Numbering Liturgy an Augustinian Aesthetics Of

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NUMBERING LITURGY

AN AUGUSTINIAN AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP

A dissertation by

Walter Roy Knowles

presented to

The Faculty of the Graduate Theological Union

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Berkeley, California

June, 2009

Committee Signatures

Lizette Larson-Miller, Coordinator Date

PREVIEWMichael B. Aune Date

Alejandro García-Rivera Date

Richard L. Crocker Date

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NUMBERING LITURGY

AN AUGUSTINIAN AESTHETICS OF WORSHIP

Walter Roy Knowles

This dissertation is a systematization of Augustine’s reflections on worship as they intersect with his more general aesthetic thought. It traces the music in his song to God and investigates the rhythm of his aesthetics to understand how that rhythm informed and transformed his understanding and love of God.

I begin with Augustine’s most directly aesthetic writings. Confessiones includes a précis of De pulchro et apto which tells us more about Augustine’s way of thinking than his thought itself. De ordine is the most important of Augustine’s four early dialogs for his thought about beauty, and it provides the context for De musica, his most significant work in aesthetic theoryPREVIEW. During the first year of his episcopate, Augustine brought his explicitly philosophical work to a close in De doctrina Christiana before turning to more pressing pastoral issues.

Those issues included leading the Christian faithful into deeper commitment, and calling outsiders and the catechumens to conversion. De catechizandis rudibus synthesized Augustine’s care for beauty and his desire for evangelism, and through its

i rhetoric, I provide a way of exploring four of the primary stages of Christian initiation

at Hippo: evangelism, committing to the church, preparation for baptism, and the journey in resurrection life.

The promise of baptism was sharing in the Eucharist. I use Augustine’s aesthetic thought to situate many of the references he made throughout his life to the Eucharist in sermons, letters, and commentary, as well as his instructions to new Christians, which describe parts of the Eucharist which were not appropriate to discuss in more public forums. This exploration establishes that Augustine’s theology of the Eucharist

(and indeed of sacramentality in general) was much more grounded in the interaction of the beauty of God with structures of signification than has often been acknowledged.

Finally, I briefly gather this descriptive effort together, invert it thematically, and draw together themes throughout Augustine’s thought: the ambiguity of desire and relationship, the proportionality of love, and the play of memory and time.

PREVIEWLizette Larson-Miller

Numbering Liturgy:

An Augustinian Aesthetics of Worship

Acknowledgements...... iv I. Introduction...... 1 A. Musica and Sacramentum...... 6 B. A brief look at the literature...... 9 C. The performance environment of the Eucharist...... 20 D. Texts and translations...... 28 II. Sounding the Numbers: Augustine’s Aesthetic of Rhythm...... 33 A. De pulchro et apto: “in interiorum melodiam tuam”...... 37 B. The early dialogs: “noverim me, noverim te”...... 61 C. De musica: “scientia bene modulandi” ...... 71 D. De doctrina Christiana: loving what we use...... 96 E. A loving aesthetic of sound...... 115 III. Leading the Community into Faithfulness: Becoming What You Love...... 117 A. Instructing beginners...... 119 B. Encouraging catechumens to commitment...... 136 C. Preparing the competentes for baptism...... 145 D. Joining in the preparation for baptism...... 147 E. Journeying in resurrection...... 163 IV. Celebrating the Eucharist: One bread, One body,PREVIEW One table, One Lord...... 192 A. Doing the Eucharist...... 193 B. Eucharistic worship at Hippo...... 199 C. The theology of worship: the life of sacrifice...... 266 V. Singing a New Song: Augustine’s Liturgical Aesthetics...... 272 A. The ambiguity of liturgy: desire and relationship...... 274 B. The proportionality of liturgy: loving God in and above all things...... 278 C. The memories of liturgy: all times are God’s...... 283 Bibliography...... 289

iii

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS A

This dissertation, as all instances of its type, is the product of a community, dispersed throughout time and locale. The list of all who influenced or supported me in this endeavor could easily double the page count of this manuscript, but several people must be mentioned. At the start must be William Beasley, at Westmont College in Santa

