Augustine of Hippo

"This biography is beautifully written. It’s a pleasure to read. I don’t know if I’d go quite as far as Lane Fox, but it’s very rare that you work in an academic field and there is a secondary work that is just indisputably superior to everything else. An agent once said to me that Brown’s book is known in her field as a “category killer”. No one else dared to write a biography of Augustine, really until the late 1990s. So, for 30 years—for basically a full generation—that was the work on Augustine. Why do I still feel it is a starting point? Well, one aspect is about humility. This is why I specified that the second edition needed to be the one that was promoted rather than the original biography, which was published in 1967. Thirty years after it was published, Peter Brown went back and he reconsidered everything he had written. And instead of just injecting corrections into the text, he let the original text stand and he wrote what —including notes— is an eighty-page postlude reviewing what he felt he had got wrong and what he felt he should have emphasised differently. There’s also the remarkable fact that twenty-six new sermons and twenty-nine new letters had been discovered in the period after he had written the original book. So, he takes into account what had been discovered in those. He critiques himself for myopia and points to some of the ways in which Augustine’s thought and life has been set in a much wider context, particularly archaeologically, in the intervening thirty years. I am in a slightly odd position talking about this book at the moment. Because what I’m currently writing turns out to be in, effect, another biography, I have purposely not been going back to Peter Brown’s book, simply because it’s so discouraging. It’s discouraging because he’s so learned and perceptive; he has such an incredible range of references, even in this older material that he goes on to self-critique. You think, what can I possibly add to this? This is the power but also the problem with the book. It is such a seamless narrative, and this is the genius of it. It’s very hard to find one’s way in if you want to do something different, if you want to write against the grain of that narrative. It’s so compelling. It’s so convincing. It is just extraordinarily erudite; it tells a beautiful story. And one now feels that it’s perhaps a little too beautiful. Brown slips a little too easily into metaphors of illumination. Precisely. And, indeed, the Reconsiderations was one of the primary sources I was tempted to include. If I could propose five books by Augustine for this project, then they would have definitely been there. And it would have been perhaps a perverse choice, but the Reconsiderations is such a fascinating work. At almost the end of his life, Augustine gathers together his treatises and he reads them through in chronological order, and he reconsiders them and says where he thinks he’s gone wrong. It’s interesting to see Augustine so conscious of his textual legacy. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage to do the same thing for his letters and his sermons. He just didn’t get round to it. Now, as far as I remember Peter Brown doesn’t say in so many words that he’s modelling himself on Augustine in this moment, but he has to have been. You couldn’t possibly write an epilogue like that to a book on Augustine and not be aware that you were mimicking the master. One suspects not. As I’ve said elsewhere, if you work a lot on Augustine you get incredibly, personally engaged with him, because he’s such a powerful and engaging personality. So, I have a personal idea of what he would have looked like. He would almost certainly have been quite small and quite dark. He would have the colouring that one sees in North Africa today. Exactly how dark he was is immaterial—except that it isn’t. One of the weird things when I started working on my book Augustine the African is that people would repeatedly say to me: so was Augustine black? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Not the question of whether he was black but what people think would be conveyed by the answer to that question, why they think it’s so important. The mature thought, I would say, falls into two categories. One of those is what he develops in his own space, as it were. I would say the Confessions is the start and the work on the Trinity is the other conspicuous example. Oh, and De Genesi ad litteram (‘The Literal Commentary on Genesis’) as well as the commentaries on the Psalms. This is when he is thinking things through for his own satisfaction. Most of his writing, however, and his doctrinal, dogmatic positions, are developed in combat. And that’s a very different type of development. And as we see, at the end of his life, he gets backed into a corner with the whole debate about original sin. “Christian theology is more or less unthinkable without Augustine” I think there are two —in theory— incompatible aspects to Augustine’s thought inasmuch as he is both a highly structured thinker and a highly indeterminate thinker. I realise it sounds nonsensical to bring the two into juxtaposition. I’m again going to use the example of original sin because it’s something I’ve worked on and thought about recently. Augustine gets backed into this position on original sin, into this very hard-line position where everyone is born into sin and can only be saved by the grace bestowed by baptism. The reason he gets backed into this corner is precisely a structural one. He takes seriously the notion that Christ died to save everyone . And his point is, if there is nothing to save in any single person who is born after Christ’s death, then Christ’s death becomes meaningless. That’s what I mean by his structural thought: he gets to this point logically, and by thinking structurally about the significance of the notion that Christ died to save everyone. He looks at the logical consequences of that and he follows them through to their extreme end. But that side of Augustine’s thought—the one that basically comes down to us in common tradition—is held in suspension with the whole side I mentioned earlier: the willingness to say ‘I don’t know’, the appreciation of indeterminacy, of multivocality. You can think of the passage in Confessions 12 when he talks about interpretations of the Bible. He says, Well, one person can say I think this passage means this and one person can say, I think it means that and third person can say I think it means something else. He says: Why can’t they all be right? Why should we think that God is so limited that he’s only put one meaning into this passage of Scripture? It’s this side of his thought that interests me much more. But, of course, it doesn’t do justice to the whole man not to consider the structural aspects of his thought as well."

