Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: ‘secularity’
- I The crisis of identity
- 2 ‘A great multitude no man could number’
- 3 Conversion and uncertainty
- 4 Augustine: a defence of Christian mediocrity
- 5 ‘Be ye perfect’
- II Kairoi: Christian times and the past
- III Topoi: space and community
- Sources referred to
- Secondary literature referred to
- Index
4 - Augustine: a defence of Christian mediocrity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: ‘secularity’
- I The crisis of identity
- 2 ‘A great multitude no man could number’
- 3 Conversion and uncertainty
- 4 Augustine: a defence of Christian mediocrity
- 5 ‘Be ye perfect’
- II Kairoi: Christian times and the past
- III Topoi: space and community
- Sources referred to
- Secondary literature referred to
- Index
Summary
Long before the conflict with Pelagius in the years after 411, Augustine and the African Church had been touched by the anxieties of the European churches. In 401 Augustine recalled Jovinian's denial that virginity and celibacy had any superiority over the married state. The Church ‘over there’, in Italy, Augustine tells us, resisted his ‘monstrous teachings’ with utter faith and determination (fidelissime et fortissime); but an undercurrent of whisperings still remained to be dealt with. Augustine therefore wrote a book, On the good of marriage. It is a significant title; and Augustine gives us the explanation why his answer to Jovinian's attack on the superiority of virginity took the form of a defence – not, as might be expected, of virginity – but of the married state. Such a treatise was necessary, Augustine says, because it was now being alleged that it was impossible to answer Jovinian without disparaging marriage. The memory of Jerome's notorious and ill-fated attack on Jovinian was fresh in Augustine's mind. In 415, writing to Jerome, Augustine repeatedly praised Jerome's ‘splendid treatise’ against Jovinian; but on each occasion he makes it clear that what he has in mind is Jerome's refutation of Jovinian's theses on the equality of sins and on original sin. He is coolly silent on Jerome's views on marriage. Augustine's rehabilitation of the married state is a thinly veiled answer to Jerome's denigration (vituperatio) of it: his covert work Against Jerome.
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- The End of Ancient Christianity , pp. 45 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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