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
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