Barbara, who as a musicologist and a musician taught me that music-making, music history, and music in worship can never be separated. Andrew Hughes, another musicologist, at the University of Toronto, impressed upon me the necessity of solid liturgical study were I to understand the music of the middle ages, and set me on the path of liturgical scholarship. The late Eugene Fairweather, at Trinity College, insisted that one must pay attention to what early texts say (and in their original languages!), rather than what we want them to say, in order to enter into community with the great thinkers of ChristianPREVIEW tradition. At the Graduate Theological Union, the four members of my committee deserve special thanks. Alejandro García-Rivera, of the Jesuit School of

Theology, drew me to the GTU and did his best to make me think clearly about Peirce, von Balthasar, and aesthetics. Richard Crocker, of the University of California renewed my interest in early chant and challenged me with early music theory. My advisor for most of my time at the GTU, Michael Aune of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary did

iv much (in so far as it has been done) to turn this autodidact into a liturgical scholar,

never letting me forget my grounding in music and ministry. I also must thank him for introducing me to the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, which provides one of the themes of this dissertation. To my supervisor, Lizette Larson-Miller, of the Church Divinity

School of the Pacific, I owe an entire book of gratitude for her mentoring in teaching, celebration, and scholarship. Wandering in the wilds of late antique North African liturgy with her guidance was a continual reminder that all who wander are not lost!

I owe special thanks to two organizations. The Church Divinity School of the

Pacific awarded me its Bogard fellowship during the writing of this dissertation. That fellowship located this work in the work of teaching persons as they deepened their call to ministry in the church, and it provided me with physical space which made the writing much easier. The people of All Saints’ Episcopal Church in San Francisco called me to leadership in their community as their minister of music. This special community of thinking and concerned Christians supported me by their life of prayer and worship, and in doing so, gave me the strength and purpose to complete this work. And lastly andPREVIEW most importantly, for their support throughout this time of study, for their reflection on this material as fellow Christians, and for their love and care, I thank my wife, Lorelette, and our son, Martin. Without their encouragement, I would not have started this journey, and without their constancy, I could not have finished it.

INTRODUCTION

“It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to get further back.”1 How does one get to a radix for the understanding of theological signification in liturgy, in music, indeed in all performative theological action? This study had its origins in an attempt to understand the relationship which medieval Western Christians perceived between music and theology—or better yet the perception that music was theology.

As I attempted to find a methodological solid point, I encountered an almost throw-away reference in a short article by Bernd Wannenwetsch arguing that the root meaning of theology—θεολογία—in early Christianity is the search for language with which we may hymnPREVIEW God.2 Wannenwetsch provided the connection (in Greek, not Latin tradition), but the subject still waited in the wings. In searching backwards from the thirteenth century, nearly every music theoretician or theologian of music quoted in

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On certainty, ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M Anscombe and Denis Paul (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), para. 471. 2 Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Singen und Sagen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 46 (2004): 334-336.

1 some way a fragment from the sixth century encyclopedist St. Isidore of Seville:

So it is that without music no other study can be perfected, for there is nothing

without music. Indeed, the universe itself is composed of a certain harmony of 3 sounds, and the very heavens revolve on the modulation of harmony.

Isidore points back to Boethius, and Boethius was involved in a project of writing the rest of a grand work, left off two centuries before: De musica of the Bishop of Hippo

Regius, Augustine. However, Augustine was not an accidental music theorist who dropped an intellectual stone into the pond of thought, for the beauty and power of well-structured sound permeated his theology and his practice as a bishop.

