I'll begin with a couple of disclaimers. First, though it is a good many years since I had to present a birth certificate in order to get my senior citizen's discount, I was not present at the beginnings of the New England Renaissance Conference (N.E.R.C.) but was still at Harvard in the Society of Fellows with a very new Ph.D. More important, I was a card-carrying medievalist at a time when medievalists were far more detached from the Renaissance than they are now. If we regarded the Renaissance at all, it was as a kind of mopping- up operation of the Middle Ages; perhaps we remembered Gilson's remark: “The difference between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages was not a difference by addition but by subtraction.” But I slowly learned wisdom and first spoke to the N.E.R.C. in 1951. I had discovered that, contrary to Gilson, joining the Renaissance was not a subtraction but very much an addition. Nevertheless anything I say about the earliest period of the Conference is based only on information received.

Writers and thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were widely engaged in the reception and transmission of a variety of earlier works, and recent scholarship has perhaps concentrated too much on the special case of the reception and transmission of the Greek and Latin classics. A study of the publishing history of the Aristotle commentaries of Thomas Aquinas may throw light on a different phase of the same general process, the Renaissance fortuna of a medieval rather than of an ancient author.

(On 1 June 1970, Fredson Bowers received a D.Litt. from Brown Univ. The following excerpts from his commencement address to the graduate school explore some of the central issues now facing the MLA. The parts of the speech omitted deal with the history and present state of the movement for a Doctor of Arts degree.)

In the Preface to the Retractationes, Augustine suggests: “Perhaps whoever will read my works in the order in which they were written will discover how I made progress while writing them.” The present essay is an attempt to carry out this suggestion of Augustine, with particular attention to his ideas on society, from the earliest Dialogues of 386 up to the time, shortly after 400 A.D., when the Donatist controversy introduces a new period in Augustine's thought.

Saint Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa are two outstanding representatives of the Platonist phase of the Western Christian tradition. At the same time it is clear that there are important differences between their positions. The purpose of the present essay is to suggest how these differences may be explained without denying the existence of a basic unity in their thought.

Eusebius of Caesarea occupies a unique position in ancient Christian thought. His central problem is to explain and justify a Christian society which is to transform the Roman Empire and which will become the new world civilization supplanting Hellenism and Judaism. Earlier thinkers do not face this problem. The Roman Empire is for them one of the powers ordained of God, but it is pagan and they expect it to remain so. Consequently the question of human government is only peripheral to their thought. Nor do later thinkers see the problem quite as Eusebius does. In the East, for example in Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus, the question of human government again becomes peripheral to Christian thought, and Eusebius has no successor as a “political theologian.” In the West, Augustine gives a general answer to the problem of a Christian society in a Christianized Empire, but his solution contradicts that of Eusebius. To Augustine, the structure of the Christian Roman Empire is still that of Babylon, and human society is still a mixture of two opposed cities, the earthly city and the city of God.

St Augustine devotes a work of twenty-two books to the defense of the city of God, and in his other writings he often assumes his readers to be familiar with this heavenly city of which they are members. It is consequently surprising that scholars have found his account of it ambiguous and that they have been so little able to reach agreement as to just what the city of God is.

Some of their difficulties have resulted from trying to answer questions which Augustine had not considered and which, indeed, he could not consider in his own terminology. We must not, for example, expect to find in his writings a solution to the problem of ‘church’ and ‘state,’ for this is a modern question and its terms are incommensurable with those of the fifth century. Our account of the city of God must be placed in an Augustinian context, and our analysis should ultimately admit translation into Augustinian Latin.