Saint Augustine: A Penguin Life by Garry Wills
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the last few months, I noticed that several books I had been enjoying were influenced strongly by Augustine—in particular, C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce and James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom.

Also, Augustine was influential on Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, and he has been influential as well on John Piper, a writer whose books have helped me grow spiritually.

One connection to Augustine that each of these writers holds is Augustine’s anthropology. Augustine sees the human being not primarily as a thinker, but as lover—not primarily a thinking being, but a desiring being. In today’s world, dominated by Enlightenment thinking, some Christians see the core of our being as the mind, our thoughts. But Augustine knew better. Augustine saw the core of our being not in the head, but in our desires, our affections. For Augustine, becoming a Christian involves God sovereignly transforming a person’s affections so that the person desires Him above all else. In other words, salvation involves the mind, but it equally involves the changing of a person’s desires so that God is loved for His own sake, and not for any other reason.

So anyway, when I saw Garry Wills’ bio of Augustine at the library last week, I picked it up, and I read the book in about three days. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It’s scholarly and yet readable, and at only 150 pages, it’s short enough that it’s not overwhelming.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I love the story of Augustine’s conversion. As an unconverted man, Augustine had struggled with sexual sins, and was unwilling to repent from them to follow Christ. As he was wrestling with his soul one afternoon in a garden in Milan, he overheard a voice, maybe of a little girl in a nearby house: “Take up and read!” Seeing this as providential, he got up, took a copy of the Scriptures, and opened it up. The verse he opened to was Romans 13:14: “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.” Augustine says, “The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and every shadow of doubt evanesced.” Again, it was Augustine’s desires that were changed. He had thought the right things, but that afternoon, his affections were directed to God.

2. I was fascinated by how Augustine’s thought developed over the course of his lifetime. For example, Augustine moved over the course of his ministry from a neo-Platonist disdain of the material realm to a Biblical acceptance and embracing of the material realm as good--because it was created by a good God. Originally, as a new believer, Augustine was an ascetic. But at the end of his life, he was defending the institution of marriage from attacks by Jerome, who had said that marriage caused defilement (because it involved the body). Augustine certainly wasn’t perfect as a man or as a thinker, but he had an amazing capacity to work through intellectual problems and the humility to change his positions as he felt led by God to do so.

3. It was interesting to me that Augustine was so involved in the work of his local ministry. He was a pastor, and he was constantly dealing with situations in his church. I had pictured him as someone sitting in a study all day, writing and thinking lofty thoughts detached from the world. But this isn’t what Augustine’s life was like at all. He was constantly pre-occupied with practical issues in his congregation and with issues in other churches nearby.

4. Wills also gave me a better idea of what the early church was like. He describes leaders like Jerome and Ambrose, as well as church councils, which could get surprisingly rowdy. Wills sees Jerome as a crotchety and argumentative man, highly unlikable, and unable to keep friends. Ambrose, who baptized Augustine, was someone who Augustine respected more and more over the course of his lifetime.

5. Finally, I was struck by the importance of writing in Augustine's life. Augustine wrote for himself, and writing helped him clarify his thoughts. Augustine also did much of his work as a pastor and as a church leader through letters, sermons, and other forms of writing.



View all my reviews