Augustine always reminded me of a clever little, provincial, mummy’s boy, who I could almost picture revelling in his Carthaginian accent the same way Radio Six presenters parade their Northern vowels.
The Confessions are an (interminable) examination of his inner life, drafted in the late 390’s as he sampled the intellectual ferment of the philosophical and religious ideas of the day, (especially the Manichaeans and the Neo-Platonists). Cicero he said converted him to the philosophical life, and he spent the first 40 years of his life like some modern trustafarian seeking after ‘truth’ or gazing at his navel, depending on your point of view. But to be fair, he was by no means the only one in a society still trying to come to terms with the new orthodoxy of Christianity. One could be cynical and ascribe his conversion in Milan in 386, on hearing the sermons of the great theologian Ambrose, to finally picking the side with the greater career prospects, but I’ll leave it at the face value as presented in the Confessions, which with RLF’s ability to get under the skin of his subjects creates a compelling account of his spiritual quest.
Augustine the saint is as self-absorbed as the earlier Augustine, constantly peering into the mirror of his soul, with little concern for others (like the mother who ‘followed him over land and sea’) is moody and spent a lot of time condemning things. ‘God give me chastity – but not yet’, his Confessions were influential in the development of the early Catholic and Protestant communions, original sin and predestination, which he helped to formulate, and his obsession with sex, did much to much to confirm Catholicism’s fixation with trying to regulate the bedroom. His rants against heretics are wearying, but RLF is in his element describing Manicheanism which he describes extensively. The followers of Mani turned from this world, rejecting Resurrection, flesh and any authority than their own (guaranteed to stick out like Gnostic thumb in the Post-Constantinian political landscape), not one of the Elect, the flesh was still firmly in his grasp, he was one Hearers until his conversion.
RLF's book is not for the casual reader, unlike his others, in its study of Augustine’s inner life and turmoil, where the focus is on the Confessions, studied in detail to trace Augustine's journey, but there is an immense amount of contextual information about North Africa, Rome and Milan, providing a useful primer for life in the later Empire as well as an impressive resource for classicists, theologians and historians. One thing that always stuck with me as a student was the framing of the concept of a just war, formulated in the City of God after the Sack of Rome in 410. His own spiritual warfare with the Manichaeans and the Pelegians were fought over several campaigns, battling about the nature of evil and human freedom as mentioned above underpin or influence many of the Western philosophical tradition.
RLF is an acknowledged expert on late antiquity and I read Augustine as a companion piece to Pagans and Christians, which examines the religions landscape and competing views across Asia Minor and North Africa in the 2nd-3rd centuries. He describes the life of the ancient world, and particularly the environment that threw up Augustine in a particularly vivid fashion.
A brilliant book, but despite his spiritual intensity, his theological insight to the mind of God, man, and all of his intelligence all I am left with a memory of two unnamed concubines (who probably had little or no choice in the matter) whom he only referred to as ‘She whom I was accustomed to take to bed’.
Great thinkers are not always great people.
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