Augustine and the People behind the Man (original) (raw)
Augustine: A New Biography. Author's Response
Horizons, 2006
This book is intended to provoke-and the questions it raises are: Why? and To what end! More about that later. James O'Donnell's name is well known to those who study Augustine of Hippo. A first step in building this reputation was a little book published in 1985 (Augustine, Twayne's World Authors Series) that can still serve as a concise introduction to the man and his thought. A signal that he was to be taken seriously as a scholar of Augustine was his three-volume work Augustine: Confessions (Oxford University Press, 1992), offering a critical Latin text of the Confessions followed by what may be described as an exegetical commentary. Here O'Donnell takes the student phrase by phrase (and sometimes word by word) through the dense Latin of Augustine's text. It is a work of monumental scholarship that will most likely not be attempted again-any equivalent effort would simply be redundant. Equally important is the role that O'Donnell has played in bringing Augustine into the electronic age: "Augustine was the first saint to have his own home page on the World Wide Web" (336)thanks to O'Donnell. In so doing, he has also stimulated a vast range of "virtual" scholarship on the entire patristic period. When O'Donnell writes about Augustine he deserves to be taken seriously. Anyone familiar with Augustine and the extensive scholarship around him would see in the very title a portal into a history of debate and controversy. Modern biographies of Augustine begin with a controversial work written by P. Alfaric in 1918, L'Évolution intellectuelle de S. Augustin. He argued that Augustine's conversion was to Platonism, not to Christianity, and initiated a vigorous debate about the man and his thought that has continued unabated ever since. One could note a second phase in these debates, marked by P. Courcelle's classic work Recherches sur les 'Confessions' de S. Augustin (1950). Here the question raised regarded the historicity of the Confessions, turning attention to the "truth" of the Confessions, and so to the very heart of what we know (or do not know) about the man. Perhaps the most significant book written about Augustine in the twentieth century is Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967, 2000). It is Peter Brown's Augustine that is perhaps the most known Augustine. This work is elegantly written, the rich tapestry of its narrative enticing the reader into another world. The Augustine that emerges here, especially in the light of the Epilogue that accompanied its 2000 re-edition, is, one might say, a heroic figure (not to say that Brown always praises his hero), in the sense that one can feel and imagine his great genius along with his great humanity. He is someone you wish you could have been in the presence of. It strikes me that Brown's biography must be seen as a background to O'Donnell's "new biography"-something I will return to at the end of this review. To say that this is a provocative study is perhaps an understatement. When O'Donnell puts "new" into his title, that is exactly what he intends-to get us to look at Augustine in a way we have never looked at him before. A single quote makes that all too clear: "The young Augustine in Milan, awash in flop sweat in his stretch limousine en route to praise the emperor or his latest favorite, had made his way in the world as a prize-winning stage performer of just this sort" (30). A stretch limousine indeed! This little aside, occurring early on in O'Donnell's narrative, is representative of the entire book in a variety of ways. The style of writing O'Donnell has chosen is not that of the staid and clinical scientific researcher. Rather he writes as a journalist (perhaps the closest contemporary equivalent to the role played by the rhetor in Augustine's world), and so this story can even find room for the Grateful Dead, Le Carré, and, yes, bowling leagues (205)! The provocative approach does not end there. O'Donnell tells us that he will only speak of "Augustine's god"-not God: "the commonest risk run by historians of this period [is to assume] that we know just what Augustine meant [by god]" (7). We cannot dare to claim to know the "god" of Augustine, is O'Donnell's point. To "turn up the heat" further, he will not allow Augustine's "version" of Christianity to be called "catholic"-Caecilianist is what Augustine is. These and other devices O'Donnell employs are deliberate: one could say that the underlying intention of the book is to bracket everything we think we know of Augustine and to start afresh: "imagine another narrative" (see 51). And the portrait that emerges is anything but edifying. Let me give a list of both explicit and implied descriptives that occur throughout the course of the narrative: authoritarian, intransigent, ambitious, performing, impresario, theological-extremist, selfserving, manipulator, petty, humorless, inventor, status-seeking, aloof, argumentative, ambitious and ruthless, Francoist (225), preener, ostentatious, currying, coward, muddled-thinker, disingenuous, corrosive, power-hungry, and above all fearful and anxious-the list could continue but the narrative that occupies the first three-hundred pages
Reviews in Religion and Theology 21/4 (2014): 454-62
This review article explores a new indispensable reference work on the reception of Augustine. It offers an overview of its content, structure, and methodology, as well as a critical assessment of its overall contribution to the study of Augustine. Goethe once remarked that, in the world, there are just a few voices, yet so many echoes. Augustine is definitely among the ‘few voices’, which have provoked all manner of friendly and unfriendly echoes. It is particularly important to realize that, apart from explicit citations and references in western literature, Augustine has also profoundly shaped medieval and modern culture through the subtle dissemination of his ideas into various spheres of life. This reference work not only provides a description of the current state of the reception of Augustine, but also adds the new results of the diligent work of the contributing researchers and identifies several topics that still need to be investigated.
This is the sixth in series of brief, analytic biographies of the 'Top-Nine' thinkers, whose thoughts have powerfully influenced large numbers of people across extended time scales. They are all reviewed here in the order of their birth. Negative thinkers (e.g. Hitler, Stalin) are ignored, while 'Mythic' talkers (like Jesus) are also ignored as little direct written information is available. Augustine has my strong admiration as a solid, original thinker and writer. He is arguably the outstanding figure in philosophy between Aristotle and Aquinas-a period of 1600 years. He is celebrated for writing two of the world's great books: The Confessions (c. 400) the first autobiography followed within a dozen years by: The City of God (required reading still in most divinity studies at western universities). This essay allowed me to investigate directly one of the most influential thinkers that has still played a strong a role in western philosophy.