Augustine and the Old Testament Eschatological Tradition: Personal History, Divine Retribution, and Sacrifice

Abstract

This study addresses the question of the correlation in the works of Saint Augustine and other scholars of his age of the sacred history, with its origin in the Old and New Testaments, and the personal, "individual time" of life path that was realized in their understanding of the concept of "today," even as biblical concepts of the end of times and of Apocalypse formed a fundamental background to these representations. These specialized concepts of time, with their clearly marked delineations between beginning and end, were a fundamental characteristic of Christianity, including ideas about the Incarnation, Resurrection, and of the Second Coming. As founding thinkers of the early Christian church, Jerome and Augustine helped set the foundation for all further representations of sacred history in Western Christianity until the end of the middle Ages. Recent studies suggest that Augustine left a self-contradictory heritage with respect to matters of explaining how the overarching biblical history could be applied as a model to the actual history of Rome. Moreover, Rome itself also boasted a long tradition of power and had its own scheme of defining the length of historical periods characterized by its own beginnings and ends for the multiple stages of development in the history of the Western Mediterranean. In this study I seek to explore a new reading of Augustine’s take on Apocalypse. In my view, Augustine’s experience of addressing the matters of the beginning and the end of times was rooted, as we see in the "Confessions", in his own experiences of the the father-son paradigm and was closely related in turn to one of the key elements of Christology, the idea of the sacrifice of the first-born son.