In 1956, Damasus Trapp published a 129-page article in the journal Augustiniana.¹ That volume was a special issue celebrating the 700th Anniversary of the bull Licet Ecclesiae of Pope Alexander iv, establishing the Ordo Eremitarum Sancti Augustini. It remains perhaps of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the late medieval Augustinian tradition, and Trapp’s article is one of the primary reasons why it is so. Reading Trapp’s article for me was transformative. I still remember sitting deep in the stacks of Doheny Library at the University of Southern California reading it for the first time and having the feeling that somehow this was extremely important, while at the same time realizing that I did not understand a single word. The title of Trapp’s article was “Augustinian Theology in the Fourteenth Century: Notes on Editions, Marginalia, Opinions, and Booklore.” That article was designed as a sketch of a forthcoming work of Trapp’s, which regrettably never appeared.² This present book takes Trapp’s article as its intertext. While I still cannot claim that I understand every word in that article, it is one to which I constantly return, with the same degree of awe, even if with more understanding.

As the intertext for this present work, the subtitle “Notes” applies here as well. The study below should be read as simply “Notes on the Augustinian Theology of the Later Middle Ages.” It makes no claim to be comprehensive, and by intent hopes to serve as a point of departure, much as Trapp’s article did for me; I have been studying the late medieval Augustinian tradition ever since.

Yet even if not comprehensive with the very conscious awareness of the extent to which that is so—since far more work would need to be done on still unknown and only partially known late medieval Augustinians before we could even begin to be able to claim a comprehensive understanding—it is more than a sketch in that it seeks to make a clear argument with sufficient evidence to make it stick. That overarching argument can be summarized in the following four theses:

1. 1.Historically seen, Augustinian theology in the later Middle Ages cannot be reduced to late medieval anti-Pelagianism;
2. 2.Historically seen, Augustinian theology in the later Middle Ages was the theology of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine (oesa);
3. 3.Historically seen, Augustinian theology in the later Middle Ages cannot be reduced or limited to the theological production of the Augustinian Hermits’ university magistri;
4. 4.Historically seen, Augustinian theology in the later Middle Ages was a major catalytic factor in the emergence of the Reformation and Early Modern Europe.

These theses, implicitly and explicitly, have lain behind the majority of my published work, so consequently one could legitimately question why yet another book on the theme is needed. There are, I would claim, two primary reasons. First, acknowledging the work that has been done, and that has been done since my High Way to Heaven in 2002,³ the late medieval Augustinians and their impact on their world have still not entered general representations of the religion and theology of the later Middle Ages. As a case in point, Kevin Madigan’s Medieval Christianity. A New History, which appeared in 2015, treats Augustine in passing but does not even mention the Augustinian Hermits, even when treating the religio-political conflicts of the early fourteenth century.⁴ Other popular works and textbooks ignore the Augustinians as well, while giving at least some importance to the Franciscans and Dominicans.⁵ While scholarly works only “trickle down” to popular works and textbooks very slowly, until the Augustinians and their importance for our understanding of the religious, cultural, intellectual, and political history of the later Middle Ages is recognized, it is essential to continue to emphasize that importance, to underscore it and to elaborate on it, in scholarly works.⁶ Second, while my published books and articles have built towards an over-arching representation of the reception, influence, and impact of Augustine from the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, emphasizing the centrality thereto of the Augustinian Hermits, they have not in and of themselves presented my vision and interpretation of late medieval Augustinianism and its relationship to the origins of Early Modern Europe in its entirety. That is presented here for the first time.

I should note, however, that that vision and interpretation is presented in this present work only in part. Originally, I had conceived of presenting my overall vision and interpretation in a single volume that would have been based on previously published articles and would have carried the account up through the Council of Trent. That soon become increasingly distasteful and I found myself doing increasingly more new research, so that what had started conceptually as a volume of collected articles of sorts grew into a new independent work, since, if for no other reason, I realized that indeed to present my vision and interpretation of late medieval Augustinianism a volume of collected articles, even reworked and expanded, did not actually suffice. It did not do what I had wanted to do. As the conception evolved and grew, it also grew in size so that were I to write a single work it would have ended up being longer, perhaps even substantially so, than my High Way to Heaven (of over 800 pages).⁷ Thus I decided to break it into two works. I may, if time and longevity allow, at some point in the future return to writing the “second” volume with the title, The Confessionalization of Augustine. Augustinianism in the Reformation, which would re-examine the thesis of Eduard Stakemeier that the late medieval Augustinian tradition culminated not in Luther and the Reformation, but in Jerome Seripando and the Council of Trent. Time will only tell, and there are a number of projects I need to complete first beforehand. Yet here I do present my vision of Augustinianism in the later Middle Ages as a whole. This endeavor too, though, grew over time with the consequence that I needed to do it in two volumes, yet two volumes that form a unified whole, even with the first volume appearing first, to be followed shortly by the second. This two-volume work then seeks to establish what late medieval Augustinianism actually was. As such, it stands on its own, as well as providing the requisite point of departure for a re-interpretation of the role and influence of Augustinianism in the Reformation.

