Garry Wills Research Articles

History and the Catholic Sixties: A Work in Progress

The 1960s continue to fascinate historians and scholars, although their understandings of the decade’s meaning differ dramatically. The same is true for the Catholic Sixties. To date, no comprehensive history exists of the Catholic Sixties, although much has been written. Catholic scholars, such as Donald Thorman, Daniel Callahan, and John Noonan, among others, wrote seminal works during the 1960s, establishing the initial lens through which scholars came to view the decade. In 1972, three important works were published by David J. O’Brien, James Hitchcock, and Garry Wills; all three provided decidedly different approaches and critiques of the decade and all have influenced contemporary understandings of the decade. Several scholars provided interpretive schemas through which future historians may organize the decade, with Mark Massa’s work being the most important. Other historians focused on one aspect of the Sixties, which contributed to a deeper understanding. The many scholars and historians who have written to date provide much for future historians to consider.

Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O'Donnell (review)

Reviewed by: Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America by Mary Ellen O'Donnell William L. Portier Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. By Mary Ellen O'Donnell. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2018. Pp. xviii, 164. $75.00. ISBN 9780813230375). As Mary Ellen O'Donnell explains in the preface, this book began at a memorial Mass for her mother. In the kneeling figures of her mother's generation, O'Donnell caught a glimpse of the passing world in which she learned to be a Catholic. Her three-year-old daughter might grow up to be a Catholic, but she would never know that world. Her daughter's Catholicism would not be embedded in a culture. O'Donnell sensed an emerging "chasm," based on fundamental generational differences "in the way Catholicism has been lived, shared, and internalized" (p. xiv). This book explores the "cultural Catholicism" (not a pejorative term for the author) of northeastern and midwestern descendants of European Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish and Italian, born between 1940 and 1965. Since O'Donnell is part of the cohort she is writing about and often finds her own experience mirrored in the narratives on which she draws, Ingrained Habits sometimes reads as a memoir. Rather than an intrusion, however, this autobiographical dimension adds to the book's overall impact. Ingrained Habits is a work of cultural studies, a literary ethnography—a salvage ethnography perhaps—that draws upon almost fifty authors, e.g., Mary McCarthy, Garry Wills, Alice McDermott, Robert Orsi, Claudia DeMonte, Donna Brazile, Anne Rice, Thomas Ferraro, and Anna Quindlen. Their literary productions, some fictional, some explicitly autobiographical, depict their Catholic culture as an "all encompassing, world determining experience" to which there appears to be no alternative (p. xviii). The author locates this work in a thick social network that includes parish and school, home, and neighborhood and community. After an opening chapter that introduces them historically and sociologically, these three sites structure the book's remaining three chapters. This world's tension arises from its rarely seamless blending of "celebration and community" with "rules and enforcement" (p. 5). O'Donnell's carefully circumscribed study of the "bridge generation" to which she and I belong, by definition, leaves out many voices. The divide this generation crossed, however, led not only from one experience of Catholicism to another, but also from ethnic enclaves to what sociologists of this generation might have called the dominant culture. Here there are alternatives, choices to make, and inevitable ambivalence. I would like to have heard more of the author's reflection on this ambivalence. [End Page 427] Nevertheless, O'Donnell's insightful, elegantly written account of a particular "cultural Catholicism" makes a valuable contribution, capturing the "feel" of European American Catholicism in this period. One of this book's main audiences would be cultural studies scholars in the field of Catholic Studies. A strong secondary audience would be educated Catholics who are members of the generational cohort the author is writing about. Ingrained Habits would also work in undergraduate courses on U.S. Catholicism, Catholic Studies, or American religion, giving a real-life, narrative feel to the kinds of formal sociological and historical works the author cites in Chapter 1. It is especially effective in opening a window on women's experience of what O'Donnell calls "Catholic culture." It is highly recommended. William L. Portier University of Dayton Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland William L. Portier University of Dayton Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, Maryland Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin

