Saint Augustine's Conversion

From Booklist
After the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul, on the road to Damascus, the most famous Christian conversion is, Wills says, Augustine's in a fourth-century Milanese garden. Moreover, Wills contends, Augustine's conversion as recounted in the eighth book of Confessiones--which Wills calls, to expunge any suggestion of criminality and better indicate its tone, The Testimony--derives from Luke's account of Saul's experience in Acts (like Saul, Augustine heard a directive voice) and incidents and emblems in Genesis and the Gospels (the garden of Augustine echoes Eden and Gethsemane; the fig tree at which Augustine casts himself down echoes the blasted fig tree cursed by Jesus in Matthew 21). In his introduction and commentary, Wills clarifies context and cons the famous text more thoroughly than any literary critic would nowadays, and his translation of it--the fourth, and final, of the extracts from ^Confessiones he has published yearly since 2001--successfully communicates the immense literary skill Augustine commanded. If only more of Wills' Augustine were forthcoming! Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

James Wood, The London Review of Books
Augustine flourishes in Wills’s hands.

Book Description
As relevant today as it was when it was originally written sixteen hundred years ago, Augustine’s Confessiones continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills has brought his superb gifts of analysis and insight to bear on this classic of Western tradition in a series of ambitious and critically acclaimed translations and interpretations. In Saint Augustine’s Conversion, Augustine’s story draws to its dramatic conclusion in what Wills calls the "hinge" chapter of the bishop’s confessional opus. With an illuminating introduction and extensive notes throughout, Wills provides a richly rewarding and inventive interpretation of Augustine’s seminal work for a new generation of readers.

About the Author
Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine’s Childhood, Saint Augustine’s Memory, and Saint Augustine’s Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.


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Fourth and last volume (after Saint Augustine's Sin, 2003, etc.) of classicist/historian Wills's translation of Augustine's Confessions, a key document of the early church. Did Augustine really all of a sudden cast off paganism and sin suddenly and come to embrace Christianity in that Milanese garden way back in a.d. 386? According to the Confessions, he did: He and friend Alypius were entertaining a visitor who filled their heads with tales about St. Anthony and the Christian ascetics, suddenly Augustine felt overwhelmed by his failure to take up the rigors of the faith, not least of them celibacy. Tormented, he repaired to the garden-gardens being the site of many important happenings in the life of Jesus and his followers-and looked into his soul: "So sick was I, so tortured," he writes, "as I reviled myself more bitterly than ever, churning and chafing in my chains, held more loosely now, but still held." Hearing a voice telling him to read, Augustine adds, he turned the Bible to Romans 13, with its quite explicit instructions to give up the usual sins: "Clothe yourself in Jesus Christ the Lord, leaving no further allowance for fleshly desires." Et voila!: a future saint was born. Well, says Wills, it's a powerful story, but a story all the same: Augustine had already converted, and there probably was not much suddenness to be had except as suited the needs of the narrative, which demands its own road to Damascus. "The pull," he writes, "came from the fact that he was not simply accepting Christianity but aspiring to be a Christian philosopher," later adding that the Confessions are better read as a work of theology rather than as an autobiography per se, "a larger testimony thatcelebrates the word of God more than the life of Augustine."Elegant and well annotated: of considerable interest to students of the church fathers and doctors. Agent: Andrew Wylie/The Wylie Agency


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