Saint Augustine
For centuries, Augustine's writings have moved and fascinated readers. With the keen eye of a writer whose own intellectual analysis won him a Pulitzer Prize, Gary Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker whose grounding in classical philosophy informed his interpretation of Christian doctrine. Saint Augustine explores Augustine's thought as well as the everyday man who set pen to parchment. It challenges many misconceptions, including those regarding his early sexual excesses. It portrays Augustine as being "peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture" who didn't even know Greek. Here is a lively and incisive portrait of one who helped shape Western thinking. "Wills's agile mind matches the agility of Saint Augustine. He presents his subject with candor and with empathy." (New York Times Book Review)
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Review:
Saint Augustine, by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and cultural critic Garry Wills, is a 145-page biography of a saint whose collected works total 13 volumes. Despite its brevity, the book offers a complex and compelling interpretation of Augustine's life and work. Much of Wills's task is demythologizing: Augustine was not a central figure in 4th-century Christianity but was "peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture," who did not know Greek, the intellectual lingua franca of his time. Although Augustine has been portrayed by artists as a bishop "wearing all the episcopal finery of the late Middle Ages," he actually "dressed in the gray clothes of a monk." And far from being a self-righteous pontificator, Augustine was "impatient with all preceding formulations, even his own." He wrote, "Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God." Wills also argues that Augustine's Confessions (which, Wills persuades the reader, is an anachronistic, egoistic translation of the original Latin title, a word Wills more accurately renders as "Testimony") has been misread in a way that suggests Augustine led a debauched sexual life before his conversion. In the Shocking Revelation department, Wills does, however, find more detailed (if elaborately coded) information about Augustine's mistress and about the son they raised together than other biographers have found. Like Wills's masterful Lincoln at Gettysburg, Saint Augustine accomplishes its revisionist aims completely and yet lightly. Wills makes his arguments without ever forgetting his first job: telling the story of a life. --Michael Joseph Gross
From the Publisher:
4 1.5-hour cassettes
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- PublisherBooks on Tape, Inc.
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 0736648224
- ISBN 13 9780736648226
- BindingAudio Cassette
- Rating
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