Reviewed by: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin Lauren Michalak Keywords Pursuit of happiness, Declaration of Independence, Blackstone, Thomas Jefferson The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History. By Carli N. Conklin. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019. Pp. 241. Cloth, $40.00.) We live in cynical political times. It's easy—common even—to ascribe base motives or rationales to people's actions, particularly in the realm of politics and law. This cynicism is not reserved to our contemporary political landscape; it filters into our view of historical actors. Carli Conklin brilliantly and persuasively compels us to buck this trend and to take seriously the words inscribed in one of the foundational documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence. Conklin does not ask us to abandon our critical assessment of the founders' intentions; rather she charges us to ground our understanding of these actors in their own times and conceptions of themselves. In a short but thorough examination of a key phrase in the Declaration—"the pursuit of happiness"—Conklin reminds us that context matters. Conklin argues that "the pursuit of happiness" had substantive and broadly understood meaning in the late eighteenth century. This meaning drew together four different elements: "English law and legal theory, the history and philosophy of classical antiquity, Christianity, and the Scottish Enlightenment's focus on Newtonian science" (8). Together, these elements reflect an understanding that the pursuit of happiness was [End Page 370] a process that sought to harmonize man and natural law, through which man strived toward a virtuous life. The result, Conklin asserts, would be eudaimonia, an ancient Greek term for "man's own real and substantial happiness" (8). The happiness that resulted from eudaimonia rested on a virtuous life that united public duty and private rights. Thus, Conklin argues, the phrase embodied "a private right to pursue a life lived in accordance with the laws of nature as they pertain to man and a public duty to govern in harmony with those laws" (134). Conklin pushes back against scholars who have dismissed the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" as either a substitution for Locke's "property" (to avoid raising the issue of slavery and property in people) or as an innocuous rhetorical flourish. In a historiographical essay in the book's appendix, Conklin challenges interpretations of the phrase set forth by William Scott (Locke's property), John Crowley (pursuit of comfort), Jan Lewis (quiet family life), and Garry Wills (Scottish Enlightenment's public virtue).1 For Conklin, these interpretations miss the complexity of the phrase by pigeonholing it to one particular meaning or strand of philosophy. Conklin's work builds on these authors, as well as studies of the process of crafting the Declaration written by Carl Becker and Pauline Maier, to give a fuller sense of how the founders understood "the pursuit of happiness" in a nuanced and uncontested way.2 To demonstrate that this understanding of "the pursuit of happiness" was substantive and broadly accepted, Conklin closely examines and compares Blackstone's use of the term in his Commentaries on the Laws of England and Jefferson's use in the Declaration drafts and its final version (approved by the Second Continental Congress). Conklin acknowledges that Jefferson rejected Blackstone's politics and found previous commentaries on English common law more accurate; yet despite [End Page 371] these differences, the common way that both Blackstone and Jefferson used "the pursuit of happiness" supports Conklin's interpretation of the phrase and her assertion of its broad and common acceptance. She breaks her analysis into three sections focusing on Blackstone and his Commentaries, the Declaration, and the commonalities in usage in both documents across their different contexts. Concise chapters make the book a quick read and potentially useful for undergraduates or graduate students as well as legal and intellectual scholars of the eighteenth century. Six appendices give readers insight into the historiographies of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Declaration as well as reproductions of key passages and drafts of each text. Conklin engages in an intensive textual analysis of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" and delves into the...

