Why is Augustine so widely read? Did Augustine contribute any big stock insights that contemporary scholarship values? I know City of God is a classic, but I'm talking more about his style and argumentation.
I think the key things that made Augustine so widely read are:
(1) His exceptionally clear, elegant, and readable writing style.
Augustine was always a student of rhetoric and it shows in his work: he is typically Latin in this respect and favours the no-nonsense, straightforward clarity of Cicero rather than the more flowery stuff you find in the Greek rhetoricians and classically trained theologians (such as the Cappadocian fathers). I think there is no-one else from late antiquity who writes as well as Augustine. Not only is he clear, but his arguments are straightforward and reasonable, he is honest about what he thinks and why, and you get a very real sense of him as a personality. Perhaps the bottom line is simply that he seems very likeable. Whatever one may think of his doctrines, Augustine comes across as a decent, honest person, who argues out of concern for the truth rather than for personal glory, and who treats his intellectual opponents with respect. Remember that his
Confessions was a very innovative kind of book - a spiritual autobiography written as a prayer, but incorporating a lot of pure philosophy as well - and it was recognised as a classic within his lifetime (the Pelagian controversy began when Pelagius, attending a public reading of this book, protested at some of the ideas in it). Similar innovation can be found in his other works too. I remember when I first read
On the Trinity, and expected it to follow the lines of all the other patristic works on this subject I'd encountered. In fact it is completely different in style and argumentation; if Augustine had written nothing else he would still be a major figure.
Augustine was also an immensely talented and charismatic preacher, and his voluminous sermons have been an important source of material to preachers ever since.
There is also the fact that Augustine wrote
so much, something which to an extent served him badly personally because he had less time to read other people's works (people read more slowly in antiquity than we do). The sheer quantity of his writings meant that in antiquity and the Middle Ages, while no-one might have read everything he wrote, most people would have read at least something.
(2) His mastery of philosophical and theological issues.
None of the other church fathers can match Augustine as a philosopher, with the possible exception of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa - both of whom wrote in Greek, meaning they had far fewer readers in the west. Augustine's earliest surviving works are basically philosophy (admittedly not particularly good philosophy, in my opinion, but still). When he came to devote himself to Christian topics he was able to bring such a weight of learning to it - but without being pedestrian or dull - that his discussion was quite authoritative. Plus, he was a very creative thinker, with that special talent of taking ideas that had been knocking around for years and doing something new with them, but without being so radical as to be generally unacceptable.
(3) His importance in the doctrinal debates of his day.
Augustine was a major figure, personally, in the Manichaean, Donatist, and Pelagian controversies, and had something to say about pretty much everything that was going on at the time. He was invited to the council of Ephesus in 431 to weigh in on the Nestorian controversy, and was prevented from going only by the fact that he had died the previous year (news travelled slowly in Vandal-ravaged Africa). That indicates the prestige which this bishop of an unimportant town enjoyed, based upon his personal stature and the popularity of his books. So his writings weren't simply big and impressive tomes about these matters, they were written in the heat of controversy and were themselves pioneering, advancing or defending new ideas. They were, in effect, the source material for those controversies.
These various factors led to Augustine becoming extremely widely read in his day and immediately afterwards - at least in the Latin-speaking west. (He was never anywhere near as important in the Greek-speaking east, where his association with the
Filioque made him an object of suspicion. However, he was still venerated there, at least officially, and there was something of a brief revival of interest in him when his works were translated into Greek in the Renaissance.) In the case of his Pelagian writings, they were still the object of acute controversy, especially in Gaul, where many people thought he had gone too far, although eventually his authority was (mostly) absolute. This initial period of influence basically never ended, because all of the major figures of the next few generations were so influenced by him, above all Boethius. His theological writings were profoundly Augustinian. By the time the Middle Ages came along, Augustine was pretty much
the authority on pretty much everything. Although there were considered to be four major doctors of the church - Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory the Great, and Jerome - Augustine was by far the most important. Ambrose was a great preacher and a good theologian, but no philosopher and not very innovative. Gregory was a great preacher and commentator, but not really a theologian or philosopher. Jerome was a great scholar and controversialist, but not much else. Augustine was all of these things rolled into one.
I was thinking just now..
As a Roman Catholic, the Canon texts of the bible are canon because, put simply, the Roman Catholic Church says so. The RCC being the authority on these matters and such. However, that lead me to wonder why there wasn't more divergence as to canonical texts after the protestant reformation. After all, the authority being broken on every other matter...
While I know there are some divergences between the Protestant faiths as to what they regard as Canon, these seem relatively minor. But was there any issue in the reformation as to changing the canon? Or were apocraphyl texts etc. simply non-issues then?
I don't know much about the Reformation so I can't answer this very authoritatively. However, it's important to remember that the Reformation grew, in part, out of the Renaissance. The Renaissance interest in antiquity and denigration of the Middle Ages influenced the Reformers' desire to strip away what they saw as the accumulated superstition of the Middle Ages and get back to the pure faith of the fathers. Luther and Calvin were both (in different ways) humanists and were influenced by the new emphasis on the scholarly examination and evaluation of ancient texts, including new ideas about dating and authorship. Now in the case of the canon, it had always been known that the deuterocanonical books were - well - deuterocanonical, even though they were regarded as part of the canon, but only in a secondary way. It was known that these books were not in the Hebrew canon although they were in the Greek and the Vulgate. At the time of the Reformation a number of humanist scholars were of the opinion that they should not be regarded as canonical - remember that there had been, at that point, no ecumenical council or similar definitively laying down the canon. (There had been various councils which listed the canonical books, I believe, most notably a couple in Africa in the 390s, but the Catholic canon even by the sixteenth century was more a matter of tradition than of clear stipulation.) So it was really quite natural for Luther and his followers to hold that the deuterocanonical books should be excluded from the canon, on the basis that they were not part of the "original" Christian canon. As far as I know there was not much controversy among the initial Protestants about this. Luther of course went further and tried to exclude a number of New Testament books from the canon as well. He had much less success with this, as there were no good humanist reasons for doing so - his dislike of James, for example, was doctrinally motivated and had nothing to do with scholarship. German Lutheran Bibles still print these works at the end of the New Testament, but they are nevertheless included.
The Catholic authorities, of course, would have no truck with this messing about with the canon, and were careful to stipulate that the deuterocanonical books were truly canonical at the Council of Trent.