The Mysterium tremendum et fascinans of music is nowhere more evident than in

Augustine’s treatise on memory in Confessiones:

The delight of the ear drew me and held me more firmly, but you unbound and liberated me. Now I confess that I repose just a little in those sounds to which your words give life, when they are sung by a sweet and skilled voice. … But the gratification of my flesh—to which I ought not to surrender my mind to be enervated—frequently leads me astray, as the senses do not accompany reason in such a way as patiently to follow. …

However, when I recall the tears which I shed at the song of the Church in the first days of my recovered faith, and even now as I am moved not by the song but by the things which are sung, when sung with fluent voice and music that is most appropriate, I acknowledge again the great benefit of this practice. Thus I vacillate between the peril of pleasure and the value of the experience, and I am led more—while advocating no irrevocable position—to endorse the custom of singing in church so that by the pleasure of hearing the weaker soul might be PREVIEW4 elevated to an attitude of devotion.

3 Isidorus Hispalensis, Etymologiarum 3.17: Itaque sine Musica nulla disciplina potest esse perfecta, nihil enim sine illa. Nam et ipse mundus quadam harmonia sonorum fertur esse conpositus, et coelum ipsud sub harmoniae modulatione revolvi.

4 Confessiones, 10.33.49, translated in James McKinnon, Music in early Christian literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 154-155. Voluptates aurium tenacius me implicauerant et subiugauerant, sed resoluisti et liberasti me. nunc in sonis, quos animant eloquia tua, cum suaui et artificiosa uoce cantantur, …

2 Augustine wrote most directly about music, beauty, and the danger and glory of both in

his earliest works, but the ideas which he expressed before becoming a presbyter in 391 and a bishop in 396 were constantly in his mind as he led his community in worship and deepened its faith through teaching. As I looked at Augustine, I saw the sort of unitive thinker who, should I choose to explore him, can provide a foundation for understanding not just a relationship between two great traditions of Western thinking, but also, through his grounding in the performed worship of his community, a fundamental way of seeing theology, the arts, and worship as one holistic disciplina, three ways of expressing a common desire for and delight in God.

William Harmless wrote that “Augustine’s approach to [catechetical] curriculum was more musical than systematic.”5 My task in this dissertation is to do the systematic effort called out by the breadth of Augustine’s thought and to trace the music in his song to God, and to see how the rhythms of his aesthetics inform and transform his understanding and love of God—to begin to grasp how Augustine hymns God throughout his adult life. Even though my effort is historical and theological, there are

sed delectatio carnis meae, cui mentem eneruandam non oportet dari, saepe me fallit,PREVIEW dum rationi sensus non ita comitatur, ut patienter sit posterior, sed tantum, quia propter illam meruit admitti, etiam praecurrere ac ducere conatur. ita in his pecco non sentiens et postea sentio. … uerum tamen cum reminiscor lacrimas meas, quas fudi ad cantus ecclesiae in primordiis recuperatae fidei meae, et nunc ipsum cum moueor non cantu, sed rebus quae cantantur, cum liquida uoce et conuenientissima modulatione cantantur, magnam instituti huius utilitatem rursus agnosco. ita fluctuo inter periculum uoluptatis et experimentum salubritatis magis que adducor non quidem inretractabilem sententiam proferens cantandi consuetudinem approbare in ecclesia, ut per oblectamenta aurium infirmior animus in affectum pietatis adsurgat.

5 William Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995), 207.

3 implications here for how Christians, some sixteen centuries later, can live out the

Glory of God in a rapidly changing world, and how our worship together can synthesize the wondrous in our rapidly changing culture in the waning days of that era we call

“modern.”

I begin this systematizing effort with Augustine’s most directly aesthetic writings. Confessiones includes a précis of a youthful work De pulchro et apto—On the beautiful and appropriate—which tells us even more about Augustine’s way of thinking than the thought itself. De ordine—On order—is the most important of Augustine’s four early dialogs for his thought about beauty, and it provides the context for the great unfinished work, De musica—On Music. During the first year of his episcopate, Augustine ended his philosophical work in De doctrina Christiana—On teaching the Christian faith— before turning to more pressing pastoral issues.

