East Reads West
A Conference of Orthodox Readings of Augustine
May Help to Bridge a Gap
by William J. Tighe
St. Augustine, a Doctor of the Western Church, has long had an ambiguous status in the (Eastern) Orthodox Church. He has a place on its calendar of saints, but some Orthodox have, in my hearing, insisted that by referring to him as “Blessed Augustine” rather than “Saint Augustine” they are venerating his person but distancing themselves from his teaching.
They want this distance on such issues as the double procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (the filioque dispute) and the relationship of grace, free will, and predestination—issues on which Augustine’s thinking was seminal for the West (Catholic and Protestant), but largely rejected, when not ignored, by theOrthodox (and non-Orthodox) East.
In the twentieth century in particular, a school of thought has arisen in Orthodoxy that sees in Augustine one of the principal sources of the “errors of the Latins,” errors so far-reaching that, to cite the words of the current Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, there is now “an ontological difference” between the theologies of the two churches.
This “school” is often connected in its origins with the theologian Vladimir Lossky, and its later representatives include the Greek philosopher Christos Yannaras, American theologians John Romanides and Michael Azkoul, and convert Orthodox writers and apologists like Philip Sherrard.
A Better View
Thus the significance, for scholarship as well as ecumenical relations, of “Orthodox Readings of Augustine,” a conference sponsored by FordhamUniversity’s Center for Medieval Studies, held in mid-June. Of the twelve speakers, five were Catholic, four Orthodox, and three Protestant, a Lutheran and two Anglicans.
The conference began with the 2007 “Orthodoxy in America Lecture,” given by Andrew Louth, a patristics scholar at Durham University and an Orthodox priest, on “St. Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms.” Louth suggested that viewing Augustine as a “preacher or expounder” by examining his 546 surviving sermons or homilies (about one-eighth of his whole output) offers a better and more balanced view of him than the Augustines (Augustine of the Great Controversies; Augustine the anti-Donatist; Augustine the “covert Manichee,” as some still see him; and Augustine of the Great Works) both West and East think they already know, and would show him to be “a bridge rather than a wedge” between the two.
He never explained this, but devoted the rest of his lecture to explaining one of Augustine’s homilies, that on Psalm 100 (101), with its theme of the present time as “the time of mercy” and the future coming of Christ as “the time of judgment,” apparently to say that Augustine’s homiletics reflect and develop patristic themes and ideas common to both East and West, and that they are not idiosyncratic or “Augustinian” in the pejorative sense. Later on, he mentioned in passing that for all the importance of predestination in Augustine’s theology of grace, it is not mentioned even once in his surviving homilies.
In “Making a Human Will Divine,” the first plenary speaker, Brian Daley, S.J., of Notre Dame, devoted most of his attention to the Greek theologian Maximos the Confessor. Daley discussed the many years Maximos spent in the West between 626 and 653—during which he was actively involved in theological controversy—before trying to discern traces of Augustine in Maximos’s thought and discussing some common themes in both theirwritings.
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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