The image we have today of Augustine as an ex-debauchee had its genesis in the Middle Ages. Thus the Church's favourite sinner and his mother St Monica became a powerful dyptych; he the reformed libertine, with mea culpa writ large across his episcopal forehead; she the long-suffering mother whose prayers converted her errant son. It was an image amenable to the imagination and one that was ultimately reductive.
Augustine's perceived identification of sin with sex spawned one of the most powerful and enduring associations in the development of Western thought. This was probably not his intention. And the unfortunately titled Confessions (in transliteration) did him no favours.
Garry Wills's book on Augustine in the Weidenfeld & Nicolson "Lives" series develops the argument against such an interpretation, not least by noting that it was a tough break for a man who lived for 15 years in a monogamous relationship and embraced celibacy for most of his life. Wills's account is generous and convincing. When he fails to convince he succeeds in engaging.
Wills makes the point that Augustine did not search his soul or his past for sin, but for God. The intimate excavations of The Confessions mark a departure point in Augustine's writing. What Wills describes as an "implosion in his mind" re-directed and impelled his quest for God "inward". He plumbed the depths of his soul, mining the shafts of memory and found God there. Portrayed as the great despiser of the flesh, Augustine never lost a sense of wonderment for the body. This earthiness is reflected in his theology. In an exquisite passage of stacked Donne-like conceits, Augustine, in Wills's words again "preached the carnality of the Incarnation". The Christ he presents is wholly real and corporeal. That he stressed, above all else, this aspect of the Christological mystery turns his alleged debasement of the body into a nonsense. The image of the Word made Flesh was seminal to Augustine's thinking. In it he saw the process of communication enacted over and over as he earthed the notions in his head to language.
Wills is right when he says: "the text does not deliver us a product but calls us into a process". The last three books, in particular of The Confessions, present the activity of a mind perpetually striving. We see the ideas emerge and coalesce; the struggle worked out and resolved in the language and rhythm of the prose in the act of expression. Words are honed to the subtlest turns of his inquiry. The language is free of the exhibitionist rhetoric of his early zeal and still redolent with wonder.
Saint Augustine is a vigorous, selective account, enhanced by the barbed comments of the author. Ambrose is dull and distant; Jerome bristly, but the contemptuous Julian, in tethering Augustine's intellect to jaded themes, made him appear in the end repetitive, defensive and pessimistic. This book is an important challenge to the image of Augustine forged over the centuries.
Darinagh Boyle is a freelance journalist