"Well, Peter Brown’s immense strength is placing the changes in Augustine’s outlook against the changing tone and social pressures of the eras and locations in which he moved. It is a most brilliant picture of the changes in the individual in antiquity who is best known through his own writing, including his superb Confessions . But there is also – although it is never explicit – a psychologically based interpretation of some of Augustine’s changes of direction. You have to look very closely at how deeply this runs through Brown’s book. Like many, I would say that this is the outstanding biography of the 20th century. Augustine is the giant thinker and writer of the Latin Christian world. He was born in 354 to a simple humble background in a little town called Thagaste in North Africa. He was a man of bewildering literary intelligence and superb literary ability. In conventional caricature, he is feared as a figure of excessive authoritarianism, who held dark views of human nature, who invented the idea of original sin. But when you read his writing, he is a figure of infinite caution on many topics and has a much more subtle mind than people give him credit for. Both philosophically and as a reader of the Bible, he is a challenge to anyone alive now. Brown’s book is by far the best account of the changes in Augustine’s thinking from his thirties until his old age. Brown sets these thoughts so cleverly against the changes in Augustine’s family’s social context and his own ageing. They won dominance because the state threw its weight behind them. They were massively favoured on and on from Constantine and then continuously from the 390s onwards. There were tax privileges for the clergy and the bishops. Christianity was made the most respectable and prominent religion in the Roman world, so non-Christians were firmly on the back foot. For many people Christian values offered a strong sense of community. Virtues such as humility and the spiritual merit of the poor were exulted – new virtues in Greco-Roman civilisation. There was the promise of a new life after death, and there was also the promise of the ability of ridding the world of demons, a very powerful motive for joining them."

"Augustine is the architect of the Western Christian idea of Original Sin. He lived in the late fourth to early fifth century, but his ideas cast a very long shadow over medieval and even over modern culture. I have been fascinated listening to some of the current American debate about federal funding for contraception. Some opponents of such funding take positions that seem to me to be avatars of Augustine’s. Through the idea that sexual activity is intrinsically bound up in sin, and must at all costs be monitored and controlled. According to Augustine, pleasure itself is an index of sin. He had a very austere philosophical concept of the human body and how it should behave, were it not for Original Sin. This idea that sexual intercourse is an intrinsically morally compromised activity, and that only procreation excuses it, has lasted down through the centuries – and it gets sounded particularly during American election years! Much of this idea of sexuality and sinfulness being part of the same package traces back in many ways to Augustine. Yes, he looked at the story of the Garden of Eden. As soon as Adam and Eve taste the fruit they realise they are naked and cover up their private parts. Augustine gives a brilliant blow-by-blow description of this moment in City of God , where he explains how Adam’s body, up until that point, had been completely under the control of Adam’s mind. And all of a sudden, the moment that Adam transgresses the commandment not to eat the fruit, he gets an involuntary erection – that’s Augustine’s gloss. And, Augustine continues, the fact that the erection is involuntary is itself shame-producing. And yet, he continues, that lack of control is now necessary for every act of conception. This is how, from generation to generation, and in this precise way, Original Sin is passed on. It is a sexually transmitted fatal disease – or at least, that is how Augustine saw it! Brown’s biography presents these ideas, but Brown does so while relating a life story that lets us understand Augustine, to sympathise with Augustine and even – perhaps despite ourselves, and despite some of Augustine’s theological positions – to like and to respect Augustine. That’s great writing."