Those pastoral issues included leading the Christian faithful into deeper commitment, and calling hangers-on (the catechumens) and outsiders (those who had not been pledged or pledged themselves to Christianity) to conversion. Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus—PREVIEWInstructing beginners in faith—synthesizes Augustine’s care for beauty and his desire for evangelism, and through examining the rhetoric of that work,

I provide a way of exploring four of the primary stages of Christian initiation at Hippo: evangelism, committing to the church, preparation for baptism, and the journey in resurrection life. Much as I would wish to discuss the center of this entire movement, baptism itself, Augustine was part of a culture that did not directly discuss the core ritual acts of baptism and the Eucharist publicly, so we have no description from him.

4 The promise of baptism was sharing at the table of the Eucharist, and so I ask

Augustine, the musician and rhetorician, what we can know about the Eucharist, which was celebrated daily in Hippo. I use Augustine’s aesthetic thought to organize many of the references he makes throughout his life to the Eucharist. Additionally his instructions to new Christians fill out many of the missing parts. It is clear that

Augustine’s theology of the Eucharist (and indeed of sacramentality in general) is much more grounded in the interaction of the beauty of God with structures of signification than has often been acknowledged.

Augustine was a theologian of the beauty of the worship of God. Even when he was a controversialist, his task was to ensure that the reality of the divine initiative in re-beautifying all of creation is always before our minds. Unity of the body of Christ, the enjoyment of God’s presence in that body, and the anticipation of a time when the glory of God would PREVIEWbe all in all constantly drew him into the vortex of desire for the God who had given him a new song to sing.

A. Musica and Sacramentum

Two words can bedevil an exploration of Augustine’s aesthetic theology: musica and sacramentum. Musica is not just the songs we sing, nor are sacramenta the list of two or seven ritual acts which the church performs, for both are much broader ideas in

Augustine’s lexicon. I will explore both in much more detail throughout this study, but it is important to have Augustine’s understanding of both in mind, so that late modern ideas do not cause us to miss important subtleties.

1. Musica

Musica is one of the seven liberal arts, and fits, with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, in the quadrivium—the arts of understanding the universe. Musica was the crowning science of the quadrivium, for while the others studied elements and motion in isolation from each other, Musica was the study of the whole universe in motion.

Arithmetic was comprehensible by human minds through the study of numbers

(and it is crucial to understand that like the other arts of the quadrivium, arithmetic does not study numbers—PREVIEWcyphers—it studies reality through the use of numbers), geometry through examining lines and figures, and astronomy through exploring stars and planets. Musica, too, is a cosmic reality studied through rhythm (the relationships of time), harmony (the mathematics of pitches), and melody (the sequencing of sounds). Sounded music—song—is the most frequent and obvious embodiment of music, but it is itself not musica in this late-classical sense.

6 Because musica is a cosmic reality, there is (as with the quadrivium and trivium

within the liberal arts) a tension between understanding and performance. Early in his life, Augustine sided with those who saw performing musicians as caged birds who warbled tunefully but, because they did not understand what they were doing, produced no musica. Later on, musica was informed by his theology of the incarnation, and he saw in the community’s song the same sort of kenosis of musica which he saw in the life of Christ in the church.

2. Sacramentum

In De catechizandis rudibus, Augustine identified one type of inquirer as “Such a person … will now only have come so as to be able to share in the sacraments.”6 From this side of the eleventh century, this meaning of this comment seems only too obvious

—he was speaking of baptism and Eucharist—the sacraments par excellence, but given the trouble Augustine continually had with catechumens not coming to baptism (and baptized Christians not receiving the Eucharist), this probably is too far a leap.

Augustine is often credited as the first “sacramental theologian” in the medieval sense of that term, butPREVIEW “the word (sacramentum) reveals an incredible diversity of senses, apart from just that of ‘rites’,”7 and thus it is better to think of Augustine as the great theologian of sacramentality, which encompasses the universe of symbolic

6 De catechizandis rudibus 8.12: quibus iam instructus ad sacramentorum participationem tantummodo venerit.

7 C. Couturier, ““Sacramentum” et “Mysterium” dans l’œuvre de Saint Augustin,” in Études Augustiniennes, Théologie 28 (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1952), 163.

