Saint Augustine (Lives) Book

Saint Augustine by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and cultural critic Garry Wills is a 145-page biography of a saint whose collected works total 13 volumes. Despite its brevity the book offers a complex and compelling interpretation of Augustine's life and work. Much of Wills's task is demythologising: Augustine was not a central figure in 4th-century Christianity but was "peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture" who did not know Greek, the intellectual lingua franca of his time. Although Augustine has been portrayed by artists as a bishop "wearing all the episcopal finery of the late Middle Ages" he actually "dressed in the grey clothes of a monk". And far from being a self-righteous pontificator, Augustine was "impatient with all preceding formulations, even his own". He wrote, "Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God". Wills also argues that Augustine's Confessions (Wills persuades the reader that this is an anachronistic, egoistic translation of the original Latin title, a word Wills more accurately renders as "Testimony") has been misread in a way that suggests Augustine led a debauched sexual life before his conversion. However, in the Shocking Revelation department Wills does find more detailed (if elaborately coded) information about Augustine's mistress and about the son they raised together than other biographers have found. Like in his masterful Lincoln at Gettysburg, in Saint Augustine Wills accomplishes his aims to set the record straight completely and yet lightly. Wills makes his arguments without ever forgetting his first job: telling the story of a life. --Michael Joseph GrossRead More