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Today is the Feast of St. Augustine in the Orthodox Church. I have a few thoughts:
1. There is little doubt that Augustine is one of the most influential Christians in history. In part this is because of his genius. In part it is because of the extraordinary size of his surviving corpus.
1a. In terms of his genius, my favorites are his “Confessions” (they are so, so honest and penetrating) and his “City of God.” Personally, I could do without much of the later anti-Pelegian material where I think he argues himself into a box.
1b. In terms of the size of his corpus, I’ve heard that Augustine’s surviving literary corpus is larger than everything that survives in Latin from ancient Rome (Seneca, Cicero, Ovid, Caesar, etc.). If so, this tells us a great deal about what medieval scribes cared to preserve.
2. In 2007, @atpapanik and I organized our first international conference for entitled “Orthodox Readings of Augustine” and, looking back, I’d say that conference was a watershed for us.
2a. On the one hand, the conference and subsequent book were a milestone for the eventual launching the Orthodox Christian Studies Center ( @FordhamOrthodox ).
2b. On the other hand, it was transformative intellectually b/c we discovered the extent to which so much of what we had learned in seminary, etc. (not just about Augustine but about so many other things) were modern reactionary caricatures, rather than authentic history/theology
2c. For example, some of the Orthodox saints (Photios, Mark of Ephesus, Nikodemos, etc.) most often lifted up by contemporary Orthodox as being anti-Western [and who is more "Western" than Augustine] they all considered Augustine a saint most of them quoted him.
2d. For example, it was St. Nikodemos of Mt. Athos who assigned June 15th as the day to commemorate St. Augustine, when he revised the "Synaxarion" (the register of saints' days) in the early part of the nineteenth century.
2e. The anti-Augustine bent of modern Orthodoxy began in the Slavophile movement in the late 19th-century Russia and was continued, especially, by a small handful of Greek-theologians in the mid-20th century. There's nothing "traditional" about it.
2f. Much of my academic work since that project has been devoted to trying to understand the historical conditions and identity constructions that gave rise to these (and other) false modern binaries with Orthodox Christianity.
3. Since "Orthodox Readings of Augustine," I've come to see St. Augustine as a symbol for Christian unity in large part b/c the uncovering of these modern Orthodox mischaracterizations provides a prime example of the way that academic research can unite Christians.
3a. Given all of this, I think that it is really fitting that the (Orthodox) St. Photios National Shrine, which is located in St. Augustine FL, would dedicate its first webinar lecture to a history of the Orthodox reception of St. Augustine.
