Education, Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes, International Philosophical
Editor of this Volume MARY T. CLARK is a Religious of the Sacred Heart and professor of philosophy at Manhattanville College. For many years she chaired the Department of Philosophy there and has been visiting professor at Villanova University, Fordham University, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Santa Clara. After graduating from Manhattanville College she completed her doctoral studies at Fordham University and was a postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.
Augustinian scholars are familiar with her Augustine, Philosopher of Freedom and Augustinian Personalism as well as her translation of the Trinitarian treatises of Marius Victorinus in the Fathers of the Church series. She is also the author-editor of An Aquinas Reader and the Problem of Freedom.
Widely known as a lecturer, Sister Clark delivered several papers at the International Patristic Conferences held at Oxford and gave the St. Augustine Lecture at Villanova University in 1969. Her articles have appeared in Downside Review, Religious Education, Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes, International Philosophical Quarterly, and Augustinian Studies.
Sister Clark is past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, treasurer of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, and a member of the executive committee of the Society of Christian Philosophers and of the Conference of Philosophical Societies. She is on the advisory board of Dionysius and Logos, and on the editorial board of Faith and Reason, the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers.
Author of the Preface GOULVEN MADEC was born in 1930 in Brittany (France). He studied theology in Rome, classics and philosophy in Paris—the Sorbonne and the Institut Catholique.
Madec received his Doctor of Letters with his work Saint Ambrose and Philosophy and his Doctor of Philosophy with his translation of and commentary on the De Magistro and De libero arbitrio of Augustine, and numerous articles on Augustinian doctrine. He has also edited the De divina prae destinatione of John Scotus Eriguena in the Corpus Christianorum.
For twenty-five years he has been a member of the Institut d'Etudes Augustiniennes in Paris. He is professor of the History of Patristic Philosophy at the Institut Catholique of Paris and research professor at the National Center of Scientific Research.
To JAMES D. CLARK, O.S.A.
My beloved brother who died January 4, 1982 while this book was being written on St. Augustine whom Father Clark cherished and imitated by preaching the Christian Message effectively because he, like his father Augustine, loved Christ.
Preface
May hymns and weeping ascend in your sight from the hearts of my brethren, your censers.
—Confessions, X.4.5
1 1986 we will celebrate the sixteenth centenary of the conversion of St. Augustine. This work of Mary T. Clark comes just in time for many people to prepare for the celebration of this event. It would be a pity indeed if the festivities were limited to a few congresses or colloquia for scholars. It would, moreover, be contrary to the spirit of Augustine, for as a shepherd of souls he did not favor the intellectual elite. F. Van der Meer expressed it well: The best was not good enough for him, and even when he was speaking to rudes and idiotae he kept nothing back. What he gave out amongst them was that by which he himself lived: '""To give you all bread which you can touch and see, that is something which I cannot do", he once said at a distribution of alms on the anniversary of his consecration, "but this word is your portion. I give you the nourishment on which I myself subsist. | am your fellow servant, not the father of your household". It was wholly alien to Augustine to seek to achieve some higher gnosis for himself and to preach some kind of vulgarized religion to his people. He knew no ranks in the school of God. ... He has no hesitation in broaching problems which are solved indirectly or by implication in Scripture but are not explicitly stated or treated here.