Stephany Hull (Brown University)
Recent scholarship on the early dialogues of Augustine of Hippo (Conybeare 2006; Topping 2012; Pucci 2014; Kenyon 2018) has emphasized the centrality of pedagogy and educational methods in these texts. And yet, the ways in which Augustine’s pedagogy intersects with the ways he styles himself a Platonis aemulus has been underappreciated. This paper is part of a larger project in which I make the case that Augustine lays out his own version of a distinctively “Platonic” curriculum, in which the subject matter of his dialogues aligns with a set of topics and methods which can be found consistently within the philosophical--and rhetorical--curriculum of other self-styled Platonists. As such, the broad aim of this project is to highlight the ways in which core questions of Platonist philosophy are fundamental to the educational curricula of late antiquity. A key question I seek to answer in this project is how dialogues--the quintessentially pedagogical genre--intersect with the plethora of didactic texts and handbooks of rhetoric and dialectic which are often used as evidence for educational curriculum in late antiquity. Large-scale narratives of this educational system, despite acknowledging the importance of the tradition of Platonic dialogues within the educational milieu of late antiquity, rarely treat dialogues per se with more than a passing mention in their accounts of ancient education method and curriculum (cf. Marrou 1982; Clarke 1971; Bonner 1977; Bloomer 2011).
In this paper, I argue that Augustine’s second dialogue, De beata vita combines the teaching of definition with the teaching of rhetorical style in a way which mirrors the same combination of themes evident in the little-studied treatise De definitionibus by his contemporary, Marius Victorinus. The way in which both authors unite definition and style shines a light on the prevalence of this particular combination of topics within the tradition of Roman "Platonist" philosophers. Victorinus and Augustine's contribution, therefore, is less a novel synthesis, and more a development which reconfigures this pedagogy of definition and style in service of these authors' particularly "Neoplatonist" models of ontology. In the first part of this paper, I argue that both authors (Marius Victorinus in the De definitionibus and Augustine of Hippo in De beata vita) elevate the use of one type of definition, namely, "definition from contraries" as the ideal means of defining God. Their rationale stems from the "Neoplatonic" concept of negative theology--i.e., that God can only be defined by what He is not. In the second part of the paper, I argue that we can find precedent for the two authors' use of this intersection of ontology and style in Cicero and Seneca. Finally, I suggest that Victorinus and Augustine's respective developments on the models proffered by the former philosophers indicates the importance of this topic in the curricula of philosophical rhetoric in late antiquity. Furthermore, the two authors' concern with articulating a more robust "Neoplatonic" expression of the style/ontology combination is evident of a late antique “development” within the Roman-Platonist tradition of teaching definition and style.