7 communication between God and humanity. Augustine’s landscape of worship does not

have seven great mountain peaks called sacraments, but rather it is filled with rolling hills, each of which is a sacramentum. Couturier identified over 330 distinct unique sacramenta and mysteria, divided into classifications of sacramental rites proper (here he identified fifteen Old Testament groupings and twelve classes of Christian rite) and sacramental symbols (again divided into nine Old Testament and eight New Testament symbols with a special class of numerical symbols). This breadth includes the universe itself8 to the giving of blessed salt.9 Time and the Christian life are both sacramental as well as he wrote in Epistula 55:

Here you should realize that the birthday of the Lord is not celebrated as a sacrament, but we only recall to memory that he was born, and for this reason there was no need to do anything else but mark with festive devotion the day of the year on which the event occurred. But there is a sacrament in a celebration when the commemoration of the event is carried out in such a way that is is understood also to signify something that must be received in a holy manner. In that way, therefore, we celebrate the Pasch, that is, we not only recall to memory what was done, namely, that Christ died and rose, but we also do not omit other things that bear witness concerning him, such as the signification of the sacraments.10

He thus saw sacramenta as any signification—any sign-making—of the realities of God’s presence. PREVIEW

8 For example in Sermo 125.10. 9 De catechezandis rudibus 26.50. 10 Epistula 55.2.2: Hic primum oportet noveris diem Natalem Domini non in sacramento celebrari, sed tantum in memoriam revocari quod natus sit, ac per hoc nihil opus erat, nisi revolutum anni diem, quo ipsa res acta est, festa devotione signari. Sacramentum est autem in aliqua celebratione, cum rei gestae commemoratio ita fit, ut aliquid etiam significari intellegatur, quod sancte accipiendum est.

B. A brief look at the literature

At this point in a dissertation, it is conventional to survey the literature which represents the landscape of the study. However, this dissertation exists because, while

Augustine is often quoted as theologians think about sacraments, he is only very minimally studied as liturgists consider the early Latin patterns of worship. The literature on Augustine is voluminous, but it tends to be focused away from my interests in aesthetics and worship. Hubertus Drobner summarized the map, as of ten years ago (and little has changed since then):

Confessions and City of God are, therefore, by no means only accidentally the most studied of all the numerous works of Augustine, comprising some 15 per cent of all publications concerning Augustine. In second place, but trailing by a long distance, follow the Sermons and the Letters, adding another 7 per cent between them. Following next are De trinitate, De doctrina christiana, and his biblical commentaries on John and the Psalms, together sharing a further 8 per cent of scholarly literature devoted to Augustine. This statistic reveals a fundamental feature of all Augustinian scholarship: it is by no means evenly distributed. Those eight treatises have been edited, translated and studied many times over, while some of the remaining 109 works of Augustine have largely been neglected. The Quaestiones euangeliorum are the least studied, with only four entries in the bibliography.

Of course, one is entitled to ask if this selection is not wholly justified. If two handfuls of rightly famous works correctly and fully represent the thoughts of Augustine, why bother with the remainder? It is exactly this question, however, that in recentPREVIEW times has raised serious doubts. Scholars are also discovering that Augustine’s doctrinal, and, especially, his polemical treatises represent only a partial view of his entire theology, given the fact that in them he sought to defend the true faith in what amounts at times to extreme terms. Yet in his pastoral writings and, in particular, in his sermons to the faithful, he avoided the relentless polemic witnessed so often in his doctrinal treatises. As a result, his explanations of doctrinal matters in the sermons and other, lesser-known works offer new, more balanced formulations for many of his theological positions. Scholars are only now beginning to tap these works, but are doing so at great profit.11

11 Hubertus Drobner, “Studying Augustine: An overview of recent research,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London:

9 Therefore, it makes little sense to gather evidence to prove a negative. My use of

the thoughts of those scholars earlier than myself in this essay is not to critique them, but rather to stand on their shoulders as I attempt to understand Augustine. Because of this specificity, it makes much more sense to break the survey of literature into bibliographic notes throughout my study of Augustine. It would be helpful, however, to touch on bibliographic resources in two areas which undergird this study: Augustine as a source for liturgical texts and Augustine’s aesthetic thought.

