Augustinianism

Identifying Augustinianism

The extent to which there has been a cohesive tradition of political Augustinianism has generated historical controversy. Some historians analyze the direct influence of Augustine's writings on other writers and their continuing use and development of Augustine's conceptual framework. Other commentators look at the extent to which independent forms of Augustinianism, sometimes based on misunderstandings of Augustine's actual thought, have developed.

Anselmist, Thomist, and Avicennist thought provided alternative theological models to Augustinianism and generated complex subvariants of medieval Augustinian thought. For example, the French historian Gilson identified two important variants of Augustinianism in the medieval period: Aristotelian Augustinianism represented by figures such as the Italian scholastic Bonaventure (1221–1274) and Avicennian Augustinianism represented by, among others, the English scholastic Grosseteste (1170–1253).

The Church Fathers

Augustine forms part of the patristic tradition of Christianity. Western Christianity gives special attention to the first eight centuries of Christian writings, which established the doctrine and practice of Christianity as a religion. Ambrose (c. 340–397 CE), Augustine, Jerome (c. 340/342–420), and Pope Gregory I (540–604) were all named as the great doctors of the Western church by a papal decree of 1298 in recognition of the benefit that the church had derived from their teachings. This status gave Augustine's writings special authority for later Christian writers.

Political Augustinianism

In the 1930s, the French writer H.-X. Arquillière connected political Augustinianism with the medieval erosion of the distinction between the state and the church in Christendom. Arquillière makes a clear distinction between Augustine and Augustinianism, arguing that later interpretations of Augustine do not necessarily coincide with the actual thought of Augustine, even where later writers have quoted directly from Augustine's major political work The City of God (413–427). Arquillière argued that medieval Augustinianism oversimplified Augustinian concepts, particularly with regard to the relations of church and state. [Page 93]This form of political Augustinianism collapsed natural law into supernatural law and the law of the state into that of the church. Arquillière sees two Christian figures as being particularly implicated in this growth of medieval political Augustinianism: Gregory the Great (540–604) and Isidore of Seville (560–636).

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