The Bizarro Hagiographer
Books & Culture reviews James J. O'Donnell's new book, Augustine: A New Biography, and finds it wanting, to say the least. Link. Excerpts:
A reader of this book will be left wondering how Augustine could have had such wide readership for so many centuries when his ideas are so flimsy. That Augustine comes in for intellectual criticism here is no surprise–scholars for decades now have complained about his inability quite to leave off the dualism of his Manichaean past, his ruthless use of imperial power against his Donatist enemies, and his late-life grumpy and inadequate responses to the intellectually spry Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum. But at every turn in O'Donnell's critique, Augustine is portrayed as dreadfully anxious, intellectually inferior to his enemies, and so inclined to deal with them duplicitously and brutally, and to tell the story subsequently in such a way as to exonerate himself and excoriate their memory. . .
O'Donnell's historical account continues in this vein: show Augustine in the worst light possible, his enemies in the best, and dispatch him with a final zinger in the form of an ad hominem slur or what's taken to be a devastating analogy. In truth, Augustine was simply "jealous" of Pelagius and Pelagius' skilled protégé Julian. He was not only a social climber but also connivingly acquisitive–despite his pious claims that he wanted people's wealth for his church and not for himself. Every one of his famous polemical disputes is described as a fight Augustine needlessly picked, with disastrous consequences. His fight with the Donatists needlessly weakened the African church and prepared the way for the later Islamic conquest. His unnecessary pouring of vitriol on the Roman Empire in City of God anticipates later church divisions between insiders and outsiders, paving the way for the Crusades, endless heresy hunts, and modern fundamentalism. Augustine is "Don Quixote in a world that really takes him and his obsessions seriously," that is, a world too gullible to know this figure deserves mirthful pity.
I guess I'll stay away from this book. B&C has a noticeable Protestant bias. That they have taken such exception to this apparent butchery of St. Augustine, is telling.
Then again, Luther's thought was influenced by Augustine, so maybe B&C likes the Man from Hippo. Or maybe B&C simply smells an intellectual fraud.