This last phrase, however, may appear to be a mis-statement, or a lapse of memory, as a major theme of my work has been the argument that there was no such thing, as such, as “late medieval Augustinianism,” or at least that if we use the term, we should do so historically, whereby only the religious identity of the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine (oesa) can legitimately claim to be described, in a historical rather than in a theological understanding, as late medieval Augustinianism.⁸ I still hold to that position, for it was, and still is, asserted as a means to bring the scholarly debate back to a historical basis rather than one explicitly or implicitly focused on the confessional, theological positions of the ones doing the interpreting. There is good reason to refer to the later Middle Ages as such as an “age of Augustine” or an “age of Augustinianism,” or the “Augustinian later Middle Ages,” yet doing so obscures as much as it might illumine historical contours and developments as did Heiko Oberman’s reference to the “Franciscan Middle Ages.”⁹ “Augustinian traditions” could be a useful term since it would acknowledge the ambiguity and the multiplicity of Augustine’s reception, influence, and impact without attempting to concretize it into any one particular reception, influence, or impact. Keeping that broader, more general perspective in mind, here “late medieval Augustinianism” is understood as referring to the historical phenomena of living as an Augustinian. Thus the qualification “Historically seen” in each of the four theses stated above. In this context we can identify more specific phenomena of how Augustine and his works affected the historical developments of the later Middle Ages. It is far more than an issue of “mere semantics”; it is an issue of historical understanding, and how we describe that understanding, which is, by necessity, always a creation of the historian. We are prisoners to language and the words we use to describe what we observe often shape and create that which we observe. With that recognition as a given, here I attempt to present my interpretation, my understanding, of that specific, determined influence of Augustine and his heritage as it was embodied in the late medieval oesa. This particular reception and appropriation of Augustine was the only historically legitimate referent for the ahistorical term “late medieval Augustinianism.” It was, however, this specific reception, influence, and impact of Augustine that served as a catalyst, at least in part, for the Reformation and emergence of early modern Europe. That, in any case, is the argument in what follows below.

If only it were true. Burnaby wrote these lines in 1938. The better part of a century later, we still live in a world in which pride, hatred and violence seem to be the rulers of the world. My country is being torn apart by hate and violence. In the current political crisis, the current soul searching in trying to figure out who we are as a country, in the current dilemma of individuals balancing the competing instincts of fighting or fleeing, in the conflict of despair and hope, what relevance at all can a study of late medieval Augustinianism have? We are still living in a broken world, and Augustine’s teaching of Love remains the only remedy for the pride, hatred, and violence that continues to infect and comprise the saeculum, regardless of the moralistic and religious rhetoric used for self-justification. In so many ways, not only the late medieval Augustinians, but also Augustine himself has been forgotten, and rendered mute, and that is, perhaps, precisely why this current volume is needed, to remind of a time when Augustine’s doctrines of love fueled the social action of an entire religious institution. It pales in comparison with the need to address gun violence, white supremacy, nationalism, terrorism, corruption, the attack on truth, and global warming, by no means an exhaustive list. And yet as so many in El Paso asserted after the gun violence and white supremacy that exerted its hate on their community in the summer of 2019, love is the means to heal their community, their city, and our country, a position that has been and remains foundational for President Biden, even after the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Burnaby’s words ring eerily true eighty years later, and not completely without reason when we have the courage to recognize the parallel perils. Thus, for what it is worth, as little as it might be, the work that follows is dedicated to the love that Augustine advocated, even if the theme of love itself is not often present explicitly in the pages that follow. It is why I study the late medieval Augustinian tradition, and why I feel it is so essential, and relevant, to our world today, lest we forget the world that led Burnaby to write his lines quoted above.

I don’t know what will happen with my country as I write these lines, and I am rather skeptical of realizing the extent and depth of healing that is needed. Yet there is always hope, even if vague and dim. Being an Augustinian myself, at least in a certain way, I accept as a given that God’s plan and our hopes do not always coincide, if they ever really do (Isaiah 55:8-9). For both history and theology, the comprehensive interpretation of Augustine’s reception, influence, and impact in the later Middle Ages, if it is to be forthcoming at all, will be the work of others. Here I offer only some notes on one part of that reception, influence, and impact, that I hope will serve as points of departure for others, representing as they do the culmination of my work since that first day long ago when I discovered Trapp’s article in Augustiniana 1956 and was transported into a state of awe. The awe remains, even if the understanding has grown, and as the understanding has grown, the awe has likewise just increased. As historians and as theologians we so often portray ourselves as masters of the past. We should recapture the awe and the wonder, not so much as dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, though that we are, but as dwarfs gazing upon the giants of the past in amazement and wonder at the world to which we no longer have access, which we can never visit and never, really, understand, try as we may. If wonder and awe are not what is clearly present in the chapters that follow, the reader should know they are there, underneath, underneath the conventions of our scholarly hubris that are intended to reveal not the scholarly erudition of the historian, but the awe and wonder at the minds, hearts, and lives of those long since dead and gone, whose only voice is that which we can give them, faint and faulty though it may be. May we listen well, we in our grossly impoverished intellectual world, who can only offer up what we can as a means of mourning our loss as we pay tribute to what we cannot hope to recover. If I can serve as a spokesperson for the mute, dead Augustinians, whose voices we still would be well advised to strive to listen to and to hear, I will have met my hopes and goals for my own work. Thus too this book.

