Mark Vessey

Augustine and Tradition

Theology

“Augustine’s homecoming may be second only to Odysseus’s in Western imaginations of Mediterranean travel, yet his own narrative in the Confessions does not quite see him home. Seeing Augustine home, finding him there—in the company he kept, in the transactions of his intellectual, affective, and public life—is a task modern scholarship has set itself. Augustine and Tradition advances it in style. Brimming with an impatience like Augustine’s, these essays unsettle ‘tradition’ in ways to enliven our sense of what passes under that familiar metaphor.”