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Augustine: A New Biography (Hardcover)

~ James J. O'Donnell (Author) "In this nothing town, the sun of the Maghreb outside the hall is relentless, but the shade between stone columns within is cool..." (more)
Key Phrases: worldly career, Paulinus of Nola, African Christianity, Augustine of Hippo (more...)

3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

O'Donnell, provost at Georgetown University and editor of the definitive edition of Augustine's Confessions, is admirably qualified to chronicle the life of the man who wrote history's most famous autobiography. But in this book, suffused with the methods (though thankfully not the tortured vocabulary) of postmodern critical suspicion, the Confessions is more hindrance than help at seeing the "many Augustines" who have been lost behind Augustine's own self-presentation. The Augustines that O'Donnell sketches include the aspiring social climber who transferred his ambitions from society to church; the bitter and dogged polemicist; and "Don Quixote of Hippo," whose "fantasy world of earliest Christianity has come eerily to be real." O'Donnell's pace is quick, his writing is sharp and there are lively and provocative interpretations on nearly every page. But his jaundiced portrait does not quite seem to do justice to the African bishop's perennial appeal, which O'Donnell acknowledges in characteristically backhanded fashion: "Call it codependency or Stockholm syndrome at its mildest; call it religious partisanship at its most extreme, but even Augustine's severest modern critics find something attractive or fascinating about the man and his work." Readers of this book will certainly wonder why. For O'Donnell, it seems, familiarity has bred contempt. (Apr. 5)

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In a compelling new biography of the great north African bishop, O'Donnell sets out to read between the lines of the Confessiones, a book he knows superlatively well, since he edited the definitive edition. His interest here isn't in what Augustine reveals in that autobiographical classic but in what he did not mention, either because it would have been obvious to his readers or because he wished to distract attention from it. Among the obviousnesses are the conflicting Christianities of the period--Donatist, Arian, and Caecilian, which became Catholicism--of which Augustine's own, Caecilian, was a distinctly minority version helped into prominence by Augustine himself. And Augustine's language: although we may think nothing of his writing in Latin, his use of that language and his dialect of it spoke volumes to his typically polylingual readers. Augustine's contemporaries read him differently than we read him, and O'Donnell provides the theological, historical, and linguistic context in which those earlier readers functioned. As to what Augustine wishes us to not notice, O'Donnell is less expansive, looking for the "darker thread" in the great man's psychology but curiously not addressing such lapses as Augustine's failing to mention how his only son died. Despite such brevity on the personal front, this will become a classic on its subject. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Ecco (April 5, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060535377
ISBN-13: 978-0060535377
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds

Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #265,856 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#21 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( A ) > Augustine, Saint
#24 in Books > History > Africa > Algeria

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
In this nothing town, the sun of the Maghreb outside the hall is relentless, but the shade between stone columns within is cool. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
worldly career

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Paulinus of Nola, African Christianity, Augustine of Hippo, Genesis Taken Literally, Julian of Eclanum, African Christians, Don Quixote, Free Choice of the Will, Pope Gregory, Saint Augustine, Holy Land, Old Testament, Roman Africa, Ambrose of Milan, Aurelius of Carthage, New York, Acts of the Apostles, Against Faustus, Augustine the Manichee, Bishop Ambrose, Gospel of John, Gregory the Great, Rule of Benedict

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 67 books:

The Origenist Controversy by Elizabeth A. Clark on 4 pages
The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine - Four Anti-Pelagian Writings by St. Augustine on 4 pages
Saint Augustine: A Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) by Garry Wills on page 334, page 340, and Back Matter
Life of Plotinus by Porphyry on page 339, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (New Edition, with an Epilogue) by Peter Brown on page 325, and page 340

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Books on Related Topics (learn more)

Augustine Through The Ages by Allan D. Fitzgerald

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	6% buy Saint Augustine: A Life (Penguin Lives Biographies) 3.7 out of 5 stars (32) $11.20
	4% buy Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) 4.8 out of 5 stars (6) $8.60

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113 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Splendid - but caveat lector, June 13, 2005

By	Christopher W. Coffman (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This new book on the great Augustine enthralled and puzzled me, sometimes on the same page. I strongly recommend it for readers who have already read Peter Brown's incomparable biography of Augustine, and perhaps also a book on Manicheism--my personal favourite remains the great study by Hans Jonas, although since Nag Hammadi there have been many more recent books based upon the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. For readers who are already familiar with Brown's biography, this is a splendid updating of the facts about Augustine's life. But I would not recommend it for readers just learning about Augustine, for example somebody who has just read THE CONFESSIONS and now wants to learn more about Augustine himself. The best biography (as O'Donnell himself generously acknowledges in a footnote of this book) remains the Peter Brown biography.

One of the key features of this book is the availability of new research, and new material, not available to Peter Brown when he wrote his great book(s) on Augustine and late antiquity. O'Donnell is immersed in seemingly all the scholarship on Augustine and on subjects related to Augustine, and O'Donnell brings a mature and considered judgment to his consideration of Augustine's life and work.

Having said that, I do have the following caveat, which is why I recommend O'Donnell's book as a supplement, but not a substitute, for the Brown biography: O'Donnell's tone veers from learned and ironic and amused to being slightly sardonic, even cynical about Augustine.

