Antiquitopia

I am beginning to wonder if there is anything Augustine does not discuss in his massive collection of works. To the perennial question--"why do men have nipples?"--Augustine as always has an answer: There are some details in the body which are there simply for aesthetic reasons, and for no practical purpose--for example, the nipples of a man's chest, and the beard on his face, the latter being clearly for a masculine ornament, not for protection. (Augustine, City of God 22.24; trans. Bettenson) The "Great Artist," as Augustine calls God in his final books of the City of God , made male nipples and beards as ornaments, for purely aesthetic purposes. Indeed, an artist as accomplished as God is not limited to practicalities.

Augustine discusses why seemingly unnatural things--like miracles, omens, and portents--are in fact natural. The argument is based upon the omnipotence of God. God creates all things by willing them. The process of willing is a natural consequence of God's omnipotence. If all things occur by God's will, and all things that occur by God's will naturally occur, then all things are natural: there can be no unnatural occurrences. His argument concerning the naturalness of portents is against his favorite punching-bag throughout the City of God, Varro (he is his favorite opponent, however, because he is one of the most formidable): For how can an event by contrary to nature when it happens by the will of God, since the will of the great Creator assuredly is the nature of every created being? ( City of God 21.8) While this somewhat recapitulates my summary, it takes things a step further. It is not just that all things willed (created) by God are natural because creation...

For the most part, reading Augustine's City of God can be a bore, but at times a passage just jumps out at you, like this one on rare and incredible bodily manipulations: We do in fact find among human beings some individuals with natural abilities very different from the rest of mankind and remarkable by their very rarity. Such people can do some things with their body which are for others utterly impossible and well-nigh incredible when they are reported. Some people can even move their ears, either one at a time or both together. Others without moving the head can bring the whole scalp-all the part covered with hair-down towards the forehead and bring it back again at will. Some can swallow an incredible number of various articles and then with a slight contraction of the diaphragm, can produce, as if out of a bag, any article they please, in perfect condition. There are others who imitate the cries of birds and beasts and the voices of any other men, reproducing them so acc...

No one...must try to get to know from me what I know that I do not know, unless, it may be, in order to learn not to know what must be known to be incapable of being known! (Augustine, City of God 12.7) Go ahead, read it again to know what you can know and cannot know or know that you cannot know (which is better than not knowing what you can know) about knowing and not knowing from Augustine.

In his magisterial multi-volume commentary on Leviticus (for Anchor Bible), Jacob Milgrom, interacting with the work of Mary Douglas, suggests that the ancient Israelite system of sacrifice was not merely a bunch of scattered practices, but a unified system--a symbolic system. The unifying factor for Milgrom is death-avoidance. In response, Jonathan Klawans has suggested a two-fold organizing principle: imitatio dei and attracting/maintaing the divine presence (itself sort of a throwback to R.E. Clements, God and Temple ). Klawans presents imitatio dei as the organizing principle and maintaining the divine presence as the function of sacrifice. See my fuller discussion here . I actually like Klawans's thesis, and use a lot of his insights in my dissertation. Interestingly enough, however, the idea that the ancient sacrificial cult was a symbolic system did not begin with Mary Douglas, Jacob Milgrom, and Jonathan Klawans, but St. Augustine (and perhaps earlier), who suggests a...

In the New Testament, Jesus's body is the temple (John 2:19-22) and the community is a temple of the Holy Spirit (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:16f), but in Paul's articulation it is not always clear whether it is the individual or the community--some passages tend toward one or the other, but there is enough ambiguity. Augustine responds quite unequivocally which it is: both. Yet he takes the body/temple connection even further: For we are his temple, collectively, and has individuals. For he ocndescends to dwell in the union of all and in each person. He is as great in the individual as he is in the whole body of his worshippers, for he cannot be increased in bulk or diminished by partition. When we lift up our hearts to him, our heart is his altar. We propitiate him by our priest, his only-begotten Son. We sacrifice blood-stained victims to him when we fight for truth "as far as shedding our blood." We burn the sweetest incense for him, when we are in his sight on fire ...

I became interested in this question in my research into the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice , which consistently refers to heavenly beings as "Gods," rather than merely "Angels." It does refer to "Angels," but they seem to be among the lower rungs of the "Gods"--the "Angels" are "Messengers," the errand-runners. Often this terminology is mistranslated as "Angels" or "Strong Ones" (which is correct in an etymological sense, but then we would have to translate "God" as "Strong One" as well). So, if ancient Jews were comfortable referring to a multitude of divine beings as "Gods," then I guess modern scholars should just face the facts and, when a particular text calls for it, do so as well. I have written far more about this here . Since then, I discovered that it is a title of Jupiter in Virgil's Aeneid (I'll quote this at a later time); it seems to be the title of t...

I was perusing Augustine's City of God , and this passage struck me as perhaps still relevant: "Peace and War had a competition in cruelty; and Peace won the prize. For the men whom War cut down were bearing arms; Peace slaughtered the defenceless. The law of War was that the smitten should have the chance of smiting in return; the aim of Peace was to make sure not that the survivor should live, but that he should be killed without the chance of offering resistance." Augustine, City of God , 3.28.