2 (CC SL 64, p. 150).58 Brown, Augustine of Hippo, rev. edn., p. 483: ‘Here we have nothing less

than the “collective biography” of African Christianity in the age of Augustine.

I had barely dared to dream of such a work in 1961.’ Prosopographie chrétienne duBas-Empire , I: Prosopographie de l’Afrique chrétienne (303-533) – ed. A. Mandouze,Paris, 1982; for the relation of the prosopography to Monceaux’s Histoirelittéraire , see the editor’s remarks on p. 15.


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himself, a conference-session on the ‘Africanity of Augustine’held in Algiers in 2001 would present an opportunity to correct‘an error of perspective’ compounded by Monceaux’s readiness

to create a literary oeuvre for the schismatic Donatus, even inthe absence of any extant text attributable to him. 59 Is therea perspective available to us now, in which these data wouldcome into a single focus?

De Ghellinck listed Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire de l’Afriquechrétienne among the major landmarks of the previous half-century’s progress in patristic studies. 60 It was the sole example – as it will always be the modern prototype – of a regional , not

to say proto-national , history of ancient Christian literature,albeit incomplete. No fewer than four of its seven volumes weresourced from or otherwise devoted to (historical) documentsand (literary) texts relating to the Donatist controversy. The lastwas dedicated to ‘Saint Augustine and Donatism’. 61 The sixthhad laid out the ‘Donatist Literature in the Time of Augustine’.The fifth covered earlier Donatist writers, hitting its stride withDonatus himself: ‘With Donatus the Great, the literature properly

so-called of Donatism begins.’ 62

The fourth constituted the coreof the dossier (‘Documents on the History of the Schism’) andhad opened with a manifesto:

Christian Africa of the fourth and early fifth centuries pro-duced a curious polemical literature that is all its own: theDonatist and anti-Donatist literature. This vast domain,in which the genius of the Africans gave itself free rein,has been almost completely ignored by modern criticism.

Historians of Latin letters have doubtless seen it only as ma-terial for theology or documents for history [...] Nonetheless

59 A. Mandouze, ‘Augustin et Donat’, in Saint Augustin. Africanité et univer-salité, Actes du colloque international Alger-Annaba, 1-7 avril 2001 (Paradosis: Étudesde littérature et de théologie anciennes, 45.1-2) – ed. P.-Y. Fux, J.-M. Roessli,O. Wermelinger, 2 vols., Fribourg, 2003, I, p. 125-139, addressing ‘une erreurde perspective concernant la transformation d’une impossibilité purementcontingent de coexistence en un antagonisme fondamentalement irrémissible’

(p. 125).60 De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age , II, p. 45.61 Monceaux, Histoire littéraire , VII, p. 3.62 Monceaux, Histoire littéraire , V, p. 99 (my italics).


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[...], it has seemed right to us to accord a place here, indeeda large place, to this polemical literature, which will be seento lack neither originality nor interest. 63

These lines of Monceaux’s should now be read in conjunctionwith his preface to the work as a whole, in which he situated thetask of his ‘literary history’ with respect to other scholarly voca-tions. ‘In sum’, he recorded,

while profiting from previous studies and rendering full justice to each, we came to a realization that, from ourpoint of view, the subject-matter was new in almost allits aspects. Having consulted historians, theologians andphilologists, we find ourselves confronting original textsand documents (en face des textes et documents originaux).Our aim has been simply to understand, to explicate, andto appreciate these documents and these texts. Hence ourinquiry has automatically assumed a double form: it beginswith philological critique, to end in literary critique. 64

More than a century on, it would be easy to miss the elementof funambulism in this preface. A classical philologist who hadcome of an age in a new era of literary criticism and ethno-centric literary history, with a study of the classical ‘pagan’literature of Africa (entitled Les Africains) already to his credit,Monceaux was staking out the ground for, as he put it, une vérita-ble histoire de la littérature chrétienne d’Afrique , one that would takefull account of the works of writers such as Tertullian, Cyprianand Augustine, without being a contribution to theology or anyother ecclesiastical science.

As it turned out, the main methodological challenge of thisnew-style literary history did not lie at any intersection of‘literature’ with ‘theology’ but instead along the line dividing(and not dividing) ‘texts’ from ‘documents’ in the case of a bodyof writings characterized by Monceaux – to distinguish it fromthe ‘past-oriented’ literature of pagan African authors – as ‘all ofaction, always preoccupied with the present or the future, and

63 Monceaux, Histoire littéraire , IV, p. 3.64 Monceaux, Histoire littéraire , I, p. vi.


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for which fine language (le bien dire ) was now nothing otherthan a form of action’. 65 As he further explained in his preface:

Historical documents occupy a fairly large place in our work.

