The purpose and scope

This book aims at providing lists of all known superiors of the religious houses in England and Wales between 1216 and 1377. Like the previous volume, covering the years 940–1216, we have restricted our interpretation of religious house to cover all establishments of monks, regular canons, and nuns, whether of abbatial or lower rank and whether autonomous or dependent. These lists are based on houses in existence between 1216 and 1377 as recorded in the relevant sections of Medieval Religious Houses, England and Wales. A few small houses have failed to reveal the names of any heads and we have intentionally omitted hospitals, colleges, the military orders, and for this period the mendicant orders who arrived in England in the thirteenth century. The decision to omit the last-mentioned was taken partly because of the work that is presently being done on biographical registers of the mendicant friars by such scholars as Dr Michael Robson (Franciscans in England and Wales) and Fr Richard Copsey (Carmelites in England, Scotland and Wales) and the as yet unused research material left by the late Dr A. B. Emden (in the Modern Papers Department of the Bodleian Library, Oxford).

The materials

The one great advantage for compilers of the 1216–1377 volume over the earlier volume, which is at the same time daunting and overwhelming, is the development of record-keeping in the thirteenth century and the consequent great growth of surviving material – both the new series of records and the bulkier continuations of earlier extant series.

Our knowledge of Augustine's world has transformed itself in the last generation. Ever since the work of Gibbon, at least, the fourth and fifth centuries had been marginalized in the historical imagination even of specialists. Gibbon described the decline of the Roman empire as “the triumph of barbarism and religion” (in the form of Christianity). This was too good a story to disregard, and the evidence was overwhelming and unambiguous.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Augustine's work and influence, both in his own period and in the history of Western philosophy after it. Patristic philosophy and theology, and every area of philosophy and theology in the later medieval period, manifest the mark of his thought. In fact, at least until the thirteenth century, when he may have had a competitor in Thomas Aquinas, Augustine is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the medieval period. Furthermore, although his influence is somewhat less after the medieval period, it is still important. Many of his views, including, for example, his theory of the just war, his account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will, his attempted resolution of the problem of evil, and his approach to the relation of faith and reason, have continued to be important up to the present.

There is an enormous scholarly literature on Augustine's account of free will, and it is remarkable for the range of views it contains. Historians of philosophy read Augustine on free will so variously that it is sometimes difficult to believe they are reading the same texts. John Rist says: 'There is still no consensus of opinion on Augustine's view of each man's responsibility for his moral behaviour . . . There are those who attribute to Augustine the full-blown Calvinist position that each man has no say in his ultimate destiny . . . Other interpreters reject this view in varying degrees. They will not hold that for Augustine man's will is enslaved, or they would dispute about the sense in which it is enslaved and the sense in which it is free.'

It is not hard to determine what Augustine meant by predestination. In one of his last works, written for those who opposed him mainly on the issue of predestination, he has this to say about his doctrine: “This is the predestination of the saints, nothing else: plainly the foreknowledge and preparation of God's bene- fits, by means of which whoever is to be liberated is most certainly liberated.” His doctrine has a dark corollary. If you are not one of the saints - one of those looked after by God - you are most certainly lost; your lot in life is to remain part of a ruined race, squandered in sin (massa perditionis). The doctrine of predestination and its corollary, the inevitable ruin of those not predestined to be redeemed, fairly encapsulate a career's worth of theological reflection on Augustine's part. He had arrived at a relentlessly God-driven account of human redemption, and if his own assessment of his development can be credited, he had begun from a place not too dissimilar. I will be marking some of the turns in Augustine's trek to his doctrine of predestination, at least in passing, but the question I most have in mind is less one of how he gets there than why he bothers. What moves him so to emphasize God's role in redemption that to even some of his own most loyal supporters, he seems to have all but obliterated the human part?

Knowledge of the soul is central to Augustine's search for wisdom, as is seen in his claim that he desires “to know God and the soul” (Sol. 1.2.7). And when Reason, with whom he converses in the Soliloquia, presses him as to whether he does not desire to know anything more, he answers, “Absolutely nothing. ” Later he expresses the same desire in his prayer, “God ever the same, may I know you, and may I know myself” (Sol. 2.1.1). Though all living beings have souls, Augustine's principal interest is the human or rational soul. He uses the Latin anima for soul in general, while reserving animus or mens for the rational soul. In his earlier writings he defines the human soul in Platonic fashion as “a certain substance partaking in reason and suited to rule the body” (De quant. anim. 13.22) and says that “a human being, as seen by a human being, is a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body” (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 1.27.52). In later writings he places more emphasis upon the unity of the human being. Though Augustine says that a human being is “a rational soul which has a body,” he also says that “the soul which has a body does not make two persons, but one human being” (In Johannis evangelium tractatus 19.15). A human being can be defined as a single substance with a body and a soul: “If we should define a human being such that a human being is a rational substance consisting of soul and body, there is no doubt that a human being has a soul which is not the body and has a body which is not the soul” (De Trin. 15.7.11).

