Lane Fox is a well-respected scholar who tends toward revisionism. Lane Fox also promises to update Brown’s work and to provide surprising new insights into and theories about the Confessions and some of the famous events it recounts. This, along with Lane Fox’s emphasis on the “conversions” and “confessions” in Augustine’s life and his introduction of two secondary characters into the story, are the new angles. Lane Fox focuses entirely on Augustine’s his life up to his commencement of the Confessions in 397 at age forty-three. He advertises Augustine: Conversions to Confessions as a backstage look at The Confessions, an intimate biography of the book.
In Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, Robin Lane Fox, an emeritus Reader at Oxford University and longtime classicist and Augustine scholar, tries a little of both. How do you escape Brown’s shadow, and persuade lay readers they should venture beyond Brown (or at most, Brown plus the well-received biography by James O’Donnell)? The only hope, it seems, is to come at Augustine from a surprising new angle, or promise clever or counterintuitive insights that will alter our understanding of who Augustine was. In a masterful biography of Augustine first published in the 1960s and with two substantial chapters on Augustine in his recent book Through the Eye of the Needle, among other writings, Brown, an emeritus professor at Princeton, has incorporated the scholarly literature on Augustine and his era into books that bring Augustine fully to life.īrown is great for non-specialists, but not so great for other Augustine scholars who would like to reach a popular audience with their work. What is a non-specialist, someone who is interested in Augustine but does not have time to master the scholarly literature, to do?įor the past generation, the short answer has been: read Peter Brown. Scholars debate whether The City of God accurately portrays Rome as its empire tottered and why Augustine emphasized some features of his life and gave others short shrift in the Confessions. Others contend that the modern self predates Augustine. Some, including the philosopher Charles Taylor, have suggested that Augustine invented the modern, inward looking sense of self, displacing a traditional emphasis on the created order. The fourth century Bishop and author of the Confessions and The City of God is so influential, both historically and today, that the stream of new literature about him never seems to slow down. Review of Augustine: Conversions to Confessions, by Robin Lane FoxĪugustine is one of those figures-like Shakespeare or Darwin-who is impossible to keep up with.
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