Augustine

Saint Augustine (Tagaste, 354 – Hippo, 430) is commonly considered to be one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church. Oriented towards a merging of Neoplatonic thought and Christianity, his thinking became central to Catholic theology. Particularly in the Middle Ages, under Saint Bonaventure and the Franciscan Movement, the Augustinian school blossomed, in juxtaposition to the Aristolelianism favoured by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. That Dante was familiar with Augustine’s main writings is indicated by a number of generic references (Mon., III 3 13; Ep., XI 16; Conv., IV 9 8, 21 14, 28 9; Par., X 120, XXXII 35), and by a few direct quotations from Confessions, (in Conv., I 2 14 and 4 9), De Quantitate Animae (in Ep., XIII 80), De Civitate Dei (Mon., III 4 7) and De Doctrina Christiana (ivi, III 4 8). Besides such textual references, however, Augustinian thought provided Dante with substantial and decisive input, both on the emotional and purely ideological level, for the creation of his complex cultural universe, although Dante’s forma mentis nonetheless remains fundamentally Aristotelian. Consider for example the centrality for both Augustine and Dante of the theme of conversion from sin, the difficult journey and the gradual progress towards salvation, which structures the theme-theology and the actual narrative of Augustine’s Confessions and Dante’s Commedia. In particular, textual and other similarities can be found in the regio dissimilis where Augustine finds himself in Book VII of the Confessions and the woods where Dante loses his way in the prologue to Commedia. In emphasizing the strongly exemplary value of the life of its agens-auctor, Dante’s poem also represents an exceptional phase in the development of Christian spiritual autobiography, a genre initiated by Saint Augustine’s Confessions.