Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography by Miles Hollingworth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography by Miles Hollingworth Gerard O’Daly Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography. By Miles Hollingworth. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xx, 312. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-19-986159-0. Also available as an ebook and in Oxford Scholarship Online.) This new book on St. Augustine has to compete with some seriously good predecessors. Biographies of Augustine are of necessity also “intellectual biographies,” engaging with the development of his thought and the controversies in which he was involved. In English alone there are Peter Brown’s classic Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, 1967, rev. 2000), which inaugurates the modern attempt to understand Augustine the individual in his life and times, and Henry Chadwick’s two short masterly studies (Augustine: A Very Short Introduction, new ed., New York, 2001; Augustine of Hippo: A Life, New York, 2009), crammed with discerning detail on his culture and theological development. In addition, Garry Wills’s Saint Augustine (New York, 1999) does eloquent justice to the man and the thinker in under 150 pages—an ideal introduction—whereas James O’Donnell’s Augustine: A New Biography (New York, 2005) is refreshingly iconoclastic and irreverent, a critical study that is firmly rooted in profound knowledge of Augustine’s writings and environment. Serge Lancel (St. Augustine, London, 2002) combines expertise in North African archaeology and history of the fourth and fifth centuries with deep knowledge of the texts, in what is perhaps now the most rounded biography of the great man. What does Hollingworth offer us? His preface provides a foretaste. He writes of the danger that Augustine puts you into as a reader … he will always begin in some ground that you share with him and thought was safe— then he’ll start pointing out the booby-traps, one by one, until the fear you taste is real, adrenal, metallic. (p. xi) But even if those of us who have failed to have goosebumps while reading Augustine are willing to let Hollingworth argue his case, the book does not deliver. Hollingworth is at his best in discussing those parts of the Confessions where Augustine deals with the themes of friendship, death, loss, and agonized conversion. In general, he is keener on anguish than on argument. This is a pity, for one of the fascinating aspects of Augustine’s writing is the way in which he can switch from narration of emotional processes to acute analysis. Hollingworth has it in for the philosophers who have, or may have, influenced Augustine, not least because he accepts at face value Augustine’s polemic against them. But Augustine’s attitude to his pagan cultural heritage is ambiguous and complex. While distancing himself from pagan thinkers and hence from his own past, he can at the same time borrow and build on their arguments—consider, for instance, his development of the theme of the self-thinking human intellect in On The Trinity. Why are some Christian theologians so nervous about labeling as Platonic those elements in Augustine’s thought that are evidently Platonic? Failure to engage with Augustine’s cultural background and development, to appreciate the generic codes of his writings, [End Page 323] or to recognize their apologetic or polemical nature leads Hollingworth to read Augustine too literally. Yet he has a good ear for the appropriate quotation, of which there are many in the book, privileging Augustine’s preaching voice. The book’s principal theme is central to Augustine’s theology: the human search for the divine and for some form of communion with God. Hollingworth writes eloquently and passionately about this, and it provides the real drama of his vivid account—it makes some sense of his assertion that Augustine often writes like a novelist. But he spoils his narrative by over-earnest appeals to the reader to accept the Christianity that he finds in Augustine as the one ideology that can satisfy all human psychological needs. Nor does it help that he engages in a persistent quasi-postmodernist polemic against the rational elements in historical scholarship. Here is a revealing statement: “The creeping, careful accuracy of scholarship has a side-effect on Augustine which a book...