I remember reading A.N. Wilson's biographies of Tolstoy and C.S. Lewis and feeling very satisfied when I had finished; over time, however, I realised that Wilson had subtlely diminished his subjects and that I had lost much of my esteem for Tolstoy and Lewis as a result of having read Wilson's biographies of them. There is an underlying tone in this book which is similar to Wilson's tone, although O' Donnell is not as corrosive. Perhaps a better match to O'Donnell's tone is the biography PAUL: A CRITICAL LIFE by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor. Like Murphy-O'Connor, O'Donnell is a real authority on his subject, with a career's worth of reflection to add to his real expertise in the primary and secondary sources--he has read and thought about the gamut of facts and interpretations offered on his subject. But Murphy-O'Connor doesn't share Paul's religious faith--his Christianity is much more attenuated than was that of Paul, and that seems to be the case as well with O'Donnell and Augustine. (A few years after his biography of C.S. Lewis, Wilson publicly declared himself to be an atheist). So be prepared for a certain distance, a certain scepticism and even cynicism in this book.

Having said all that, I really admired O'Donnell's magisterial grasp of his material and his profound, considered take on Augustine, his work, and his world. What I considered the flaws in the tone spring from an interpretation which, while it may not be shared by all readers (I certainly don't share it), will not obscure the many wondrous insights that O'Donnell offers, insights which leave me admiring Augustine all the more.

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78 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Modernism's Shortcomings Revealed, January 3, 2006

By	California Smith - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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"Modernism" gets a bad name from "Augustine" by James O'Donnell. Subtitled "A New Biography," it has little new but for oppressing the reader with the prejudices, peeves and contemptuousness of the anti-religious "modern."

The book's undertaking is ambitious: drag Christianity's most prominent thinker into the trash of modernism; tear down the Bishop of Hippo with sniffy skepticism; mock the model for centuries of penitents; make fools of those inspired by Saint Augustine's fusion of Platonic and Jewish traditions that became the philosophical foundation of the Western religious culture.

The author of this book, O'Donnell, would seem to have the credentials: he wrote volume upon volume of annotations, largely unnoticed, about Saint Augustine's "Confessions." The chapter titles and subtitles of O'Donnell's book taunt the great doctor of Catholicism: "Augustine the Self-Promoter," Augustine the Social Climber," "Augustine and the Invention of Christianity."

O'Donnell's book is the self-proclaimed "modern" understanding of Augustine, as in "modern attitudes," "moderns commonly say of Augustine," and "the dawn of the twentieth century's psychological age" (whatever that is).

O'Donnell's modernism has its own definitions and perspectives, which he claims can explain history "with ideas of rigor, objectivity and truth." But that claim highlights the book's lack of credibility, because O'Donnell's "Augustine" is so obviously the subjective, downright kooky ruminations of O'Donnell, not just on Saint Augustine, but upon all of Christianity and even all of history.

Thus, in O'Donnell's modern interpretation, Augustine becomes "a Don Quixote in a world that really takes him and his obsessions seriously;" Christianity becomes a "community of obsessives" or "like a bowling league or a condominium association;" and history for O'Donnell becomes something explained not "with ideas of rigor, objectivity and truth," but rather occasion for O'Donnell's flights of fantasy, literally. Throughout the book, O'Donnell asks that we join him in his own petty, modernist alternative realities of the past, in page after page of O'Donnell's drag-in-the-dirt brand of "what if?"

O'Donnell tries to preach his "modern" viewpoint with catchy contemporary references and definitions. Classifying pagans is equated with labeling one a "Pinko." On the death of a friend, Augustine reverts to "sex, drugs and rock and roll." Every possible heresy of the time is capitalized (along with "Pagans"), e.g. Donatists, Pelagians and Gnostics. But O'Donnell finds the license to spell "catholics" throughout. Ultimately O'Donnell's "modern" definitions are pretentious, contemptuous and profoundly ignorant, and it simply gets boring wading through O'Donnell's "modern" theses, little more than pedestrian psycho-babble, liberal political correctness and academic pomposity.

Any subsequent biography of Augustine will be compared to Peter Brown's work. The comparison here is very instructive. Written in 1962, Brown's "Augustine of Hippo," like its subject, has stood up well to time. Brown wrote about Augustine with a timeless human reference. Where O'Donnell provides cheap quips, Brown tells us that Augustine "had chosen to see the great complexity of his own view on grace and free will, veiled to the unenquiring mind, a source of wonder to the philosopher." O'Donnell's central interests are mundane human sexuality, ambition and weakness; Brown probes a mind and life consumed in a beatific vision of true human happiness in the illumination of a timeless God (O'Donnell's "god"). Peter Brown presents a human person easily recognizable as he passes through the ages of his life while leaving a posit of millions of words that still resonate with those living today, just as O'Donnell's "modern" retrospection on Augustine will be so quickly forgotten.

O'Donnell's "Augustine" is a mean book by an author without capacity. If it reveals the truly modern man, he is not someone you would want to meet.

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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Naked Augustine, March 3, 2006

By	E. P. Pepka (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

T. van Bavel once compiled a bibliography of all the books and articles published about St. Augustine from 1950 to 1960. It is at least twice the size of O'Donnell's book. And this is a just a list of bibliographical info plus brief descriptions of content. Imagine how thick all those books and articles must have been! Let's see: mutliply all that by 4 and 1/2, and you get a rough estimate of how erudite you have to be now to write an adequate biography of the greatest Christian thinker after St. Paul. If an author on St. Augustine ends up playing the role of one of the six blind men trying to describe an elephant, he has a lot of company.
This much I can grant to anyone who tries to present all about St. Augustine in fewer than 400 pages. What I am more reluctant to concede is a treatment of the man and his thought that recasts him and it as a practitioner of cheap journalism might do to a leading public figure today. Augustine comes out of this book stripped of his own garments--exposed, as they say today, or cheapened, as I say. He's even worse than naked: he is reclothed in contemporary undress--just enough on to make him lurid.
As other reviewers here, I do not recommend this book for Augustine beginners. Try not Peter Brown but the third edition of Gerald Bonner's "St. Augustine of Hippo". And when you feel ready for a recent and really erudite, not sensationalist, study, read Serge Lancel's "St. Augustine".

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