Anyway, just thought it cool to get such a Feastday reminder from a student, period. I sat through Barnes' undergraduate Augustine course last spring with Jessica and other former students like David and Ryan, and it's cool to see people internalize something from that encounter with such a great personality, even across the continents, cultures and centuries.
I even learned something new today from Barnes, in finding out that Sebastiaan Tromp, who is a scholar I've encountered in my dissertation research, seems to have been responsible for single-handedly coining the understanding of Augustine's ecclesiology at the Second Vatican Council. And, as it turns out, that understanding was based on about five repeated quotations from Augustine, all taken out of context and applied to an understanding of the Holy Spirit that seems to have nothing to do with anything else Augustine ever wrote about the Trinity. What the effect of that has been, I'm not certain; but it certainly doesn't help us refine our understandings in the present when our scholars mess up their representations of the past upon which we are building. I'm always conscious, as an historian, of a responsibility to both the past and the present (and thereby the future, I guess) to try to make sure my characterizations are as correct as possible, regardless of any use I might have thought to make of history for some present cause.
