Prayer After Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition (Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology)

__Prayer after Augustine__ explores the place of prayer in the works of Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict, three figures critically important to the development of Latin medieval philosophical and theological thought. Part I offers a chronologically ordered reconstruction of Augustine’s understanding of prayer, tracing both theological reflections and practices from his early philosophical dialogues to his late anti-Pelagian polemical works. Part II investigates how Boethius in his __Opuscula sacra__ and __De consolatione Philosophiae__ and Benedict in his __Regula__ take up Augustine’s understanding of prayer. For all three authors, the virtue of patience emerges as the means through which they struggle to confront the chasm between time and eternity, mortality and immortality, and humanity and divinity. At the heart of this book’s approach is an argument for a more complex understanding of religious and moral traditions that appreciates the subtleties with which late antique authors draw on their predecessors’ works and lives. By proposing a distinction between two levels of tradition—Augustinianism 1 and Augustinianism 2—this book argues for a distinction between the act of citing, referencing, and alluding to another author, and the use of general orientations and constellations of thought borrowed from another author. As Boethius and Benedict exemplify, the development of a religious tradition may oftentimes be less an affair of dialectical reasoning and more an expansion and refinement of devotional sensibilities. "The influence of the theology and philosophy of Augustine of Hippo on subsequent Western thought and culture is undisputed. Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition argues that the notion of the 'Augustinian tradition' needs to be re-thought; and that already in the generation after Augustine in the West such a re-thinking is already and richly manifest in more than one influential form. In this work, Jonathan D. Teubner encourages philosophical, moral, and historical theologians to think about what it might mean that the Augustinian tradition formed in a distinctively Augustinian fashion, and considers how this affects how they use, discuss, and evaluate Augustine in their work. This is exemplified by Augustine's reflections on prayer and how they were taken up, modified, and handed on by Boethius and Benedict, two critically influential figures for the development of Latin medieval philosophical and theological cultures. Teubner analyses and exemplifies the particular theme of prayer and the other topics it constellates in Augustine and to show how it already forms a distinctively 'Augustinian' concept of tradition that was to prove to have fascinatingly diverse manifestations. Part I traces the development of Augustine's understanding of prayer. Patience and hope as articulated in prayer sit at the centre of Augustine's understanding of Christian existence. In Part II, Teubner turns to suggest how this is picked up by Boethius and Benedict." -- From publisher's website Acknowledgments Contents Introduction PART I A Theological Prelude 1. Learning to Pray 2. Prayer as Acceptance of Time 3. Prayer as Reception of the Other 4. Prayer as the Hope of Wisdom PART II A Historiographical Interlude 5. The Augustinianism 1 of the Opuscula sacra 6. The Augustinianism 2 of The Consolation of Philosophy 7. The Augustinianism 1 of the Rule of St Ben 8. The Augustinianism 2 of the Rule of St Benedict An Ethical Postlude Bibliography Index This study provides an account of Augustine's understanding of prayer and its importance to his theology by drawing on his practices as monk and bishop.