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James J. O'Donnell Augustine: A New Biography New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005 Pp. xv + 396. $26.95.
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'DonnelPs 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...