Peter Costello
Augustine: Conversions and Confessions
by Robin Lane Fox (Allen Lane, £30.00)
In the history of Western civilisation St Augustine has a special place. Just how special many may not realise.
In any academic library the works of the Greek and Latin Fathers in their original (say in the standard edition of Migne) occupy a great deal of space. Even a series of translations occupies several shelves. Few of these texts are read these days, except by specialists and theologians.
But two works of Augustine, The Confessions (c. 399) and The City of God (c. 426) are widely read in both popular and academic editions. Augustine almost alone remains a very living presence for very many Christians of all traditions, Western, Eastern and Protestant.
In a sense they divide his life into two parts, his earlier movement towards a conversion to Christianity, epitomised in The Confessions, and his creation of a Christian philosophical view of God, man and society in The City of God. His influence on ways of thinking has been immediate and immense over the centuries.
The new book by a leading classist, Robin Lane Fox, an authority on Alexander the Great, in a sense explores the first of these movements in the life and thought of Augustine. In many ways this is the human part of his life, and because of his struggles with the sensuality of his early life and his eventual acceptance of faith, it has always attracted writers, such as Peter Brown and our own J. J. O’Meara. It is a compelling emotional drama.
A key element in this is Lane Fox’s use of two other figures of the time as counter-currents to Augustine to compare and contrast ways of thought, feeling, faith and sensibility. These are Libanius of Antioch, a pagan Hellene, and Synesius, a Christian. He has also had the advantage of recently discovered texts and new scholarly insights. Though he does not share the faith of Augustine, or indeed of some of his commentators, he attempts to understand Augustine in the full complexity of his time, which coincided with the fall of Rome.
Encounter
In this field, which is not new to Lane Fox – he says his first Augustinian encounter was with the Gozzoli frescos of the saint’s life in S. Agostino in San Gimengo in 1966 –but (ever conscious of Peter Brown and Henry Chadwick) he has tried here to find new ways to present the man to a modern readership.
This is an important aspect I think. Those frescoes that inspired his interest so long ago show Augustine as a Renaissance scholar in an Italian garden. There is a tendency for all readers of Augustine, such as Luther and Calvin also to read and interpret him in the context of their time. But this is deceptive. Without seeing Augustine in his late classical period is to misunderstand him in many ways. His views on God, man and faith are tempered by his time.
We can learn from them, but perhaps modern readers need also to be doing what he did in his mediations on Genesis which bring The Confessions to a close, to find their meaning again, with a deeper knowledge of the context of scripture and of Augustine than was once available.
This is a richly detailed and well informed book, which is written with skill and style. It will provide many with a rich feat of insights and information, and will doubtless find its place beside Brown, Chadwick, Marrou and other scholars of the past.
The author is famous for his attention to detail; in his Alexander book he noted the kinds of flowers in the mountain passes of Afghanistan that the conqueror travelled through. Expect, and relish, the same attention in this book.
Whether there will be another book, devoted to the Augustine of The City of God, the more fully theological philosopher, is unclear. But such a book would round out this modern presentation of a very significant figure.