1. Augustine as a source of liturgical text

We face many problems in dealing with Augustine as a liturgical person. While most of his writing life was spent in the context of public worship of the church, we do not have a coherent or complete understanding of that worship through either text or description. However, a significant amount, if not the majority, of Augustine’s work was delivered in the context of public worship:

The earliest known portrait of Augustine is a fresco dating from about the year 600. It captures him in the classic pose of the ancient preacher: seated on an Episcopal cathedra, his hands clasping a codex of scriptures. This icon, while artistically crude, is at least apt, for it portrays Augustine as he wanted himself remembered: as a servant of the Word.12 While he was a servantPREVIEW of the Word, this fresco represents him, not as a writer in his study, but more importantly for us, as a preacher in the liturgical life of his community.

Unfortunately, due to the Vandals who were knocking on the doors of North Africa

Routledge, 2000), 19-20. 12 Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 160. The fresco, in the Lateran Library, from about 600, can be found at Plate 11 in Frederik van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. Briand Battershaw and G.R. Lamb (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961).

10 from the west as Augustine was dying, and the Arab conquests from the east three

centuries later, there are no primary textual materials of the liturgy extant from

Christian North Africa.13 Thus we have to engage in a bit of careful recursive (and, one would hope, not circular) reasoning from description and commentary. Much of the material that we have from Augustine (and from his episcopal colleagues in North

Africa as well) is both allusive and illusive rather than discursive, and thus we must spend our effort in “connecting the dots” rather than in scientifically establishing the contents of liturgical elements.14

How is it then that we can find the dots to connect? Josef Jungmann gave us a basic framework:

In the writings of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine and in some other writings, numerous details are mentioned from which we can put together a fairly complete picture of this liturgy.15

The little snippet of liturgy which we have in De catechizandis rudibus 26.50 is just such a detail, as are comments in Augustine’s catechetical sermons. “Fairly complete” is over- generous, particularly since much of what we would like to know about fourth-century liturgy is obscured by the rules of secrecy (disciplina arcani) surrounding baptism and the Eucharist. PREVIEW

13 Paul Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102. 14 pace Bradshaw, Search, 20. 15 Josef A. Jungmann, The Early Liturgy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1959), 234. Unfortunately, Jungmann’s “fairly complete picture” is completed in a single small paragraph!

11 While there is much work to do in this area of study, and indeed, given the

advances in our understanding of the worship life of the early church in the last twenty-five years, work to be done over, there are some key major works which can provide us with starting points. The classic study, translated into English, is Frederick van der Meer’s Augustine the Bishop. Van der Meer’s study is detailed and entertaining, and rich in cultural content.16 While there have been many biographical studies of

Augustine published since 1947, they overwhelmingly treat Augustine as person, as a thinker, and as a writer, but not as a bishop in his church. Van der Meer devoted nearly

130 pages to Augustine’s liturgical life, but in painting his rich portrait of Augustine, van der Meer occasionally mixes levels and geography of sources.17 In spite of that, van der Meer remains one of the only places in which to get a comprehensive and culturally informed sense of worship in fifth-century Hippo Regius.

An earlier study, one which van der Meer mentions but was not able to consult due to the exigencies of World War II was Wunibald Roetzer’s Des heiligen Augustinus

Schriften als liturgie-geschichliche Quelle.18 Roetzer drew on the work of W.C. Bishop who did the first correlationPREVIEW of Augustine, with a few other of his confrères, into a

16 Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 31, notes that van der Meer “offers the most expansive treatment [of Augustine and the catechumenate], but his work is more descriptive than analytical.” 17 e.g., using texts from the missal of Pius V to fill in where he does not have text in Augustine, or assuming that the visual structures of buildings in Cuicul are applicable to those in Hippo Regius. Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 162 n 23. suggests that van der Meer engages in “imaginative reconstruction.” 18 Wunibald Roetzer, Des Heiligen Augustinus Schriften als liturgie-geschichtliche Quelle: eine liturgie-geschichtliche Studie (München: Hueber, 1930).

