There is nobody in the ancient world we know better than Augustine, the author of a famous spiritual autobiography and a number of other classics that continue to form part of the canon of Western literature. But do we really know him? This is the question Miles Hollingworth asks in his new book, Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, and he gives a qualified answer. At one level, he admits we know Augustine very well, as numerous biographies and other studies of his writings show. But at another level, Hollingworth claims we hardly know him at all. What made him tick as a man and as a thinker? What factors shaped his mental and spiritual outlook that aren’t easily accessible, even from his voluminous and apparently self-revealing writings?
Hollingworth’s basic thesis is that the child is father of the man. So he gives a great deal of space to Augustine’s formative years and tries to show how much they influenced him in later life. The main effect is to downplay the importance of his conversion, although Hollingworth, research fellow in the history of ideas at St. John’s College, Durham University (U.K.), makes no attempt to do that. He recognizes that everything Augustine tells us about himself is written in the light of his spiritual rebirth. But he points out that the bishop of Hippo’s concerns and general approach to intellectual matters remained the same as they had been before. Christianity is the answer to his searching, not a complete change of direction, and that made his works uniquely important. Augustine spoke not only for, but also to, a generation that was losing its bearings as the Roman Empire slowly collapsed. The old gods had failed, but in Christ, Augustine had found the key to understanding the ways of the universe. On that basis, he restructured his inherited culture and rewrote its history. The pagan idea that Rome represented the supreme triumph of reason and civilization gave way to the view that human life was an eternal struggle between good and evil, played out in the individual heart as much as on the world stage.
Parents and Milieu
Because of its focus, the first half of the book concentrates on the society into which Augustine was born and the influences of his parents and milieu. Hollingworth takes us back to the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece and the beginning of classical civilization. We cannot understand how Augustine was trained to think unless we master the origins of Platonism, and that means returning to the world Plato addressed and transformed. To say this isn’t to argue Augustine was a Platonist, but to recognize the ideas that first arose in Athens circulated with the air he breathed. Modern writers don’t have to be Christians, but they can hardly escape the influence of traditional Christian culture, and Augustine’s relationship to Platonism was similar.
There’s an entire chapter devoted to Cicero, an important influence on the young Augustine. This chapter is hard to evaluate accurately since the major work on which it depends, Cicero’s Hortensius, has been lost. Nevertheless, it’s clear Cicero inculcated that most precious and necessary of gifts for anyone aspiring to make a difference in the world—a sense of purpose and duty. Cicero was Rome at its best, a man of integrity and determination who was eventually sacrificed to the evils of his time. He showed what a good man could accomplish, but also that it could never be enough in a world governed by sin. Cicero prepared the way for Christ, not positively but negatively, by demonstrating that the alternative wasn’t viable.
Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography
Miles Hollingworth
Another chapter is given to the study of Manichaeism, the dualistic heresy that intrigued Augustine in his youth and by some accounts continued to influence his thinking even after he turned against its teachings. The modern reader has no trouble believing that Manichaeism makes no sense. It’s rather like the various New Age phenomena of our own times, a mishmash of ideas and practices no rational person would embrace but that exert an appeal even so. Augustine was never a pure rationalist, much as he respected philosophy and believed in the coherence of the universe. The appeal of Manichaeism cannot be explained in those terms, Hollingworth suggests, but by something else altogether—Augustine’s longing for a father and for the authority only a father can have.
Here we touch on Augustine’s relationships with his family. His human father seems to have been a typical Roman, with all the normal interests and prejudices of the provincial elite. He was converted to Christ shortly before he died and, although Augustine naturally approved, their relationship was never close. Things were very different with his mother Monica, however, who played an important part in his life until the day she died. That is well known, of course, but the appeal to Manichaeism as a father-substitute is a new take on the subject that demands further exploration.
The last three chapters are taken up with Augustine’s conversion and later life, in which the various threads that had gone into the tapestry of his upbringing are woven together in the picture later generations were to have of the man. Hollingworth says less about them than he might have, but his logic in doing this has already been explained. In any case, once we’ve reached this point we can read Augustine for ourselves, as Hollingworth clearly wants us to do. His book isn’t a substitute for reading the original texts but an introduction to them, and his great achievement is that his audience goes away with questions that fuel a desire for more.
Psychological Reflection
This intellectual biography of Augustine could equally well have been subtitled “A Psychological Reflection.” Those who know little or nothing about his subject shouldn’t begin here, since a great deal of prior knowledge is expected from potential readers. This is a meditation on someone who is already known, not an introduction to a complete stranger, and it must be approached accordingly.
Hollingworth is extremely widely read, and he doesn’t mind telling us so. Who else would refer in passing to Riccardo Bacchelli and Antonio Fogazzaro as “great” Italian novelists (227)? Who but Hollingworth has ever heard of them? Obscure references and quotations from people like that dot the pages, and since he doesn’t hesitate to quote these secondary sources almost as much as he quotes Augustine, often passing from one to the other without interruption, the dizzy reader is sometimes left wondering whose thoughts he is reading. There is a certain intellectual snobbery that revels in this sort of thing, but to my mind at least, such quotations are distracting. It’s impossible to know how relevant they are to a study of Augustine without chasing them up, and of course Augustine himself never knew any of them. Showing off in this way seems pointless and can get irritating at times, because it’s not always clear where Hollingworth is going with them. No doubt he thinks he’s sticking to his subject, but few others will be persuaded, and the book would read better if most of this extraneous material were omitted.
Along with such erudite obscurantism, Hollingworth occasionally gets things wrong. This is most obvious in his remarks on the Latin Bible, which he claims didn’t exist as a unit until the sixth-century translation by Cassiodorus (125). Augustine’s contemporary Jerome is never mentioned, but even people who have never heard of someone like John William Dunne (134) will know Jerome translated the Bible into Latin. He and Augustine even corresponded about it. Hollingworth also has a fondness for quoting Latin phrases and translating them in ways that may not be accurate. For example, on page 172 he renders facientis animus as “revolving mind” and articulus occulti temporis as “the hidden joints of time.” Is this correct? The endnotes cite a source but don’t give the original text, and a brief attempt to follow the note yielded nothing relevant. Of course Hollingworth is entitled to imaginative reconstruction, which is what his book is about, but this doesn’t mean he’s free to make statements that aren’t solidly anchored in facts.
In conclusion, it must be said Saint Augustine of Hippo is for the initiated and will appeal most to those whose minds work in much the same way as Hollingworth’s. Those with a more pedestrian approach to life will find it hardgoing and may be entitled to wonder whether we’re really any closer to Augustine the man than we were before.
