This is a book that I have been waiting all my adult life to read – though I did not realise it. I have read Augustine’s Confessions three times without, as I now see, properly understanding the purpose or shape of the book. I have dipped into The City of God and read Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms (to me, his most accessible writing). And I have read Peter Brown’s marvellous biography of Augustine. Great as Brown is, however, he is a historian, not a theologian – still less a poet-bishop, like our present author.
Augustine’s reputation suffers in several respects. He is regarded as the macho father of Western Catholicism: obsessed by the evils of the flesh and all but dualistic in his depiction of a city of God that is completely at variance with what Wordsworth called “the world of all of us”. He is also seen as an ardent heresy-hunter, an establisher of Church orthodoxy and a male chauvinist who abandoned his common-law wife and child in order to pursue a career as the sex-hating, self-flagellating egomaniac who penned the Confessions.
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