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Strategies in Jacobean Polemic: The Use and Abuse of St Augustine in English Theological Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Robert Dodaro osa  and
Michael Questier
Robert Dodaro osa
Affiliation:
Collegio Santa Monica, Via Paolo VI (gia S. Uffizio),25,1-000195 Rome, Italy
Michael Questier
Affiliation:
Worcester College, Oxford OX2 2HB
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Extract

It is well known that following the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 English Catholic and Protestant polemicists turned to the Church Fathers, and particularly to St Augustine, for source material with which to bolster their doctrinal arguments. Augustine's works were, of course, the basis for so many Reformation controversies, yet the theological disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were entirely different from those of the Early Church. Further development and refinement of doctrine had created a wide gulf between the two periods. Early modern polemic was therefore relying on patristic sources which at times were patently inappropriate. It might therefore be thought that there would be little to be gained from an examination of its use of the Fathers, particularly as there was no reason for bitterly opposed polemicists to take a restrained, objective, or even particularly discerning approach to the patristic sources in order to refute the ‘errors’ of the other side. Historians of the English Reformation have indeed shown little interest in the seventeenth century's preoccupation with St Augustine, the most widely cited of the patristic writers. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that in this period ‘the true meaning of St Augustine was the object of as much unprofitable speculation as has ever been expended on the equally inscrutable mind of God’. Those historians who have dealt briefly with polemical technique in this period have suggested that seventeenth-century uses of patristic texts were likely to be primitive. J. C. H. Aveling argued that both Catholic and Protestant writers were afflicted by the same weaknesses: their understanding of source texts was undermined by a ‘cult of great erudition’ which was essentially shallow.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 432 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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17 Cf. Contra epist. Manich., 5, CSEL xxv. 197, in which there is no evidence to support Crompton's argument that were the Church to have departed from Scripture, Augustine would not depart from the authority of Christ.

18 Augustine wrote ‘non igitur debet ecclesia se Christo praeponere’ but Crompton substituted ‘Ecclesia non debet se Christo praeponere’, eliding the significant ‘igitur’: Crompton, , Saint Austins Summes, 38Google Scholar; Contra Cresconium 2. 21, 26, CSEL lii. 385.

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20 Brereley, , Sainct Austines Religion, 35Google Scholar; De baptismo v. 23, 31, CSE L li. 289. He cites Scripture in this section of De baptismo only to show how it accords with his own understanding of the tradition relative simply to rebaptism. Nor does he state in this section that heretics rely on Scripture alone and not tradition.

21 Brereley, , Sainct Austines Religion, 36Google Scholar; De Genesi ad litteram x. 23, CSEL xxviii. 326–7. Augustine says that infant baptism is within apostolic tradition and not Scripture, but does not thus make the point which Brereley drew from it. Augustine is speaking in this text of a traditio in the restricted sense of liturgical custom. He did not believe that the doctrines of the Church could ever be in conflict with the Scriptures. See Karpp, J., ‘Bibel IV: die Funktion der Bibel in der Kirche, 1: Alte Kirche’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie vi, Berlin 1980, 48–59Google Scholar; Studer, B., La riflessione teologica nella chiesa imperiale, Rome 1989 (sec. iv, ch. v), 142–66Google Scholar.

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23 Crompton intended to use Augustine's statement as evidence that Augustine did not hold absolutely to the infallibility of Church tradition since the Church later rejected a position affirmed and taught by Cyprian. Crompton, however, fails to note that Augustine explicitly states in the same text that it was because of the greater authority of a plenary church council (Aries, AD 314) that the Church and Augustine had rejected Cyprian's teaching.

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26 Crompton, , Saint Austins Summes, 63Google Scholar. See also Crompton's use of Augustine's commentary on Psalm 108, where he argues, correctly, that Augustine thought Christ intended the granting of the keys to Peter not as the ‘head’ of the apostles but as a metaphor for the Church: Crompton, , Saint Austins Summes, 65Google Scholar; Enarrat. in Ps. cviii. 1, CCSL 1. 1585. See Chadwick, H., Augustine, Oxford 1986, 83–4Google Scholar; La Bonnardiére, A. -M., ‘Tu es Petrus: la péricope “Matthieu 16, 13–23” dans l'œuvre de saint Augustin’, Irenikon xxxiv (1961), 451–99Google Scholar; Eno, R., ‘Forma Petri-Petrus, figura ecclesiae: the uses of Peter’, Augustiniana xli (1991), 659–76, at pp. 671–6Google Scholar.

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36 Brereley, , Sainct Austines Religion, 48Google Scholar; Enarrat. in Ps. xlvii. 2, CCS L xxxviii. 539; Contra litt. Pet., 2. 32, 74, CSEL lii. 62–3.

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38 See Evans, R., One and Holy: the Church in Latin patristic thought, London 1972, 94–6Google Scholar.

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40 Brereley, , Sainct Austines Religion, 36Google Scholar; ep. liv. 1, CSEL xxxiv/2, 159–60. See also van der Brink, J. N. Bakhuizen, ‘Traditio im theologischen Sinne’, Vigiliae Christianae xiii (1959), 65–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Congar, Y., Tradition and Traditions: an historical and a theological essay, trans. Naseby, Michael and Rainborough, Thomas, London 1966, 42–50, 138–55Google Scholar.

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42 The Manicheans were a sect which claimed to be the rightful heir of Christ's revelation. Augustine argues against them that all true teaching is to be found only within the Church (and may be verified by reference to apostolicity). In Augustine's words, as translated by Brereley, Rome ‘from the Apostolical sea by successions of Bishops haith obtained the hight of authority’: Brereley, , Sainct Austines Religion, 53Google Scholar.

43 Ibid. 54, citing the Centurists who ‘confesse that he [Augustine] laboured much for the primacy of the Roman Church, which is evident by al his epistles’. Unusually, this is one occasion on which Crompton does not give details of Catholic dissent, something which he tries to do in most sections of his tract.

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47 Ibid. 59–60.

48 Anthony Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: the demise of a Jacobean consensus’. We are very grateful to Dr Milton for allowing us to see and quote from this forthcoming essay.

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51 Ibid: ’Daher sind aber auch ecclesia mixta und ecclesia sancta nicht zwei getrennte Wirklichkeiten, sondern zwei von verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten her gewonnene Begriffe der einen komplexen kirchlichen Wirklichkeit, die wenigstens zur Zeit noch so ist, daβ sie nicht einfach in zwei getrennte Wirklichkeiten zerlegt werden kann.’

52 Milton, ‘The Church of England’.

53 The convert, Walter Montagu, emphasises the effect which Protestant divisions of this kind had in influencing his change of religion: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 853, fo. 154.

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