Our thought in expanding its framework in this way was notonly to render service to archaeologists and other scholarswho often have to cite these items without always beingable to ascertain their value beforehand. Indeed, we initiallymeant to confine ourselves to literary works in the strict sense.However, we quickly realized that one cannot, without mis-representing it, arbitrarily isolate a literature of action, sincein this case the insertion of contemporary documents is necessary for an understanding of literary works, and the most literary

of those works are at the same time documents of history. Anony-mous treatises, letters, transcripts of proceedings, conciliaracts, inscriptions, martyr acts – we have omitted nothing,since all of this serves to illuminate the literature ( puisque detout cela s’éclaire la littérature ). 66

There is more than a little irony in Monceaux’s special plead-ing for a present-minded, forward-looking ‘literature of action’,when so much of that reputed literature, at least from the mid-

fourth century onwards, takes the form of a dogged contesta-tion of disputed pasts. If the ‘strictly literary’ texts of this AfricanChristian corpus were indissociable from their contemporary(datable, placeable) documents, was that not because it was – likeother ancient Christian ‘literatures’, even if pre-eminently soamong them – also a ‘literature of tradition’?

There is no need for us to resolve that dilemma at this date.There may be some value, however, in recognizing how skil-

fully it was managed by Monceaux at the time. As de Ghellinckwould show in 1947, the romantic-historicist classical philologyof the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (as representedsupremely by Wilamowitz) created formidable problems forstudents of ancient Christian writings, not least because of thefreight of ‘documents’ – that is, of texts not manifestly ‘literary’according to aesthetic criteria – that were transmitted as partof patristic tradition. The non-appearance of the third volume

65 Monceaux, Histoire littéraire , I, p. i-ii.66 Monceaux, Histoire littéraire , I, p. iii (my italics).


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of Adolf von Harnack’s history of pre-Nicene Christian litera-ture, which was to have traced the internal development of the‘literature’ whose extant ‘documents’ were inventoried and

dated in the first two, was only the most graphic symptomof a general difficulty. 67 Since Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire del’Afrique chrétienne also remained incomplete, arrested at the pointat which it would have had to absorb the oeuvre of Augustinefrom beyond his direct dealings with the Donatists, it is impos-sible to say what model it might ultimately have provided foran extended literary history of Christian writings that couldno longer be mistaken for a propaideutic to theology. By stop-ping where he did, in the immediate aftermath of the heavilydocumented events at Carthage in June 411, Monceaux leftlater historians and literary scholars with an invitingly open‘literary’ dossier .

A little over fifty years ago, by separate routes, André Man-douze and Peter Brown came back to that juncture at the endof Monceaux’s unfinished narrative of the ‘literature’ of earlyChristian Africa, near the beginning of Vincent’s projectedplenary discourse of the Fathers – a place and time close to

the practical limits of both patristics and literary history as theyhave been known. Guided by the lights of these two modernscholars among others, we have our own chance to intervene inthe same zone. The outstanding challenge can perhaps be put asfollows: Is there a language, existing this side of pure poetry andthe ineffable philology of God, in which ‘patristic’ philologistscould now at last speak without equivocation about texts/docu-ments that, from the moment of their genesis in late antiquity,

have also been documents/texts?Could we invent it, that might still be something else again.

Bibliography

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Hieronymus, Epistulae – ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54-56.

67 See De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age , II, p. 149-172.


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Vincentius Lirinensis, Commonitorium – ed. R. Demeulenaere,CCSL 64, p. 145-195.

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tembre 1954), 3 vols., Paris, 1954-1955.H. C. Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissen-

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p. 61-107.A. Mandouze, ‘ “L’extase d’Ostie”. Possibilités et limites de la mé-thode des parallèles textuels’, in Augustinus Magister , 3 vols., Paris,1954, I, p. 67-84.

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Abstract

Patristics, being defined by writings attributable to Church Fathers,has in recent times been pursued as a philological science. Philology,however, is a divided house and its divisions are writ large in patristic

and para-patristic scholarship. Whereas philology always deals withwritten ‘texts’ in the broad sense of that word, some of those textsprove in practice more ‘literary’ (hence, even, more ‘textual’), othersmore ‘documentary’. Seventy years ago, the most lucid methodo-logical reflection on patristics as a discipline left its fate suspendedbetween literary and theological vocations. While that dilemma islong past, the ambivalence of patristics between literary/textualand historical/documentary regimes of philology continues to be felt.The works of two exemplary scholars who intervened in the Oxford

patristic conferences of 1959 and 1963 offer insights into the methodo-logical problem and, between them, a vantage-point from which wemight yet respond to it.