Augustine, like Newman, was not by temperament inclined to acquiesce in prolonged or systematic doubt. Yet his growing dissatisfaction with Manichaeism, whose dogmatic dualism he had embraced as an eighteen-year-old in 372, made him a temporary skeptic in about 383 or 384, at a particularly insecure and unstable period of his life. A year or two later he encountered Platonism in Milan, and gradually laid the foundations of the theory of cognitive certainty that characterizes his earliest extant writings. He was subsequently to argue polemically that skepticism is a form of despair of finding truth. Yet he considered the refutation of skepticism to be of primary importance. He devoted the first of the programmatic series of philosophical writings of 386-387, Contra Academicos, written in the aftermath of his conversion, to criticism of skeptical positions and defense of the attainability of knowledge. He continued, moreover, to use skeptical arguments and method in his writings: they are found, for example, in his anti-Manichaean polemic from 388 onwards, and some survived in his later, mature thought.

The topic of memory in Augustine's thought includes much of his philosophy of mind, for memory is not a distinct power or faculty of the soul, but the mind itself, from which memory, understanding, or will are distinguished only in terms of their different activities. Memory for Augustine has not merely the rather straightforward role of retaining recollections of past experiences, but also the much more problematic tasks of holding in mind present realities and even of anticipating the future. Augustine's account of memory shows a marked development from his early writings, in which he accepted a Platonic doctrine of reminiscence, up to the works of his maturity, in which he clearly rejects almost all, if not all, traces of such a teaching. In the Confessions, Augustine devotes the first half of Book 10 to a description of the contents of his memory as he searches for God, and in Book 11 memory plays a key role in the perception of time. In De Trinitate, Augustine finds in the memory, understanding, and will of the human soul a series of psychological analogies or images of the three persons in one God.

If there is a God, it is possible that he cannot be known by our reason. If reason could attain to religious truths, faith would be unnecessary. If faith is needed, reason is somehow inadequate. But why? Either because the human mind cannot comprehend the mysteries of God in whole or in part, so that (at least some) religious truths - such as the Resurrection or the Day of Judgment, according to Augustine (De vera relig. 8.14, cf. De Trin. 4.16.21) - are inaccessible to unaided reason; or because such truths cannot be demonstrated and can only be shown to be more or less plausible or possible; or because our minds are now damaged and need to be habituated - by faith, by the practice of the virtues or by both - to reason more effectively, and above all not merely to rationalize.

Augustine's most extensive discussions of philosophical and theological cosmology are found in his commentaries on Genesis (De Genesi contra Manichaeos, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim), in the last three books of the Confessions, and in Books 11 and 12 of the De civitate Dei. The main lines of his view of the creation are as follows. God created both the spiritual realm of angels and the visible world, including the incarnated souls, out of nothing (ex nihilo), without any pre-existing matter or other things outside God, so that ontologically new beings came into existence. The creation was based on an eternal free act of God's perfectly good will. It took place through God's omnipotence without toil, effort, or industry. God created simultaneously all first actualized things and, through “seminal reasons” inherent in them, the conditions of all those things which were to come up to the end of the world. God is the only creator. Created beings cannot bring things into existence out of nothing. God created time in creating movement in the universe. The story of the six days of creation is a metaphor which helps human imagination. Augustine sometimes interprets the “beginning”' (in principio) of Gen. 1.1 as a temporal beginning, but following an established tradition, he also takes it to refer to the Word or the Son of God (John 1.1-3): “In this beginning, God, you made heaven and earth, in your Word, in your Son, in your power, in your wisdom, in your truth” (Conf. 11.9.11).

In Rome at the beginning of his stay in Italy, Augustine became disenchanted with the Manichaeism he had provisionally embraced in Carthage. He found himself increasingly attracted to the skeptical position taken by the Academics, the followers of Arcesilaus and the New Academy, who, as he writes in his Confessions, “held that everything is a matter of doubt and asserted that we can know nothing for certain ” (5.10.19). What Augustine knew of ancient skepticism, including the debate between Arcesilaus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium, he seems to have learned from Cicero's Academica.