12 description of “The African Rite.”19 In the 80 years since Roetzer did his work, no one

has reworked it in a comprehensive sense, no one has translated it into other languages, and there are minimal citations of it in the literature, but it remains the

“only monograph devoted to a systematic investigation of Augustine’s writings on the liturgy.”20 Roetzer examined the church year, the environment of worship, the

Eucharist, other sacraments, dedication of churches, and liturgical structures with liberal citations from Augustine’s writing. By doing so, he provided an invaluable index to Augustine’s interaction with worship. One might think that Roetzer provided us with a counter-example to the sign in Cassiodorus’s library (“Anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine is a liar”) but for one large and obvious lacuna in Roetzer’s comprehensive analysis: he completely ignored non-Eucharistic daily prayer.21 In what he does cover, Roetzer was highly analytic, and he should be considered foundational for studies of Augustine’s liturgy; he tells us what Augustine said or wrote, but does not attempt to peel back the layers of expression one more level to arrive at that of which

Augustine spoke.

Angelo Marini updated Roetzer’s work in La Celebrazione Eucaristica Presieduta da Sant’Agostino.22 WhilePREVIEW restricted to the Eucharist and its environment, Marini is quite comprehensive and fair. He does show an unfortunate tendency to lump together

19 W.C. Bishop, “The African Rite,” Journal of Theological Studies 13 (1911): 250-276. 20 Pier Franco Beatrice, “Christian Worship,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 157. 21 cf. Confessiones 5.9.16, Enarratio in Psalmo 49.23. 22 Angelo Marini, La Celebrazione Eucaristica Presieduta da Sant’Agustino (Brescia: Pavoniana, 1989).

13 everything that is happening in North Africa (more freely combining Tertullian and

Cyprian than might be justified), or in Augustine’s time (assuming that Augustine would be following the catechetical practices of his ecclesial father, Ambrose), with the documentary evidence from Augustine himself. Additionally, Klaus Gamber, particularly in “Ordo Missae Africanae”23 has provided important corrections and new information.

William Harmless provided the only English-language monograph on Augustine and liturgy in Augustine and the Catechumenate, which has been an important source as we have been exploring this particular part of Augustine’s life and thought—far beyond the relatively few citations. Harmless structured his study around the generic fourth- century model of catechesis expressed in the Roman Catholic Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). However, unlike Marini, Harmless does not allow his pastoral concerns to cloud a clear vision of Augustine. Harmless recently extended his study to the catechetical implications of the sermons discovered by Françoise Dolbeau in Mainz. 24

All of these studies hold in common the need to take a synthetic approach to our exploration of Augustine’sPREVIEW comments on worship. We cannot simply translate text, but rather we must engage in a hermeneutic which takes into account the various modes of his expression: artistic, homiletic, theological, and liturgical.

23 Klaus Gamber, “Ordo Missae Africanae: Der nordfrikanische Meßritus zur Zeit des hl. Augustinus,” Römische Quartalschrift 64 (1969): 139-153. 24 William Harmless, “The Voice and the Word: Augustine’s Catechumenate in Light of the Dolbeau Sermons,” Augustinian Studies 35 (2004): 17-42.

2. Augustine, aesthetics, and theological aesthetics

By the simple mention of these terms in the context of a study of Augustine, I am proposing a particular sort of lens that is not indigenous to Augustine’s own thought. While pulchrum—the beautiful—is at the core of Augustine’s thought, aesthetics, in the objective study of beauty as a transcendental is not. The term and discipline was proposed by Alexander Baumgarten in 1750 in Aesthetica, as the science of sensory cognition (scientia cognitiones sensitivae25). Through the work of philosophers such as

Immanuel Kant and theologians like Søren Kierkegaard, aesthetics has come to be understood as the philosophy of art (and in contemporary discourse, the philosophy of

“artistic artifacts,”26), and a radical disjunction is posited between theological and aesthetic reflection.