Garry Wills, What the Qur’an Meant and Why It Matters

Garry Wills, What the Qur’an Meant and Why It Matters

Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer

Reviewed by: Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer David S. Brown Russell Kirk: American Conservative. By Bradley J. Birzer. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Pp. viii, 574. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-6618-6.) Over the past several years a number of commentators have explored various facets of political theorist Russell Kirk's thought and "imagination." Among the best of these are W. Wesley McDonald's Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology (Columbia, Mo., 2004) and Gerald J. Russello's The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (Columbia, Mo., 2007). Now arrives Bradley J. Birzer's big biography, which will immediately become the standard life-and-times account of Kirk. This work offers a full portrait, appropriately devoting most of its pages to Kirk's writings, politics, and critical role as an intellectual engagé helping elucidate a conservative tradition in America. Kirk's scholarship, particularly his important book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago, 1953), challenged the notion advanced by much of the postwar professoriat that the country's political philosophy, as a rule, trended liberal. In effect, he gave the Right a respectable intellectual heritage, which included Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, and Irving Babbitt. More than sixty years after publication, it remains an iconic text among conservatives. The strengths of Birzer's biography are numerous. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, has immersed himself in Kirk's oeuvre, reading not simply his subject's major writings but also Kirk's many opinion pieces, articles, and [End Page 1012] novels. He ventures into Kirk's psychology and makes altogether reasonable and insightful observations about Kirk's search for faith and community, delight in the gothic, and antisocial pose as an undergraduate at Michigan College, now Michigan State University, before flowering in Scotland, where he completed his graduate work at the University of St. Andrews. He was a Catholic convert who swore he saw sundry fairies, goblins, and ghosts throughout his life. One has the impression of a preternaturally mature young man who may not have taken his callow American peers seriously. The bulk of Birzer's work assays Kirk's quixotic quest to challenge the secularism of the twentieth century and create a Christian humanist movement in response to the major ideologies—liberalism, communism, and fascism—of that period. For Kirk, this amounted to a proposed "return to first principles" (p. 185). Birzer rightly notes, however, that Kirk's high-humanistic pursuit began to lose focus in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he became increasingly involved in politics. Much against the advice of his friend T. S. Eliot, Kirk began writing for William Buckley's National Review and advising Barry Goldwater. By the 1980s and the onset of the Reagan Revolution, these connections helped make Kirk an éminence grise among the conservative faithful, but, as Birzer notes, such efforts in print and partisan politics took time away from his intellectual work. Kirk is certainly deserving of a large biography, but this one would have benefited from a bit of careful pruning. There are many pages examining the lives and works of important thinkers who knew or had some influence on or association with Kirk, including T. S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, Ayn Rand, and Garry Wills. These often expansive vignettes border on becoming extraneous. One seven-page section explicates English critic T. E. Hulme's influence on Eliot and effectively de-emphasizes Kirk. Birzer also devotes considerable space to Kirk's three periods as a short fiction writer in a section that at times feels like a detour. Caveats aside, Birzer has provided an impressively researched and lucidly written study. Readers looking for a sensitive, sympathetic account of Kirk and his commanding role on the last century's intellectual Right will not be disappointed. David S. Brown Elizabethtown College Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

The Harvard Vergil: Memoir of The Black Sheep

The Harvard Vergil:Memoir of The Black Sheep Hans-Peter Stahl The influence the Harvard School has had on my scholarship? Among the questions you ask, this is a challenging one indeed, Professor Hejduk, and it comes at an (in)opportune time: I have recently published a monograph on the Aeneid (Stahl 2016, subtitled a Recovery Study), which along its way is widely critical of the Harvard School. The book is not written for short-distance readers who pick decontextualized passages, scenes, and "verbal echoes" for their "reading," but it pays attention to the artifice's long-distance organization (the existence of which it has lately been fashionable to deny, with "desiderated" results). So one might of course, with equal justification, ask your question also the other way around. The long-range answer there, I'm afraid, would probably be, to use a Harvard School code word, "disturbing." Considering the long gestation period of my book over many decades and the guiding track it lays on the Latin side of my scholarship, [End Page 108] it appears appropriate to fill in some pertinent autobiographical details with which its history is interwoven. Well, my first acquaintance with Harvard was a rather cheerful affair. I was fortunate in being awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies. When, in the fall of 1961, I arrived from Germany in Washington, D.C., I found that there was no Center for Hellenic Studies, at least not as a physical entity. Instead, there was an almost empty house on Whitehaven Street, N.W., whose owner, a Mr. Paul Mellon (said to be a sponsor), resided next door.1 There was no permanent director (Bernard Knox was taking a year off), but a young scholar (a Latinist, working on Vergil!), Michael C. J. Putnam, was filling the position in Knox's absence. And, there was only one single book in the house—a mystery story.2 However, when I mentioned my return ticket to Germany, the never-failing Michael quickly arranged for me a trip to Harvard and Elliot House, where I both could explain to John Finley my reservations about his prognosticating Thucydides (the enthusiastic young [New Deal?] democrat turning conservative with age), and in two weeks' time went through the Thucydidean holdings of Widener Library (my work had just reached the point where I needed a vast amount of secondary literature)—and cut a deal with the helpful but wary librarians: they would always send me the next package of literature before I had returned its predecessor. So I would always have a sufficient supply at hand in D.C. It worked out splendidly, and I could work through my bibliography faster than I had ever hoped. The cheerful Junior Fellows proved a more than lively group, especially when, under Michael's helpful instructions, playing croquet. The peacocks in the adjacent gardens of the British Embassy uttered loud screams whenever a mallet hit the ball. Soon there came a request from the Embassy, transmitted via the Mellon residence, please not to play [End Page 109] croquet during nighttime (under floodlights). Discussions were similarly vivid: I recall Anna Morpurgo's and Garry Wills's lively disagreements on Sophocles' Antigone; Kenneth Reckford and myself hotly discussing Euripides (we both intended writing a monograph on this author, but neither of us ever got around to it); and the ever-joking Doug Parker writing epitaphs on each Fellow (mine went somewhat like this: while walking on a glacier immersed in Classen-Steup, I stumbled into a ravine. It ended: "Maybe/I see/Hans-Peter/später"). Michael invited visitors for us, among them Wendell Clausen from Harvard, and, for me specifically, Adam Parry. The two of us discussed Thucydides. I do not remember whether we also touched upon Adam's "Two Voices" theory on the Aeneid. (Almost a decade later, upon reading my Thucydides, Adam would persuade me to join the Classics Department at Yale.) All the while, Michael Putnam was working on his Aeneid book. I myself had studied Vergil under a reinstated Nazi professor (by then a conservative democrat; his writings of the 1930s are largely suppressed in his Gesammelte Schriften); also, I had...

