The Next Life Of Augustine
...modern interpreter of Augustine's life quotes and renders the deathbed scene thus:
"'In the midst of these evils, he was comforted by the saying of a certain wise man: "He is no great man who thinks it a great thing that sticks and stones should fall, and that men, who must die, should die."'
"The 'certain wise man', of course, is none other than Plotinus. Augustine, the Catholic bishop, will retire to his deathbed with these words of a proud pagan sage."
Those are the last words of the penultimate chapter of Peter Brown's magisterial biography.1 This book, now nearly thirty years old, has exercised a huge dominion over the field of Anglophone Augustinian studies even in an age when those studies have exploded and flourished as never before. When an Anglophone reader begins to read Augustine, the first text read is still likely to be the Confessions, and I would surmise the third is City of God or some portion thereof, but to an extraordinary degree, Brown's biography is usually the second and sometimes the first. Certainly to those curious readers who come from adjacent disciplines to learn what they can of Augustine for their own purposes, the book is inescapable. Our Augustine is Brown's.
There was good reason for this ascent to eminence. In many important respects it was the first modern biography of Augustine, and it is still the only one. That is, it was the first narrative account that was both fully post-hagiographical and fully post-Freudian and that set out to construct a narrative of a man's life, not a bishop's. The early life of Augustine had long attracted biographical attention, but Augustine past the age of 45 and the writing of the Confessions offers so many challenges to the would-be biographer that he had been for the most part left alone. Brown accepted and mastered the challenge of maintaining narrative focus throughout. His...
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