By “post-medieval Augustinianism” I shall mean characteristically Augustinian concepts, questions, arguments, responses, and ways of thinking that are prominent in various modern philosophers, whether or not those philosophers ever acknowledge the Augustinian provenance of these aspects of their own thinking. On this way of understanding “Augustinianism ” Descartes is perhaps the most Augustinian of modern philosophers, even though Descartes himself declined to acknowledge that there was any significant affinity between his own thought and that of Augustine (let alone that Augustine had actually influenced his thinking!). Both because Descartes was so profoundly Augustinian in his ways of thinking and because he inaugurated the “post-medieval” period in Western philosophy, I shall begin with him.

In 386, at the age of 32, Augustine converted to Christianity. As he tells the story in the Confessions, the complex and dramatic events that constituted his conversion brought to successful conclusion a search he had begun as a teenager at Carthage with his reading of Cicero's Hortensius. Cicero had inspired in him a passionate yearning for the sort of immortality that comes with wisdom. After more than a decade of fruitless searching, Augustine finally discovered that the wisdom he had longed for was to be found with the God of Christianity. The discovery came in a moment of intellectual vision in which Augustine glimpsed and thereby came at last to understand the divine nature. “At that moment,” he tells us, “I saw [God's] 'invisible nature understood through the things that are made' [Romans 1.20]” (Conf. 7.17.23).

Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine conceived of God as a supremely good being who is “incorruptible, inviolable, and immutable ” (Conf. 7.1.1). At the same time, he was aware of the existence of evil in the world, evil that can be divided into two major classes. First, physical objects have limitations and defects. In particular, the limitations of living things result in hardship, pain, illness, and death. Secondly, there are people who behave wickedly and whose souls are characterized by such vices as pride, envy, greed, and lust.

Augustine regards ethics as an enquiry into the Summum Bonum: the supreme good, which provides the happiness all human beings seek. In this respect his moral thought comes closer to the eudaimonistic virtue ethics of the classical Western tradition than to the ethics of duty and law associated with Christianity in the modern period. But even though Augustine addresses many of the same problems that pagan philosophers do, he often defends very different answers. For him, happiness consists in the enjoyment of God, a reward granted in the afterlife for virtue in this life. Virtue itself is a gift of God, and founded on love, not on the wisdom prized by philosophers.

The topic of Augustine's political philosophy must be approached with care. Augustine never devoted a book or a treatise to the central questions of what we now call “political philosophy.”Unlike Aristotle, he did not attempt serially to address them and to draw out the institutional implications of his answers. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, he did not elaborate a philosophical theory of politics, if by that is meant a synoptic treatment of those central questions which relies on theoretical devices contrived for the purpose. Discussions of politics can be found in a number of Augustine's writings, but these are generally conducted in service of conclusions which neither we nor he would regard as philosophical. Indeed it is questionable whether Augustine thought that political philosophy has a subject-matter which should be sharply distinguished from the subjectmatters of other areas of philosophy or of political enquiry. His own treatments of political subjects draw heavily upon ethics, social theory, the philosophy of history, and, most importantly, psychology and theology. It is possible to recover a distinctive set of political views from Augustine's texts. That set constitutes not a political philosophy, but a loose-jointed and heavily theological body of political thought which Augustine himself never assembled. It does not fit comfortably into any one of the disciplinary categories now standardly associated with the study of politics.

Augustine began writing commentary on scripture not long after his conversion. His first such work, meant as a counterblast to Manichaean attacks on the creation account, was De Genesi contra Manichaeos (388-390). In many ways it sets the tone for much of his later work: Augustine admits an allegorical sense but warns against overenthusiasm for allegory and denigration of the literal sense; we see also from the outset Augustine's interest in scripture as a controversialist and polemicist. After his ordination to the priesthood in 391, he seems to have gone through something of a writer's block, starting but leaving incomplete a treatise on exegetical theory (De doctrina christiana, begun 396 but not completed until 427), another commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, 393-394), and an exposition of Romans (Epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio, 394-395). He did manage to finish a verse-by-verse commentary on Galatians, giving the literal sense (Epistolae ad Galatas expositio, 394-395) and a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (De sermone Domini in monte, 393-396). His Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistola ad Romanos (394) derives from conversations with the monks at Hippo, who recorded his answers to their questions about Romans; Augustine tells us later that he missed what he eventually came to see as the main point of the epistle.