The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by Jared Peatman (review)

Reviewed by: The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by Jared Peatman Andrew Delbanco The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Jared Peatman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8093-3310-3, 244pp., cloth, $34.50. About halfway through Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast of the whaleship Pequod, promising it as a reward to the first man who spies the great white whale for which he is hunting. One by one, officers and crew walk up to take a closer look at the coin, which “like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn . . . mirrors back his own mysterious self.” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has been America’s doubloon. It has been parsed phrase by phrase, assessed as rhetoric and political theory, claimed as a national scripture and disclaimed as a misreading of history, demeaned, exalted, and everything in between. Some scholars have placed it within the military and political context of its time; others have lifted it out of time into the realm of philosophy and [End Page 101] world literature. To say something fresh about it is no small feat—but Jared Peatman manages to do so in this informative and probing book. Peatman begins with how Lincoln wrote and spoke the speech. He sorts out conflicting accounts of how it was composed in several stages (not, as legend would have it, hurriedly on the train on a “scrap of brown paper”); received by its first audience (not with stunned silence, but with delayed applause, as if it were a piece of music that the audience is not quite sure is over); reported in northern and southern newspapers (with reactions ranging from appreciation to contempt); and how, through the ensuing decades, it has been invoked as a statement of sectional reconciliation, a defense of political democracy, a call for racial justice, and, most recently, for global cooperation in the face of problems no nation can solve on its own. Along the way, Peatman touches on many topics pertinent to the contemporary reception of the speech, such as the creation of instant journalism by the new technology of the telegraph, which delivered multiple versions to every corner of the country, and the question—still very much unresolved in the fall of 1863—of the pace and scope of emancipation. We also learn a great deal about what might be called the afterlife of the speech—how Sun Yat-sen invoked it on behalf of Chinese revolutionary nationalism in the 1910s; how during the short-lived Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early ’30s German intellectuals embraced it as the credo of the American Bismarck; and even how it has penetrated popular culture, as when, in 2004, sportswriter Frank Deford adapted it as an anthem for the Boston Red Sox. But at the heart of Peatman’s book is the long post–Civil War struggle over the meaning of Lincoln’s remarks for America’s destiny, which has amounted to a debate over the meaning of the Civil War itself. He shows convincingly—in gentle dissent from previous readings by Garry Wills and Gabor Boritt—that it took a long time for the message of racial equality implicit in the speech to come through loud and clear. He shows how the weight of interpretation shifted slowly, and with frequent stalls and reversals, from understanding it as a defense of majority rule (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”) to a call for fulfilling the promise of racial justice implied in the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence (“a new birth of freedom”). Peatman is at his best when he shows how during the middle decades of the twentieth century an array of American leaders—from Theodore Hesburgh to Lyndon Johnson and, most decisively, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—compelled the nation finally to grapple with the Gettysburg Address as an ever more urgent articulation of the unmet challenge of achieving racial justice. Historian Eric Foner wrote recently, in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, that “no one could mistake the meaning” of the phrase “the new birth of freedom” when...

Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theater in Shakespeare’s Time by Garry Wills

Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theater in Shakespeare’s Time by Garry Wills

CHAPMAN’S HOMER. The Iliad. Edited, with Introduction and Glossary, by Allardyce Nicoll, With a New Preface by Garry Wills. Bollengen Series XLI. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998

http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183-1718_67_14

Book Review: Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief, by Jeff Sharlet, ed

Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief. Jeff Sharlet, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. 424 pp. $30 hbk.It is hard to think of a writer better suited to editing an anthology on American religion than Jeff Sharlet. The Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College is also a talented journalist especially known for The Family and C Street, investigative works chronicling the ways in which Christian fundamentalism has permeated the political power structure in Washington, D.C. His latest offering is subtler-less expose than meandering meditation. But it offers equally valuable insight into the role of religion in America's politics, communities, and in the private lives of its citizens.More precisely, Radiant Truths concerns itself with American belief, which Sharlet defines as a subset of religion. In practice, focusing on this supposed subset has produced a nonfiction collection that's broader than what one might expect to find in a book about faith. Sharlet begins with Walt Whitman on a Civil War battlefield in 1863 and proceeds chronologically to end in 2011 with a fragment from Francine Prose in which she recounts bursting into tears on seeing the poet's verses at an Occupy Wall Street camp. In between, there are stories that face religion head-on, such as John Jeremiah Sullivan's hilarious and ultimately humane portrayal of Christian rock fans in Upon This Rock (2004) and Zora Neale Hurston's mesmerizing immersion into the Voodoo traditions of New Orleans in Hoodoo (1935). In others, such as the selection from Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), readers could debate whether the fervor being explored is religious or something else-a manifestation of culture, say, or of a powerful but not necessarily divine political ideology.Unsurprisingly, Sharlet's fascination with the intersection between religion and politics holds. This is good for readers. Without it, he might not have included Garry Wills's incisive Whittier: First Day (1970), which connects Nixon's Quaker roots to a destructive, uniquely American myth of self-improvement. The piece manages to feel fresh despite the fact that Nixon is long gone. His reign may be over, but our national obsession with the self-made man persists to this day, affecting social and political progress in myriad ways. Likewise, Sharlet includes communist writer Meridel Le Sueur's 1934 account of a labor strike, I Was Marching. The piece is another that is not strictly about religion, but the prose is sharp and surprisingly current, offering lines like this to readers fresh off a year of headlines about racism, inequality, and police brutality:Our life seems to be marked with a curious and muffled violence over America, but this action has always been in the dark, men and women dying obscurely, poor and povertymarked lives, but now from city to city runs this violence, into the open, and colossal happenings stand bare before our eyes. …

Garry Wills. Why Priests? A Failed Tradition. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.

DialogVolume 53, Issue 4 p. 390-392 Book Reviews Wills, Garry. Why Priests? A Failed Tradition. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. W.T. Dickens, W.T. Dickens Siena CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorW. Merle Longwood, W. Merle Longwood Siena CollegeSearch for more papers by this author W.T. Dickens, W.T. Dickens Siena CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorW. Merle Longwood, W. Merle Longwood Siena CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 December 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/dial.12145Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume53, Issue4December 2014Pages 390-392 RelatedInformation

Making make-believe real: politics as theater in Shakespeare's time

A penetrating study of the images, symbols, pageants, and creative performances ambitious Elizabethans used to secure political power Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of other playwrights of the era as well, Marlowe's Edward II and Tamburlaine among them. But Elizabethan playwrights were not alone in realizing that a sense of theater was essential to the exercise of power. Real rulers knew it, too, and none better than Queen Elizabeth. In this fascinating study of political stagecraft in the Elizabethan era, Garry Wills explores a period of vast cultural and political change during which the power of make-believe to make power real was not just a theory but an essential truth. Wills examines English culture as Catholic Christianity's rituals were being overturned and a Protestant queen took the throne. New iconographies of power were necessary for the new Renaissance liturgy to displace the medieval church-state. The author illuminates the extensive imaginative constructions that went into Elizabeth's reign and the explosion of great Tudor and Stuart drama that provided the imaginative power to support her long and successful rule.

