Review: The Way of Humility – Discourses on Minerva

Saint Augustine is the towering figure who looms over western theology. Almost all people are familiar with his name through the Confessions, his semi-autobiographical work. Others know he wrote a big book called The City of God, even if they haven’t taken the adventure of reading that monumental tome. Others also know him as the Doctor of Grace, the theologian who confront the Pelagian and Semi-Pelagian crisis of the early fifth century and articulated a salvific theology where God’s grace acts and moves first in all human life. Yet Augustine the theologian was, for most of his Christian life, Augustine the preacher—a man who would preach to his congregation in Hippo as much as three times a day, surrounded not by the educated and elite audience his liberal arts education trained him but a more plainspoken and common people of farmers, fishermen, and slaves.

Augustine’s theology of preaching, in comparison to his other contributions, remain understudied. Charles G. Kim Jr., an assistant professor of theology and classical languages at Saint Louis University, tries to correct this problematic hole in Augustinian scholarship with his latest work, The Way of Humility: St. Augustine’s Theology of Preaching. While there have been some studies on Augustine’s preaching in the past, Kim is keen to point out that our reliance on dated scholarship is problematic. Even the great Peter Brown, Augustine’s preeminent biographer and historian of late antiquity, falls into the trap of thinking Augustine’s primary congregational audience was a more educated middle-class in Hippo rather than a poorer and more commonfolk audience that becomes apparent when carefully studying the language and metaphors of Augustine’s surviving sermons.

In the Confessions and City of God, Augustine, though indebted to the Platonists for helping him move closer to Christ, accosts them for their pride—their lack of humility. This is especially true when Augustine turns his focus to the Neoplatonist Porphyry in the latter half of the first half of the City of God. Augustine argues that the Platonists cannot accept Christ as the Mediator between God and man and therefore the embodied wisdom that they seek because of their self-love, their pride, which they jealously protect: I and I alone am the discoverer of truth. It wasn’t until Augustine was humbled through his encounter with the scriptures coupled with the infant Christ speaking to him in Milan: Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege, that he was able to throw off his intellectual pride and submit himself to the humility of a Galilean carpenter and fisherman who was also the incarnate Deity, the only mediator between God and man.

“Humility,” Kim says, “both in word and deed, is central to the preaching of Augustine.” In fact, “it is impossible to think of Augustine’s theology of preaching without considering the virtue of humility.” What follows in The Way of Humility is a tremendous examination of Augustine’s preaching style and what it reveals about him and the theology communicated in his surviving sermons. Kim asserts that Augustine understood his role as a preacher was as a teacher, not to showcase his intelligence and education as a teacher, but to serve as a humble servant of the Saving Teacher, Christ, “Augustine recognizes that he is an example for his congregation as their preacher. He wants that example to be drawn from the bible witness of Paul and of Christ.”

…

Read the rest of the review, first published at VOEGELINVIEW, 25 August 2024.

________________________________________________________________

Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

________________________________________________________________

Support Wisdom: https://paypal.me/PJKrause?locale.x=en_US

Venmo Support: https://www.venmo.com/u/Paul-Krause-48

My Book on Literature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1725297396

My Book on Plato: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BQLMVH2

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paul_jkrause/ (@paul_jkrause)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_jkrause (@paul_jkrause)

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@paul.j.krause