The Next Life Of Augustine

The Next Life of Augustine

Augustine entered the afterlife on 28 August 430. The most authoritative 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 success lay in a charismatic union of scholarship and interpretation. It is hard now to recapture the approving surprise with which this book was greeted, inasmuch as we have since come to recognize the master's style, even to track the efflorescence of its adjectives with guilty precision.

One characteristic feature of Brown's style and methodology probably comes close to encapsuling the power of the book. On the one hand, there is express disavowal of psychoanalytic interpretation: "The unexpected combinations, ramifications and resolutions that a properly sophisticated knowledge of modern psychology would lead us to expect, escape the historian." That sentence attracts a footnote: "The studies known to me ... [citing three landmarks of psychoanalytic interpretation of Augustine] show that it is as difficult as it is desirable to combine competence as an historian with sensitivity as a psychologist."2 But eight pages later, in a sentence almost every reader of the book retains in memory, we hear him say "Far from being the libertine that some authors have imagined, converted at the age of 32 from a life of unbridled sensuality, Augustine was, in reality, a young man who had cut the ebullience of his adolescence dangerously short."3 That judgment is unintelligible to a reader, or from a writer, not deeply imbued with the platt-Freudianism of the twentieth century. That and similar turns of phrase led one scholar to call this book indeed "a 'closet' psychobiography."4 All our biographies today expect to be such, claiming no professional credentials but borrowing the interpretive apparatus.5 The sophistication of Brown's application, however, needs emphasis. What he had learned brilliantly at an early age was precisely the combination of narrative, interpretive, and investigative skills needed to produce a book in every way satisfactory to the biographical taste of his time.

To take one example of the transformation of Augustine at Brown's hands, consider the case of Julian of Eclanum. Brown's depiction of Julian as the youthful foil to the aging Augustine has been a central, if often barely acknowledged, part of the last generation's enthusiasm for working through Augustine's ideas on sexuality. Brown's Julian is an essential part of Brown's own later work, but also of that of countless writers of lesser erudition. But Julian is far from obviously the figure Brown makes of him. Hugh Pope's still essentially hagiographical biography of 1961,6 mentions Julian all of four times. Gerald Bonner's work of 19637 mentions him only twice in the chapters devoted to "life".8 In Brown's account, he earns a chapter of seventeen pages of his own, and the narrative of Augustine's old age from that point on runs to a full fifty pages. This is not to say that Brown's reading is unduly emphatic; indeed, Brown is the first biographer to have worked so patiently through the mass of Julianic and anti-Julianic prose that survives. But Brown's reading, precisely because fresh and so far uncontested, has been decisive in a way that merits caution. The confident and polished young bishop, a liberal intellectual avant la lettre, is just the foil needed to set off Brown's depiction of Augustine as increasingly rigid, gloomy, and authoritarian. In an environment where Julian himself has not yet been the object of synoptic study on his own of adequate quality, a single powerfully effective account will take the day and encourage those who know it and little else to think that they have the story whole and complete.

Simply put, it is the power and success of Brown's biography that requires us, a generation after its appearance, to question it closely, to see what it has made of Augustine, and to question ourselves, to see what we now make of Augustine. The thought experiment may be put simply enough as this: what would the next life of Augustine look like?

II

To pursue that inquiry, I propose to take several soundings in Brown and in Augustine for comparative purposes. To begin, let us return to that deathbed scene and the commentary as quoted above. At that point, to the name "Plotinus", Brown appends this footnote:

"Plotinus, Ennead I,iv,7, (MacKenna 2, pp. 46-47); v. Pellegrino, Possidio, p. 226, n. 14, and Courcelle, Hist. littйraire, pp. 277-282."

Let us take those elements one at a time:

MacKenna's Plotinus:

If the Proficient thinks all fortunate events, however momentous,