Augustine of Hippo Brown, Peter.

Augustine of Hippo

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2000.

Make me good God, but not yet.' According to Augustine, in his most famous work the Confessions, this was his cry before he experienced a direct revelation from God about God's truth and man's inherent sinfulness. No ancient philosopher was as open and honest about his own life, perhaps, as Augustine. Rather than receiving a picture of the chronology of his lives through the words and images of other, later authors, Augustine penned his own spiritual autobiography. He depicted himself, warts and all, and created the narrative of spiritual progress, from hell to heaven, that still characterizes conversion narrative 'plots' today.

The problem for an aspiring biographer like Peter Brown, when tackling the life this giant philosopher and espouser of Christianity of ancient world, is not the problem of the bias of others, or of a lack of detail about Augustine's own life. Rather, it is that Brown must contextualize Augustine's existence for a modern reader and also attempt to see past Augustine's own biases and agenda in framing his spiritual and personal development for a Christian readership. Also, as Augustine became a canonized saint, Brown must show the man, not the spiritual ideal that has passed into church lore and teaching. Thus the title of the autobiography is not St. Augustine, but merely Augustine of Hippo. Brown attempts to restore the humanity and the ancientness (or the difference) between Augustine and ourselves.

Augustine is so compelling to modern readers not simply because we know so much of his life as well as his thoughts but because his concerns seem so germane to modern readers. We are, after all, self-obsessed and concerned with personal issues, rather than the minutiae of the nature of the Trinity, by and large, even devout Christians. And Augustine was, according to Brown the thinker of the Early Church most concerned about nature of human relationships with God on a personal level. Augustine regarded his own Confessions as an instruction to readers, and as an extension of the confessional that all Catholics take part of in the ritual of confessions of the church.

To be truly open and honest about the sinfulness of the self was to develop one's spirituality. Augustine's self-examination and his honesty about his early sinfulness, including stealing apples as a young boy and having a mistress makes him more, rather than less attractive to modernity. Thus Augustine called his Confessions a story of the soul or heart, not merely a chronology, and even Brown deviates from pure chronological development in his exposition and excavation of this figure. Brown's includes a variety of quotations of the Confessions while attempts to present the details of Augustine's life as a historical figure, not merely a saint and not merely through the lens of hindsight and Christian interpretation, as was characteristic of Augustine's self-configuring in his Confessions.

Instead of presenting Augustine's eventual career as a foregone conclusion, Brown situates the future saint's life in the contest of the late Roman Empire. Augustine's family was able give their son a good education. The region was noted for its legal education and producing great lawyers, and as a young man Augustine gained a distinguished reputation in the study of the law and rhetoric. Augustine was later to reject his early education, chastising himself for his love of pagan authors rather than Christian writings. At the time he found Christian writers less intellectually stimulating. Latin was Augustine's greatest passion, more so than Greek, particularly the works of great orators. But despite his secular education, Augustine loved his mother, Monica, a devout Christian who would later be canonized as well because of her maternal influence on her future saintly son's development. Monica was honored for her forbearance in marriage to an undisciplined, often cruel pagan man. Augustine's father suffers by comparison to Augustine's mother, but rather than suggest that she should have left his father because of his mistreatment, Monica's quiet example of patient endurance is praised by her son.

Augustine's turning towards his mother was seen, through hindsight, as the major development of his life, but he went through several stages of spiritual development, first paganism, and then a cultish version of Christianity called Manichaeism, which was later characterized as a heretical view of the world as evil, as opposed to the goodness of heaven. It also involved a number of highly elaborate eating practices. Augustine was particularly vehement in his later denunciations of the Manicheans and other Christian heretics when he became a bishop in North Africa, very likely because of his own past affiliation with them. Augustine was never a full initiate in the most elite circles of the Manicheans, but ironically he adopted, at least according to Brown, their hierarchical split between the laity and the priesthood and the education priests received, that would characterize formal Catholicism and the education and learning of the clergy.

Before his conversion, Augustine lived a full (he would later say sinning) life as a typical Roman man. Without telling his mother (significantly) Augustine went to Rome to teach Latin, deciding he was better suited to be a scholar than a lawyer. He kept a mistress. The Roman Empire was falling into turmoil at the time. The fourth century was not the Roman Empire of antiquity rather it "was facing the strain of perpetual warfare... Taxation had doubled, even trebled, within living memory. The poor were victimized by an insane inflation. The rich defended themselves by unparalleled accumulations of property. The Emperor himself became a remote and awe-inspiring figure...His servants could only rule by terror....by a spectacular brutalization of the penal law." (Brown 9)