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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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The title of James O’Donnell’s new biography of Church father Augustine—Augustine, Sinner and Saint—indicates his approach. O’Donnell’s intention seems to be to knock Augustine down a peg or two before he can elevate him again.
This may be a typically contemporary approach to biography—the unmasking—but Augustine himself, when writing the Confessions, tried to show that behind the facade of the famous bishop there was a sinner rescued by God. O’Donnell starts by immediately delving into Augustine’s North African, fifth-century context, to try and recall Augustine’s voice.
His insistence on recognising the distance between us and Augustine is admirable most of the time but becomes pedantic when he uses the lower-case god to differentiate between our concept of God and Augustine’s.
This is one example of O’Donnell’s postmodern style that, in an attempt to liven the text, can seem a little forced.
The Mediterranean is described as a “super highway,” a bishop is a “CEO,” Augustine rides “in his stretch limousine” and a contemporary of Augustine is a “gunslinger.”
But then, Augustine is a particu larly modern-sounding writer. While trying to reach back to the person of Augustine, whose voice has dimmed, O’Donnell also recognises the literary Augustine that still speaks loudly today.
His On Christian Doctrine uses semiotics (the study of signs) 1500 years before theorists such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes. His Confessions are a remarkable mix of candour and control, and also, says O’Donnell, a confusing mix of “confessions-about-god” and “confessions-about-Augustine,” which alienated Augustine’s contemporary audience but appealed to the readers of much later centuries.
His biblical study is like modern literary theory: more about how to interpret than actual commentary. He is relentless in his questioning, “scientific and analytical and literal and systematic,” yet he thinks like a “jazz improvisationalist.”
O’Donnell adds that the likes of Augustine’s writing was not seen again until Proust and Joyce.
Augustine wrote, says O’Donnell, the average of 300 pages a year for 40 years. That’s a lot of material. Much of the material he wrote was dashed off hurriedly, to put out the fires of heresy.
O’Donnell details at length the disputes with Manichaeism, Donatism and Pelagianism.
O’Donnell suggests that, in hindsight, we see a line from the apostles to the Church of today. however the reality of fifth-century Christianity was competing factions, with Augustine’s version winning out. In indulging some what-if scenarios, O’Donnell implies the makeup of today’s Christianity and the history of the Church is something of an accident—it could have gone any number of ways. From a historian’s perspective, this seems fair.
O’Donnell uses a type of literary archaeology to shed light on aspects of Augustine’s character that aren’t traditionally illuminated and does so in impressive detail. He also acknowledges the impact of Augustine’s “appetite for transcendence” on even secular thinking today, in the areas of sexuality—as a young man, Augustine famously prayed for “chastity but not yet”—and the question of mind-body unity and the soul, which continues to stump current philosophers. Augustine has also shaped the way we read books—biographies in particular.
O’Donnell structures his biography around the idea that there were many Augustines—Augustine the bishop, Augustine the theologian, Augustine the writer. The depth and breadth of Augustine’s character provides such a wealth of material for a biography like O’Donnell’s—but this should also return us to Augustine’s works themselves, the places his voice speaks the loudest today. Not only should we be familiar with how he has influenced the Church; the identity he reveals to us in his works—that of sinner and saint— embodies the happy contradictions of Christian faith, and speaks to us across the centuries with a voice that is both ancient and modern.
Extract from Signs of the Times, December 2007 .
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