Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Introduction xvii
duced. I have also looked, along the way, for hidden gems, passages that only experts might know of. Few would realize, for example, that Augustine gives his best brief summary of Manicheism in a late letter (ep. 238) or that he once tacked a brilliant point-by-point contrast between Manichean and Catholic views onto an early commentary on Genesis. I introduce each of the four chapters on Augustine's controversies with excerpts from his opponents. It helps to hear a Manichee or a Donatist or a Pelagian speak in his own voice about his own concerns before we hear Augustine's rebuttal.
Why such brief excerpts? Years in the classroom have taught me that newcomers do best when they watch their diet of ancient texts and limit themselves to smaller morsels. Brief excerpts tend to invite closer examination. While this book is intended for a broad range of readers, some will grapple with it in the rough-and-tumble of the classroom, where texts can be probed, pondered, dissected, argued over, and, if need be, argued with. My all-toobrief introductions to individual excerpts are no more than points of entry. These texts invite, indeed require, fuller commentary.
What guides the flow? That depends. It varies from chapter to chapter, from topic to topic. Sometimes Augustine's own text shapes the sequence, as in Chapter 1 on Confessions. Other times the order is roughly chronological, as in Chapter 3 on Augustine the bishop. Still other times it follows the point-counterpoint of controversy, as in Chapter 10 on the Pelagian debate. But often the choice is intuitive. I have thought of this project as piecing together a vast mosaic whose fragments, in the end, offer a portrait. Mosaics, after all, are collections of small, brilliantly colored stones known as tesserae. When skillfully assembled, tesserae come together to create intricate designs and gleaming portraits. The metaphor of mosaic-making is quite apt since mosaic was among the most popular and the most artistically accomplished art forms practiced in Augustine's North Africa.12 The floor of his basilica had a patchwork of mosaics. Augustine himself once compared God's ordering of creation to the aesthetic of the mosaic artist: "If a person were to look at an intricate pavement so narrowly as to see only the single tessera, he would say the artist, lacking a sense of composition, had set the little pieces at haphazard, since he could not take in at once the whole pattern, inlaid to form a single image of beauty."13 The challenge mosaic-artists face, as Augustine notes, is to create a coherent portrait from seemingly haphazard little pieces,
12. Aïcha Ben Abed, Tunisian Mosaics: Treasures from Roman Africa (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2006); Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, The Mosaics of Roman North Africa: Studies in Iconography and Patronage, Oxford Monographs on Classical Archaeology (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1978).
13. De ordine 1.1.2 (BA 4/2:72-74); trans. Garry Wills, Saint Augustine, Penguin Lives (New York: Viking Penguin, 1993), 3.