Augustine's Confessions: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books)

I’ve enjoyed a number of the titles in Princeton’s Live of Great Religious Books series, and, having read a number of St. Augustine’s works since college, I looked forward to reading Garry Wills’s “life” of the Confessions. With one or two caveats, I was not disappointed. Wills’s biography of the Confessions is a brisk, well-written, and informative guide to the life and times of Augustine’s book.One of the strengths of Wills’s book is the attention he gives to the historical context in which Augustine wrote. Or dictated, as Wills points out all important people of Augustine’s time and place—and volume of output—did. Wills lays out the way people of the time wrote, what assumptions they brought to the writing process, and how writing was duplicated and disseminated. Where modern people are accustomed to read a book like Confessions as the private journal of a man’s intimate thoughts with God, in reality it was dictated to a roomful of scribes while yet other writing projects and ecclesial duties were underway.Over the course of recounting both the story of Confessions and how Augustine came to write it, Wills also exposes the centrality of Genesis to Augustine’s story. The parallels are myriad but often overlooked, and Wills does a wonderful job highlighting them. Augustine, in telling his own story, consciously invoked the imagery and message of Genesis—his fall and redemption were Adam’s. The result, for me, was a renewed appreciation of the Confessions as a literary work.Two things keep me from giving the book five stars. The first is that the latter third or so of the book becomes very quotation-heavy. Wills falls into a rhythm—explaining a passage of Augustine, quoting at length from it, sometimes as much as a page and a half, and then rehearsing again the passage’s meaning and tying it to the next such passage to be quoted. It becomes repetitious and even tedious after a while, all the more so because it is unnecessary.Second, the book, unlike the others in the Lives of Great Religious Books, severely truncates the section of the biography dealing with the Confessions’ “life” since Augustine. Wills runs through the history of the Confessions’ reception and interpretation in a single chapter, gliding over points like Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin in a single paragraph. This section has offered some of the most interesting and rewarding material in the other Lives in the series (especially my two favorites, Alan Jacobs’s life of The Book of Common Prayer and Mark Larrimore’s life of The Book of Job), but Wills all but skips it. And as short as the book is, the shortest of the series by far, it could have stood expansion.Despite those two weaknesses, Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography is an excellent read. Wills takes a great work of literature, meditation, and devotion and, by unpacking the literary and theological features of Augustine’s narrative and setting the book in its historical context, makes it fresh, vivid, and helps the reader understand just what gave the book its lasting power.Recommended.

Only in the last few pages does Gary Wills actually do what this series was created for its writers to do: to read down through time the life of the book. That is what makes the series, Lives of Great Religious Books, exceptional. It is not the life of a book's author (in many cases in the series unknown or anonymous anyway), but of the book itself which it studies, which means, among other intentions, the ways in which it has been used and abused, read and misread through that life. Wills saves that task for the last few pages of this book, as if to acknowledge, however belatedly, what his book was supposed to be about.Otherwise, it mostly repeats his interpretations of The Confessions (among other writings by Augustine) and his brief biography of him from the book on Augustine which he published in Penguin's brief life series. If you have read that book, a fine one, of course, you do not need to read this one since it is essentially the same book, slightly re-written, under a new guise.The Princeton series, Lives of Great Religious Books, is original and stimulating. I have read some twenty from it and intend to read the others. A few have been disappointing, like the one on The Book of Mormon, but most have been exceptional, each in its own way.But Wills' contribution is disheartening, especially coming from a writer whose work is usually beautifully, engagingly written, learned, informative, and fresh. This one is reused goods, self-plagiarism of a kind. It does not fit the series and it is, in effect, a repeat of another book by him on Augustine with a bit of variation here and there and, of course, at the very end when it briefly acknowledges the book it was supposed to be.I hate to say this, but there is something not quite right about that, something slightly dishonest or, at the least, misrepresentative. If you have not read Wills' other short book on Augustine, this version of it no doubt would satisfy, but not for the reasons that those of us who have come to treasure the series to which it purports to belong. The two books are nearly the same book, after all, something the purchasers of this one, at least, ought to have been told. This is barely a biography of The Confessions at all.

Very good reading indeed. Well written and insightful. A must read, for those who are interested in the subject.I would have given it 5 stars if it were not for the fact that the book arrived with an awful greasy stain on the dust jacket (see picture attached). Sad.

I'm reading Confessions right now and this book opened up insights i never would have seen in the text itself.

A very learned work and well written. The author has an in depth knowledge of Augustine and his writings. He quotes references by other authorities on Augustine, like Dr. O'Donnell.I recommend it to everyone who would like to get familiar with the subject.Conn Harrington.

On the subject of religion, faith and Catholicism, if you're looking for insight, rigorous scholarship and history, cogently and clearly expressed, there are few writers as gifted as Gary Wills. Like Christianity's greatest apologist, C.S. Lewis, Mr. Wills always leaves the reader enlightened, encouraged, and enthused.

Wills, who has translated the Confessions, has written a book that is part guided tour, part commentary, and part reception history of Augustine's most accessible work. I thoroughly enjoyed it and it made me want to read the Confessions again. So far this has been my favorite book in the excellent Lives of Great Religious Books series.

A terrific little book -- lucid, forceful, and original in its way. A genuine pleasure to read. Wills is good on Augustine, on the Confessions, and on the "afterlife" of Augustine's great work. He cites Gibbon but misses Gibbon's best zinger on Augustine (admittedly directed to City of God): "[Augustine's] learning is too often borrowed, and his arguments are too often his own." Decline and Fall, vol. II, p. 67, n.79.

Gary Wills brief synopsis of Saint Augustine's biography with a specific emphasis on the purpose and meaning of the Confessions is stronglyrecommended for anyone who has an interest in prayer, in self-reflection, in Psychology, in Philosophy, in Religion and so on. This little bookis full of gems, so since I read it, I have gone back to it a few times discovering something new each time, that's why I love it, it is the latest additionto my reference books. Thank you Gary.Dr Alexander Theodossiadis