Augustine and the Humanists: Reading the 'City of God' from Petrarch to Poliziano ed. by Guy Claessens and Fabio Della Schiava (review)

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• Augustine and the Humanists: Reading the ‘City of God’ from Petrarch to Poliziano ed. by Guy Claessens and Fabio Della Schiava
• Patrick Ball

Claessens, Guy, and Fabio Della Schiava, eds, Augustine and the Humanists: Reading the ‘City of God’ from Petrarch to Poliziano (Colibri. Collected Studies in History and Literature, 2), Gent, LYSA Publishers, 2021; hardback; pp. 480; 21 colour plates; R.R.P. €75.00; ISBN 9789464447620.

Augustine called De civitate Dei his ‘magnum opus’; it is a leading source of theological thinking about the history, destiny, and politics of Christianity. It also yields abundant information about its period, the tipping point between pagan antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages: facts about Rome’s pre-Christian religion, extensive citation of lost classical sources, and miscellaneous detail (such as that it was customary to scatter powdered charcoal under boundary markers, so nobody could get away with shifting the stones afterwards). As the Middle Ages’ Godcentred mentality gave way to Renaissance humanism, there was the potential for new uses of City of God to emerge—for it to evolve from a theological authority into a repository of antiquarian knowledge. To date, though, there has been little interest in exploring humanists’ engagement with it. This volume attempts to address that oversight. An introductory chapter by Eric Saak precedes fifteen contributions, each detailing one scholar’s engagement with the work (or, in the case of Antonio Manfredi’s chapter, two scholars: Tommaso Parentucelli and Giovanni Tortelli). Elisa Brilli concludes the volume with an interesting study of manuscript illuminations of De civitate Dei and what these imply about changing understandings of Augustine’s ‘City’ over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The contributors address the topic from varied angles. A uniform approach is not authorised or necessarily possible given the available evidence. One common, basal mode of investigation assesses Augustine’s influence by estimating the number of his works the humanist in question possessed or had read and the frequency of references to him in that individual’s writings. More is not always feasible. The most rewarding chapters succeed in providing further context. For instance, Fabio Forner describes how Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pius II, deployed Augustine’s other writings, during the standoff between the papacy and [End Page 221] the Council of Cardinals, in defence of the cardinals before switching sides to the papal camp. Then, once the Turks captured Constantinople, he began citing and modelling his own writings on City of God, itself inspired by the Visigoths’ sack of Rome. Sometimes there is enough evidence to allow focus on something specific in a scholar’s use of the work. Thus, Sam Urlings gives a rundown of City of God’s place in the Florentine Republic’s political thought, before turning to Coluccio Salutati’s account of the rape of Lucretia, the Roman Republic’s foundation myth—an account that implicitly critiques Augustine’s presentation of the rape. A few chapters treat Augustine’s general influence, not City of God’s, perhaps as there was little to say about the latter. It may be no coincidence that those contributions that engage most directly with the topic include the ones written by the editors (Fabio Della Schiava on Biondo Flavio, and Guy Claessens and Jeroen De Keyser on Francesco Filelfo). Della Schiava and Claessens’s awareness of these men’s especially close engagement with Augustine may have inspired the project.

Explicit connections between chapters can be observed, including commonalities in humanists’ responses to Augustine’s work. Several contributors describe the defensive use of City of God, from Petrarch onward, to counter condemnations of the reading of pagan philosophy or poetry. Here was an unimpeachable authority who had made extensive use of both to support his arguments. For Valerio Sanzotta, Marsilio Ficino invoked Augustine in the service of Platonism as a ‘protective shield for a philosophical program that was [...] profoundly un-Augustinian in its essence’ (p. 377). There seems to be agreement that the humanists under consideration engaged with Augustine in complex ways. Petrarch used him to oppose scholastic objections to pagan authors, but his response ultimately involved ‘disappropriation’ (Saak, p. 39). Later humanists essentially followed suit. Clementina Marsico’s observation that Lorenzo...