Augustine of Hippo
University of California Press, 1967
Pp. 463
Brown's stated purpose with this biography is to tell about the "course and quality" of Augustine' life with a backdrop of the changes in north Africa and in the Roman Empire as a whole. Brown says he wants to show how Augustine himself helped precipitate some of the changes by using the most "up-to-date" treatments of the life Augustine.
Peter Brown, writing from All Soul's College at Oxford, England, thoroughly documents the events, activities and inner workings of Augustine. The Bishop of Hippo's story is interwoven with accounts of the state of the Roman Empire as a whole and North Africa, in particular. Brown's telling is so vivid that an artist could chose a stage of Augustine's life and then accurately paint Augustine surrounded by his local counterparts with elements of the Empire in the background.
The text is well-documented with most pages having five or more footnotes. The bibliography takes up 18 pages. Brown used primary souces in Latin, as well as, scholarly works in English, German and French. A number of the cited works were published just a few months before Brown's own work was submitted to the publisher demonstrating that Brown worked diligently on his manuscript until the last moment to make sure that he did indeed use the most recent scholarship of the time.
Augustine is presented as a gifted child, and then as a out-going bright young adult who in turn grows into one of the most remarkable religious leaders and writers of all time. Brown writes marvelously interesting chapters and when I thought that he couldn't top the writing and interesting material of one chapter, I would again be fascinated by the next chapter.
A helpful feature of the text are the five Chronological Tables, one at the beginning of each major division of the book. The tables list each year with major events, if any, in Augustine's life or the Empire's history. Later tables also list corresponding texts and letters written by Augustine during the year.
At times during the reading, I smiled at Brown's choice of works. The words were strange, but the context gave their meaning away. A conventible of Manichees was a gathering and a love-philtre is apparently a love letter or gift.
At other times, Brown's writing choices were strange to me and remained strange. Early in the text, Brown made a number of comparisons to the Mandarins of China. Being unfamiliar with Chinese history,the meaning he wanted to convey escaped me. Another cue I missed about Augustine's taking of a concubine. Brown's first references to this relationship were of a second-class marriage. I thought Augustine had entered into an actual marriage to a woman of a lower social class. In the middle of the text, Brown uses the word concubine and I understood the situation much clearer.
