Augustine: A New Biography (review)

This much anticipated biography of Augustine is sure to evoke partisan passions. Those of us who read Augustine for inspiration as well as provocation are going to be distressed to learn that his god (small 'g' please) is inhuman, his soul without personality and resistant to embodiment, his spirituality a resigned and cranky solitude, his religion humorless, his politics imperialistic, his conversion overblown (it was about sex), and his writings self-promoting. Those of us, on the other hand, who are tired of having the historical Augustine sanitized and appropriated for contemporary use are likely to find O'Donnell's portrait a bold stroke, innovative in how it deconstructs the saint and leaves the man, whose genius is neither doubted nor explored, scattered over multiple personae: self-promoter, social climber, correspondent, friend, private person, troublemaker, writer, obsessive, delusional (a Quixote type), catholic (but not really), power broker.

I admit that I am one of those readers who finds a philosopher in Augustine, one whose voice is still living, but I also read readers of Augustine who are skeptical of echoes and seek to return his voice to its time and place of origin. Just as it is never a purely philosophical matter to authenticate a voice and determine its provenance, so it is never a purely historical one to assign that voice its significance. In the uneasy alliance between historians of Augustine and Augustinian thinkers, both sides have been able to look to Peter Brown's imposing biography of Augustine for a common source of insight. Brown's biography casts a long shadow over O'Donnell efforts, much in the way that Beethoven's Ninth once cast its shadow over Richard Wagner and moved him to reinvent symphonic form or perhaps render it obsolete.

O'Donnell calls Brown's book "marvelous, imperfect, and enduring" (325). In an earlier essay of his, "The Next Life of Augustine" (1999), he discloses the nature of the imperfection. Brown makes Augustine's life seem too coherent, too inevitable, too tragically beautiful, and in those regards he falls under the siren's spell of Augustine himself, whose confessional voice, from O'Donnell's Odyssean point of view, is disarmingly seductive. In seeing through that seduction, O'Donnell is freed to make good on a postmodern conceit: he will write about a life without having to narrate it. He will suggest narratives, of course, multiple ones, but never in a way that allows the multiplicity to be reduced to a single theme with variations. Brown is the last modern writer of Augustine; O'Donnell is his postmodern heir—the writer who makes Brown, and Augustine, into a glorious anachronism.

I call O'Donnell's postmodernism a conceit for a number of reasons. In the first place, I doubt his claim to have transcended a traditional narrative ambition, to tell a coherent story from beginning to end. On the dust jacket of Augustine: A New Biography, we are told in bright red letters that this is "the first biography to tell the whole story of Augustine, the North African bishop, picking up where his Confessions left off." I concede that it is somewhat unfair to hold O'Donnell to the words of his publicist, but his publicist does capture something important about the book. It is, for all of O'Donnell's creative attempts to evade a master narrative, a book that remains squarely within the genre of the unauthorized biography. The whole thing is organized around the revelation of a scandal, something that Augustine supposedly tried very hard not to confess. In this case the scandal is that he used his almost preternatural gift of persuasion to bring down the Roman imperium upon the Donatist Church, the home-team of African Christianity. The denouement of O'Donnell's quite consistent narrative is that Augustine effectively destroyed the basis of African Christian culture. This is a bold claim to say the least and one that is remarkably undeterred by the more complex readings of Augustine's attitude towards...