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

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...

Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism by Garry Wills

209 Book review Both Bradshaw, an Anglican, and Johnson, a Lutheran, hold dearly the ecumenical movement and it is reflected in their scholarship . Chapter 7 provides a clear exposition of the theological positions espoused by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and English reformers . For the uninformed, the chapter provides the nuance necessary to understand well each position and hopefully dispel large and clumsy assumptions about what any one particular reformer did or didn’t believe about the Eucharist (240). Unfortunately , the treatment of the Anglican Communion in the same chapter placed emphasis upon the ritual shifts that occurred under particular royal rulers, but seemed to lack an explanation for what might have been shifts in Eucharistic theologies. One wishes that the final chapter, “The Modern Period”, had included a word about the Anglican Ordinariate and the implications it has for ecumenical convergence. This could have been discussed alongside Summorum Pontificum (317) – another ecclesial matter having important liturgical and ecumenical ramifications . Perhaps a second edition could include this topic. Readers will garner insights about a variety of liturgical facts including the transition from chair to ambo for homilies (62), formal blessings given to those not receiving communion (66), the careful avoidance of unlearned presiders (70), Luther’s esteem for both Latin and the vernacular (254), the great advantage of a return to ancient sources, which occurred after the Reformation (290), and that 70% of the English-speaking Protestant communities use the Revised Common Lectionary (311), which brings about the added benefit for them of a rediscovered liturgical calendar. Surely this text will become a new standard within academic courses, whether broadly liturgical or specifically Eucharistic. Michael B. Wurtz, C.S.C. Pontifical Athenaeum Sant’Anselmo Rome Garry Wills Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 208 pages. Hardbound. $21.95. In Font of Life, Wills uses the baptistery of Milan as a way to explore the lives of Ambrose and Augustine and to show their significance for later developments in the history of Western 210 Antiphon 18.2 (2014) Christianity. He does not advance an overarching argument, but seeks more to act as a tour-guide. Drawing from primary sources and scholars such as Peter Brown, Mirabella Roberti, Richard Krautheimer, and Marcia Colish, Wills walks readers through the geography and history of Milan, early rites and theologies of baptism , ecclesiastical discipline, and the allegorical interpretation of scripture. The book is helpful for novice readers, but offers less to scholars who are already familiar with the secondary sources on which he draws. For Wills, Ambrose is a man of power, the model of bishop as potentate. Though he acknowledges the pastoral and theological implications of Ambrose’s actions and work, he thinks that with Ambrose, the political remains primary. When Ambrose expresses a desire to be a martyr or braces his congregation for martyrdom during a confrontation with imperial troops, Wills interprets his actions primarily as means of control. Similarly, Ambrose asserted his authority over devotion to the martyrs by raising his own churches and binding them in a single discipline. This consolidation of power helped him in his conflicts with the emperors Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius—in which he prevailed every single time. Augustine found himself in Ambrose’s Milan teaching rhetoric at the imperial court. In later years, he depicts himself as Ambrose ’s spiritual son, converted and instructed by his wisdom and love. However, Wills argues—against Courcelle’s Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin—that this was not his view during his time in Milan. It is clear from the Soliloquia, written at Cassiciacum months before his baptism, that “Augustine wanted to discuss his personal problems with Ambrose, but the great man had no time for it” (68). Moreover, Augustine had other teachers whom he acknowledged at the time, chiefly Mallius Theodorus and the priest Simplicianus. From them, not from Ambrose’s sermons , he gained access to Neoplatonist thought. Simplicianus’ tale of the conversion of Victorinus was a particular help. Wills writes: “What [Augustine] needed now was not intellectual persuasion but a strengthening of the will… This is the kind of counsel and encouragement Augustine had hoped to get...

The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills

The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills

Font of life. Ambrose, Augustine, and the mystery of baptism. By Garry Wills. Pp. xiii+194 incl. 2 frontispieces and 14 figs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. £16.99. 978 0 19 960579 8

Font of life. Ambrose, Augustine, and the mystery of baptism. By Garry Wills. Pp. xiii+194 incl. 2 frontispieces and 14 figs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. £16.99. 978 0 19 960579 8 - Volume 64 Issue 3

Augustine's “Confessions”: A Biography. By Garry Wills. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011. x + 166 pp.

