Augustine Conversions and Confessions, by Robin Lane Fox review: a new analysis

Augustne: Conversions and Confessions

Author: Robin Lane Fox

ISBN-13: 978-1846144004

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £30

Augustine's Confessions is generally regarded as one of the first instances of autobiography in the western world. Focusing mainly on his interior life, and likely composed starting in 397 CE, the Confessions maps Augustine's intellectual and spiritual journey to Christian belief via his engagement with some of the most prominent philosophical and religious traditions of his day, particularly the Manichaeans and the Neo-Platonists. Reading Cicero's Hortensius was the catalyst that converted him to the philosophical life, he tells us, and his first 40 years were consumed by a quest to seek after truth, and were dominated by questions about the nature of being, the problem of God, the existence of evil, and the character of the good life. This search was punctuated by a series of conversions, the most important of which was his conversion in Milan in 386, on hearing the sermons of the great theologian Ambrose, and which led him to affirm his belief in Christianity. It is this journey that the Confessions recall, and in this work Augustine has not only painted a vivid and compelling account of the drama of his intellectual and spiritual quest for understanding, but has also provided the western literary canon with one of its earliest and enduring autobiographical meditations.

Sprawling archive

Augustine was a prolific writer who left behind a sprawling archive of theological treatises, biblical commentaries, sermons and letters, some of which are still being uncovered having been preserved in manuscripts by later scribes and scholars. The Confessions was composed near the beginning of his writing life, when he was 43, and just embarking on an ecclesiastical career that was lived amidst the tumult of the decline of the Roman Empire. Moreover his extensive writings over the subsequent 30 years were also, in the main, composed in the context of both political and theological tumult, and were responsive to it. For example his The City of God, which had such a significant impact on western political philosophy and in which we see the first framing of the concept of a just war, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Sack of Rome in 410.

In addition his development of concepts of original sin and free will emerged from the heat of theological battle with the Manichaeans and the Pelegians. These battles were waged over a host of intersecting questions about the nature of evil and human freedom and have had a formative impact on the conceptual scaffolding of the western intellectual tradition. Indeed there is scarcely an important theological question on which Augustine has not written and such has his impact been, that subsequent generations have usually taken notice.

Robin Lane Fox's magisterial work Augustine Conversions and Confessions deals only with the first 43 years of his life and is focused on the Confessions and the series of "conversions" around which the Confessions is implicitly structured. A historian of the ancient world, Lane Fox tells readers that he does not share Augustine's faith but is nonetheless intrigued by his restless intelligence. Lane Fox is an acknowledged expert on late antiquity and has already made an important contribution to our understanding of this most dynamic and interesting of times in his celebrated Pagans and Christians, first published in 1986, which analysed the differing and competing religions operative across Asia Minor and North Africa in the second and third centuries CE. In Augustine Conversions and Confessions we see many of the hallmarks that also made Pagans and Christians such an important and influential work. Lane Fox has an enviable command of a vast array of sources, and moves fluently between multiple genres of text, image and other forms of material and intellectual culture.

He depicts, with great sympathy and imagination, the context of life in the ancient world, and particularly the context of someone such as Augustine, who was consumed with his search for wisdom, and who was confronted with an intensity of religious and philosophical debate that we moderns can only imagine. His erudition across manifold philosophical and religious belief systems grounds this work and this is further enhanced by his contextualisation of these systems within the complex historical and political happenings of an empire in its last throes. Yet his analysis and arguments have a lightness of touch that draw the reader in, even when one is encountering previously unknown texts, belief systems or events.

Lasting impact

Like Peter Brown's seminal Augustine of Hippo, published in 1967, Conversions and Confessions will likely have a lasting impact on how Augustine's Confessions are read and understood. However this is not a book for the faint-hearted. It runs to 657 pages, with notes, and occasionally suffers from the inclusion of digressions that, although some readers may find themamusing, add little. There are also a small number of places where his accounts of various theological positions and debates suffer from over-simplification, and thus inaccuracy. But these are minor flaws in an outstanding work.

The depth of Lane Fox’s understanding of the philosophical and religious world views with which Augustine engaged is evident in this very fine work. It is manifested in many ways, not least by the fact that Lane Fox extends the range of his analysis to include contemporaries or near contemporaries of Augustine with whom scholars have not traditionally been concerned. In addition, the political and historical contextualisation of encounters that are more usually considered in their intellectual dimensions, seen for example in his discussion of Augustine’s involvement with the Manichaeans, is most illuminating and is one of the hallmarks of his approach.

Conversions and Confessions is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching analyses of Augustine's Confessions in the context of its philosophical, theological, cultural and political hinterland. As such it is a tremendous achievement.

Linda Hogan is vice-provost/chief academic officer and professor of ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin. Her most recent book is Keeping Faith with Human Rights