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St. Augustine's Platonic Sources As Intertexts St. Augustine’s Platonic Sources as Intertexts Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD Joseph Byrd Stanfiel University College London 3 December 2001 ProQuest Number: 10014367 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10014367 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT OF THESIS St. Augustine’s Platonic Sources as Intertexts This thesis attempts to determine whether Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ever read Plato’s dialogues. In the Confessions, Augustine cites the importance of certain libri Platonicorum, books of the Platonists, to his own understanding of the nature of God and the universe. It is clear from his account that exposure to these books was a watershed event in his life. The insights communicated by them contributed to his conversion to Christianity and laid the foundation for the development of his own Christian philosophy. The questions of the identity of the libri Platonicorum and of Augustine’s knowledge of Plato generally have been addressed in scholarship many times before. Previous studies have used the methodology of Quellenforschung, comparing the texts of Augustine’s writings with those of Plato’s dialogues and comparing them for similarities, almost always doctrinal. It was assumed that close correspondences would indicate Augustine’s familiarity with Plato and suggest his influence on particular Augustinian doctrines. The present study differs from all preceding scholarly works in that it develops and applies a new method that allows for philologically based comparisons of texts. Some half-century of scholarship on allusions in ancient literature has revealed specific and demonstrable characteristics of allusion, techniques applied by the ancients to effect allusions and linguistic markers that indicate the presence of allusions. A body of theoretical knowledge has also been developed to interpret the significance of allusions. The current study approaches Augustine’s citations of previous authors as literary allusions. Borrowing from allusion scholarship, it develops a methodology for identifying Augustine’s allusions and suggests means of interpreting their significance. The findings of the study are replicable and easily evaluated; the method devised can be applied not only to Augustine’s Platonic readings, but also to his knowledge and use of literature generally and to the relationships between ancient authors and texts across genres. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many things had to go right for me over the last four plus years to turn the desire for a PhD into a degree. I had the great good fortune to work with outstanding scholars and teachers who were not only academically challenging and intellectually inspiring, but were also thoughtful, kind and encouraging. I owe a debt of gratitude to so many; without them I would not have been in the position to write this thesis, let alone complete my degree. 1 must thank Bette Ruellan and Fr. Charles Dullea of the University of San Francisco who sat patiently with me teaching me to read these difficult languages. I regret that Bette did not live long enough to enjoy her share in my success. I hope I can carry her passion for the ancient world and her intellectual curiosity to inspire a new generation of students. I was fortunate to have benefitted from the expertise of many outstanding teachers in Athens, Georgia. Dr. Pam Bleisch has been so especially helpful, I doubt I will ever be repay a fraction of her support and guidance. Attending University College London was one of the great opportunities of my life. Again, many things had to go right for me to make this a reality. And, again, I received kind assistance that made the opportunity possible. Dr. Armand D’Angour’s great talent for scholarship is one of very many he possesses. He was my fellow student, my host in London, and is now my colleague in this profession. Most of all, he is a great friend. He very kindly took me under his wing and acted as my guide in what was for me a new institution and new country where I knew no one and didn’t speak the language. I must also thank the CVCP, now Universities UK, for the vital support I received in the form of an Overseas Research Studentship. 1 must also thank Prof. Richard Janko, whose aggressive effort on my behalf secured the award. I am also grateful to the UCL graduate school for its financial support. 1 absolutely would not have been able to stay in England for four years had it not been for my friends in the UCL Development Office. Rachel Hall and Simon Pennington took a risk by giving me a job. They, and later Tim Johnson, were patient enough also to endure my difficult schedule. The result was a very happy partnership that achieved some very nice fundraising successes for the college. 1 believe very few people would have taken such a risk and shown such patience. I will be forever grateful to them. I was very fortunate to have worked side by side with such wonderful people. I had the great good fortune to have worked under the supervision of Prof. Gerard O’Daly. Gerard fulfilled every expectation I could have had of a supervisor. He is a consummate scholar whose expertise 1 drew upon, depended upon, throughout the conception and creation of my thesis. While working closely with Gerard, I was never able to forget the great joy of intellectual discovery that motivates us all to pursue a life of the mind in the first place. 1 count Gerard as a good friend and am well aware that working under someone who is not only a great scholar but also a wonderful human being is a rare opportunity for anyone. I must also thank Prof. Robert Sharpies for his insightful criticisms, each of which made my thesis better than it would have otherwise been. My single greatest stroke of luck happened years earlier when I ment my wife Lisa. We were partners in this process. She supported me when I was discouraged, sacrificed to make things possible for me, disrupted her life, left her beloved San Francisco, altered her career to make my dream come true. All the while, she treated our time in England as a great adventure, never complaining of the opportunities she was missing by living with a graduate student. When this enormous task threatened to swallow me whole, she and our daughter Pauline were my tether to the human race. They made me part of a family and a home. My achievement is their achievement. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction 5 Chapter One: The Platonic Tradition 8 Chapter Two: Christian Platonism 45 Chapter Three: Augustine's Christian Philosophy 84 Chapter Four: Literature Review and Method 114 Chapter Five: Results 151 Chapter Six: Analysis 188 Excursus: Literary Allusion and Roman Education 206 Bibliography 210 INTRODUCTION This thesis examines the question of whether Augustine read any of Plato’s dialogues. It is a question worth asking beeause Augustine was an enormously influential figure both in the development of the Catholic doctrinal tradition and in Western intelleetual history. For the theological historian, this question is compelling because it suggests pagan philosophy as a potential souree for Augustine’s Christian thought. The issue is also of acute interest to the intellectual historian because of the rare opportunity Augustine provides to observe the philosophical development of one of the ancient world’s most important thinkers. Augustine himself makes much of his own philosophical and theological development in the Confessions. He describes there the importance of the libri Platonicorum to his coneeption of God and creation, but never mentions the titles or authors of these works. Generations of seholars have agreed with Augustine that influenees so integral to his development are important to an understanding both of that development and its literary results. As J.J. O’Donnell said in defence of his own interest in the question of Augustine’s influences, ‘the history of what a subject reads and hears is potentially as useful to the reconstruction of the development of a lifetime's thought as the history of what the subject wrote, said and did.’' Rather than ask why it is of interest to examine Augustine’s knowledge of Plato, it may be more appropriate to ask why the issue must be revisited after it has been investigated already by so many scholars. Augustine’s readings have been the subject of numerous studies and a scholarly consensus has been reached; the Timaeus is the only dialogue Augustine read, and even that only in Cicero’s partial translation. This was the conclusion of the first sueh study of the 20'*’ century, Angus’ 1906 dissertation, and was established as the final word on the issue some four decades later by Courcelle in his classic study in Quellenforschung, Les Lettres Grecques en Occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore. The characterisation of Courcelle’s study as the last word on the question of Augustine’s Platonic reading is the position of the scholarly community both literally (the phrase comes from Hagendahl^) and practically. No full-length treatment of the question has been undertaken since Courcelle. The intervening fifty-three years have seen exhaustive examinations of Augustine’s ' O ’Donnell (1980), 144.
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