This disciplinary separation is reflected in the study of Augustine, beauty, and desire. In the 1930’s and early 1940’s there was a burst of initial studies. Of these the most significant was Karel Svoboda’s L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses Sources.27 In this work Svoboda established what have been the standard readings of De pulchro et apto, and provided importantPREVIEW studies of other primarily early works, particularly De musica.

25 It is interesting to contrast Baumgarten’s limited phenomenological definition with Augustine’s definition of music in De musica 1.2.2: “scientia bene modulandi,” which I will consider later in Chapter 2. 26 This concentration on static artifact, i.e., the reduction of art to museology, and the concomitant marginalization of performing arts can easily be seen by perusing periodicals such as the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism or by examining curricula of departments of philosophy which offer specializations in aesthetics. 27 Karel Svoboda, L’esthétique de saint Augustin et ses sources (Brno: Spisy Filosofické Masarykovy University V Brno, 1933).

15 Etienne Gilson (with The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine28) and his student Emmanuel

29 Chapman (Saint Augustine’s Philosophy of Beauty ) form a second generation. Both Gilson and Chapman tend to see Augustine as little more than a very important precursor of

Thomas Aquinas. Standing alone in almost fifty years of a desert of scholarship, Robert

O’Connell reintroduced the discipline of aesthetics to Augustine in Art and the Christian

Intelligence in St. Augustine,30 though it would be more accurate to categorize his work as a study of Augustine’s philosophy of art.

A second wave of the study of Augustine’s aesthetics had to await a redefinition and reintegration of aesthetics and theology. While theologians of the resourcement, such as Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Henri de Lubac began the process, the magnum opus of the task was Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit: Eine Theologische Ästhetik in

1961.31 Balthasar argued that the health of both theology and art depends on their relationship, for beauty, separated from its Source, becomes little more than a trivial and unimportant “prettiness” and theology, separated from the beauty of the incarnation and its manifestation in the world, becomes a mere rationalism of scripture, history, andPREVIEW tradition. Balthasar proposed two paradigms for that

28 Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York: Random House, 1960), a translation of Introduction à L’étude de saint Augustin (Paris, Vron: 1943). 29 Emmanuel Chapman, Saint Augustine’s Philosophy of Beauty (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939). 30 Robert O’Connell, Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 31 Translated as The Glory of the Lord: I: Seeing the Form, ed. Andrew Louth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984).

16 relationship: Aesthetic Theology and Theological Aesthetics.32 Aesthetic theology is

theology which is done in conversation with, interpretation of, or service to the arts or a specific art form, and theological aesthetics is the study of the Glory of God as it manifests itself in the beautiful. As might be gathered from his title, Balthasar positioned his own thought firmly within theological aesthetics, but in doing so demonstrated one of the dangerous weaknesses of this particular method: in the fifteen volumes of The Glory of God, Theo-drama, and Theo-logic, there was almost no mention of art, and less of the creators of the art.

Among those who address this omission by picking up the gauntlet of aesthetic theology are Frank Burch Brown33 and Jeremy Begbie.34 The Society for the Arts in

Religious and Theological Studies is also a leader in the study of arts within the context of theology.

However the developments in theological aesthetics are more relevant to my own method. Significant works in this area, outside of Balthasar himself and PREVIEW

32 Roland Chia, “Theological Aesthetics or Aesthetic Theology? Some Reflections on the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Scottish Journal of Theology 49 (1996): 75-95, provides a useful summary of Balthasar’s discussion in Balthasar, Glory of the Lord: I, 45-127. 33 Most prominently in Frank Burch Brown, Religious aesthetics : a theological study of making and meaning (Princeton. N.J: Princeton University Press, 1989). 34 Begbie’s most significant effort in this area is Theology, music, and time (Cambridge: University Press, 2000).