Augustine of Hippo: A Life (review)

It is always a pleasure to read great writers who are also great scholars. The wealth of what is found in this short book does not need to be emphasized. Reading a book by Henry Chadwick is always chock-full of choice delicacies. As Peter Brown tells us in his graceful introduction, "the manuscript of the book was discovered among his papers" (p. viii). A shorter version was published in 1986, and now, this longer version allows us to appreciate, in Brown's words, the "full texture of Augustine's life and thought" (p. viii).

Chadwick has chosen several important moments in St. Augustine's life as a focus of his reflective narrative. A few examples serve as representative "snapshots" of his probing, thoughtful writing. On the significance that Augustine attaches to his own conversion, Chadwick sees it as "the culmination of a moral and intellectual struggle" (p. 29). He sees Augustine as having accepted "so profound a fusion of Christianity with Platonic mysticism that Augustine thinks of Christ and Plato as different teachers converging in the same truths." The fascination of such a combination has led more than one writer to neglect the grounding that Augustine had in the Scriptures in favor of the neoplatonic influence. Chadwick sees rather a confluence of "Cicero's Hortensius, Neoplatonist ideals . . . readings in St. Paul, brotherly pressure from Alypius," and something inside this highly intelligent man—a "teacher who needed his pupils to get his own thinking clear"(p. 30).Such insights can be found throughout this book, attentive to social, historical, and spiritual dimensions as he gives us a vision of this man in his time.

Perhaps instigated by the interest of St. Paulinus of Nola, Augustine wrote the Confessions as "a prose-poem addressed to his Maker, not to human readers" (p. 90). As Augustine questions his God, we are told that the last three books are a neoplatonizing commentary on the first chapter of Genesis with striking affinities to ideas found in Origen. Neoplatonism, of course, was part of the air Augustine breathed, and the thought that he sees things through such eyes remains all too common among learned readers of the Confessions. How much apter it is to see a Christian reading of Origen as a significant influence on this book. Rather than a writing summarized as "the alienation of man from his true self" (p. 91), is it not the story about the growth and the salvation of an innocent, alienated child? Is the pessimistic turn of phrase, "The innocence and natural goodness of childhood Augustine thinks an illusion"(p. 91) really accurate? The "original" sin left everyone with the weakness and ignorance of mortal beginnings—which meant, for Augustine, a need for Christ. That diagnosis of the human condition is hardly "somber" (p. 152).

"Anger," Augustine observed, "passes into hatred if unhealed" (p. 108). Chadwick grasps the enjeu of the Donatist controversy, noting that "the town/country tension was more a consequence than an initial cause of the schism's history (p. 106) and the way that each community described the beginnings was incompatible (p. 110). But his comment on the debate on the use of coercion (even today) bears repeating: "In later ages his arguments came to be disastrously exploited by inquisitors, ecclesiastical and secular, who neglected his crucial proviso that the form of correction must be seen to be a loving familial chastisement, a minimal force. . ." (p. 113).

Brown writes: "This is a book about Augustine which has the tang of life" (p. ix).To read it is to be treated to an adventure, savoring both Augustine's life and that of the delightfully human scholar who wrote about him. One should not delay the pleasure.