Peregrine professor holds Augustinian Chair
Although not a theologian, Dr Mark Vessey adds new insights on the thought of St. Augustine

A peregrine professor passing through Villanova: this was the way that Dr. Mark Vessey, who held the Augustinian Chair in the Thought of St. Augustine for the fall semester, described himself. A native of Sheffield, England, and a permanent resident of Canada since 1988, Vessey has been a member of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver since 1990. He is an associate professor of English. During the academic year 1998-1999, he was acting principal of Green College at the same university.

Vessey received an Honors degree in English in 1980 from Queens College, University of Cambridge. After spending the 1982-83 academic year at the Sorbonne in Paris, he studied from 1983 to 1988 at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in Literae Humaniores (sub-faculty of ancient history). His studies included late Roman history, patristic theology, Augustine, and early medieval history. From 1989 to 1990, Vessey was an I.W. Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and, in 1997, he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has organized a number of conferences on topics that include Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament, Augustine’s City of God, heresy and heretics in late antiquity, the works of the English poet John Milton, and more.

Vessey has presented and/or published numerous papers. He has several works in progress, including Jerome’s Dream, or the Romance of the Book (on the Bible and Literature), translations of Erasmus’ Annotations on Luke and a translation of Jerome-Gennadius: On Famous Men.

During his stay at Villanova, Vessey taught an undergraduate Honors course, "Augustine and the Roman Novel," In The City of God, Augustine referred to a novel by a second century writer named Lucius Apuleius, titled The Golden Ass. It is also known as The Metamorphosis of Lucius"(the name of the protagonist). The work recounts the story of Lucius who was turned into an ass because he was too curious. After a series of adventures and misadventures, he is rescued and restored to human form through the pure kindness of the goddess Isis. By the end of the book, Lucius became a priest of Isis.

There are obvious similarities between the transformations of the fictional Lucius and the conversion of Augustine, as narrated in the Confessions. There is a similarity in the literary genre, as well, Vessey believes. "The Confessions, as everyone knows, is sui generis," he said. "There was nothing like it before. How did Augustine get the idea of delivering himself to his public in this style?" These and more questions will be posed and discussed

Vessey also taught a graduate theology course, "The New Christian Culture of the Medieval West," which examined the two-hundred year period following the deaths of Augustine and his contemporaries, including Latin fathers Jerome and Ambrose, and the Greeks Basil and the Cappadocians. During this turbulent time between 400 and 600 A.D., early Christianity was settling or unsettling into the church that would emerge in the Middle Ages. Vessey highlighted Cassiodorus, a distinguished civil servant-turned leader of a monastic community around the year 550. Cassiodorus provided for the translations and preservation of many early Christian texts. His own work, Institutions of Divine and Human Learning is described by Vessey as "a laboratory for studying what comes to be thought of an orthodox, normative western Christian culture.’

In addition to teaching courses, Vessey delivered three public lectures on the theme "Mediterranean and Atlantic: Augustine of Hippo between His World and Hours."

From November 9 through 11, he hosted a colloquium called "Augustine and the Disciplines." It gathered at Villanova many of the world’s major authorities on Augustine and on the disciplines which he directly or indirectly affected and altered: the liberal arts, including music and literature; scripture; history; philosophy; and tradition. Other scholars addressed Augustine’s own activity as a teacher in Cassiciacum and present a disciplinary comparison of Augustinian and Gregory of Nazianus, a Greek theologian of late antiquity.

Dr. Robert Markus, emeritus professor of medieval history at Nottingham University, England, was scheduled to be the keynote address. He was to be introduced by Princeton University historian, Dr. Peter Brown, author of Augustine of Hippo, arguably the most widely read and most highly regarded modern scholarly biography of Augustine.

Shortly after his arrival at Villanova, Vessey mused about the way in which a non theologian could hold a theology chair.

"I’ve never had a degree in theology. I have taken theology courses as one does in places like Oxford, but my degrees are in English literature and history, ancient history. I’m not only not a theologian; I am programmatically the opposite, except in the Villanova context. Here Augustine stands not only for theology but also for the liberal arts, where the more or less humane and the more or less sacred meet."

While he was teaching literature at the University of British Columbia, Vessey’s efforts to give his students a picture of the longer traditions of Christian culture frequently resulted in his being accused of having a religious mission, when he was merely relating facts. "That’s been turned around in a way by my having come to a place which has Christianity as part of its identity," he commented. "Here I am in a religious chair without having any kind of religious profession, a non-canonical Augustinian in an Augustinian endowed chair. That’s exciting."

As a visiting professor, Vessey noted that for Augustine, all professors were visitors. "We are all only visiting after all. All our professions are inadequate and temporary. So I take this to be a quintessentially Augustinian situation to be a resident alien, a peregrine professor on my way through – not that I will necessarily go back to any other better place, but that I don’t quite belong here."

Aware that Augustine is invoked so frequently and familiarly at Villanova, Vessey would like to make him a slightly stranger figure. "To have Augustine wholly domesticated on a campus would be rather to waste the value of his work. Augustine was first and last a relentless critic of himself, of the culture he inherited, and inevitably of the church of which he was a member. That critical intelligence is part of the legacy. One doesn’t want to become to cozy with him."