The study that follows is a new creation of what is signified explicitly by the term “Augustinian Theology” in the chronological period referenced descriptively by the term “the Later Middle Ages.” Creation it is, and consciously so, but creation is not fiction. The historian is grounded in the existence of her sources, sources that signify, somehow, the muted voices of the past to which the historian has the daunting responsibility of making heard once again. Historical fiction has its place, and if and/or when it is done well, it can enrich our historical understanding. But historical fiction is not history. Just as the historian is a slave to language, so is the historian a slave to the extant sources. Thus in the chapters that follow, I strive to describe, analyze, interpret, and understand the sources of the late medieval Augustinians, or at least some of them, and to present my understanding and interpretation thereof to come to a new understanding and representation of the Augustinian theology of the later Middle Ages, creating thereby a new understanding of late medieval Augustinianism, even as a slave to language and to the sources. I can only hope that fundamentally as simply some “notes” on the Augustinian theology of the later Middle Ages, it may serve itself as a catalyst and inspiration for new and further work on the extant sources, many of which have still never been read, even if only by some future undergraduate, deep in the stacks of her undergraduate library.

While the present volume is a new work, I have, at times, drawn on previously published material. Chapter 1 includes work originally published in articles as: “In the Wake of Lombard: The Reception of Augustine in the Early Thirteenth Century,” Augustinian Studies 46/1 (2015): 71–104; and in part, though here much expanded, “Augustine and Augustinianisms in the Fourteenth Century: The Cases of Petrarch and Robert de Bardis,” in Agostino, Agostinianie Agostinismi nel Trecento Italiano, ed. Johannes Bartuschat, Elisa Brilli and Delphine Carron (Ravenna: Longa, 2018), 127–150. Chapter 2 is comprised for the most part of “In Search of Origins: The Foundation(s) of the oesa,” Analecta Augustiniana 75 (2012): 5–24, and “Living the Augustinian Life in the Later Middle Ages: Daily Life in the oesa and Brother Jordan of Quedlinburg,” in Vita Quotidiana e Tradizioni nei Conventi dell’Ordine di Sant’Agostino, ed. Isaac González Marcos, oesa and Josef Scriberras, osa (Rome, 2018), 113–147. I would like to express my gratitude to the publishers for their permission to reprint such material here.

There are, though, too many people to list each and every one who deserves my recognition and sincere gratitude for all they have done for me. Nevertheless, four individuals, giants of the previous generation, deserve special mention, for this book is in many ways dedicated to their memory, and would not have been possible without them: Damasus Trapp, osa, Adolar Zumkeller, osa, Alberic de Meijer, osa, and Heiko A. Oberman. C.H. Kneepkens, Karl Gersbach, osa, and Martijn Schrama, osa have been foundational and my debt and gratitude to them is profound. To Robert Bast, John Frymire, Andrew Gow, and Karla Pollmann I am more indebted than I can ever repay and more grateful than I can ever express.

Likewise deserving of special mention for a variety of reasons are Pascale Bermon, Monica Brinzei, Robert Christman, Mathijs Lamberigts, Jonathan Reid, Chris Schabel, and Fr. Josef Scriberras, osa. Robert Bast further merits mention and my gratitude for his close reading of the manuscript and his many corrections and suggestions, which have made this book better than it would have been otherwise. The flaws that remain, remain my own. And to my former colleagues in the Department of Divinity of the University of Aberdeen, I can only say thank you, for one brief shining moment …

Twenty years ago, my High Way to Heaven appeared in the Brill series Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions. Working with Brill over the years has been much appreciated and I thank them for their patience. I have promised far more than I have delivered. I cannot sufficiently express my appreciation for the intellectual and scholarly freedom Brill allows, giving priority to authors and scholarship, rather than to concerns of “marketability,” which is ever so rare these days. I am most gratified that this work is published in Brill’s series Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, and I thank the editor, Robert Bast. It is a fitting circle, so to speak, as both smrt and shct were founded by Heiko Oberman, and have continued to publish ground-breaking research. If scholarship is conditioned and limited by trends and the assumed market, true scholarship is dead. Brill is keeping it alive, and for that we all should be grateful.

My greatest debt of all, though, is to my wife, Anja Petrakopoulos. Her love, support, encouragement, courage, strength, and perseverance have been as sustaining during turmoil and crises as they have been inspirational. This work could not have been completed without her.

Eric Leland Saak

Indianapolis

16 July 2021