Augustine's “Confessions”: A Biography. By Garry Wills. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011. x + 166 pp.

Garry Wills, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism

Garry Wills, <i>Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism</i>

“Conjunctive Relations”

“Conjunctive Relations” Priscilla Wald (bio) Abraham Lincoln as a vampire slayer? Why not? Surely a mythic figure on the historic landscape, he embodies the paradoxes of a period at once rich and raw, a time of agonistic contradiction and extraordinary possibility, a moment when the constitution of the nation in every meaning of that term showed its roughest edges as it teetered on the brink of extinction. I am not surprised at finding myself more willing to suspend disbelief that Lincoln slayed vampires than that his best friend (and the best man at his wedding) was African American or that he was devoted above all to the abolition of slavery. He is—and seems to have styled himself as—a figure suited more to myth than to history, and that is why I take such pleasure in his speeches, especially the Gettysburg Address. Pleasure is never unalloyed. The Gettysburg Address is as dangerous as it is powerful—dangerous because it is powerful. Lincoln was a wordsmith par excellence; his favorite book was Kirkham’s Grammar, a book used commonly in classrooms at a time when the political power of rhetoric was widely acknowledged. Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg demonstrates the president’s mastery of rhetoric, but I wonder if even Lincoln could have imagined the impact of the 271 words (more or less) intoned at the Pennsylvania cemetery on November 19, 1863, when the president was not even the featured speaker. And I wonder if words could matter that much at present. I hope so, which is why I take such pleasure in this rhetorical performance. At Gettysburg, as I have discussed elsewhere, Lincoln uttered the modern nation into existence. His archaic opening—the biblical language of “four score and seven years ago”—shows his awareness that he is writing a creation myth and grounding it in the highest authority available to a nineteenth-century American. My pleasure comes from my astonishment and awe at what these words seem to have done. Their alchemy appears to have turned “these united states” into “the United States” even before the Union victory produced a nation out of a confederation. Lincoln’s flaws are well known; his mistakes and limitations are very much the stuff of history. But the audacity of a rhetorician—a poet and politician—who knew and profoundly believed in his crafts displays undeniably the power of words to change worlds. That power is [End Page 15] hopeful, and that hope combined with the rhetorical force of the speech/poem yields an awful pleasure: the pleasure and politics of words forged out of a dauntless (and daunting) imagination. I take pleasure in this text as a poem—and in calling it a poem—every time I teach or write about it.1 I delight in seeing, and showing, how much prosody, poetics, and grammar matter, for example, in Lincoln’s use of the transitive and intransitive forms of the verb “to dedicate” when he insists that although “we” are “here” to “dedicate” the battlefield—to convert it into a cemetery and national symbol—“we” cannot “dedicate” (or “consecrate” or “hallow”) it; that honor belongs to “the brave men, living or dead, who struggled” in the bloodiest battle of the war. “We” can, however, “be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Lincoln’s audience, metonymically “the people” of the nation to which he so hopefully gives rhetorical shape, can complete this work by dedicating themselves to an idea—“the proposition that all men are created equal”—to which the nation is “dedicated.” They can, that is, consent to be “the people” who embody the nation that founds itself not on territory or tribal right but on a principle declared “four score and seven years ago,” eleven years prior to the ratification of the contested Constitution. The exclusions and exceptionalism of this vision are evident; its grandiosity is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. I came to understand that apparent paradox, as well as the curious pleasure of paradox itself, from another text that greatly enhanced, if not altogether enabled, my pleasure in Lincoln’s words: Allen Grossman’s magisterial...

Taking the Measure of Madison

Jeff Broadwater, a Barton college history professor and the author of one of the three biographies reviewed in this essay, recently began a public lecture on James Madison's presidency with the following story. A decade ago, Garry Wills, Broadwater notes, wrote the biography of Madison for an American presidency series, edited by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and published by Times Books. The Madison volume in this series contains only two illustrations: a portrait of Madison on the dust jacket and another adjacent to the title page. The portrait pictured next to the title page in the initial run of this book is of, well, James Monroe.