by Matt Sitman
In a review of Miles Hollingworth’s recent book, Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, Joseph Bottum sizes up the Christian thinker’s place in the history of the West:
To read The City of God is to realize Augustine was a great philosopher, of course. Maybe not quite in the absolute “A” class of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, or Hegel, but not down at the next level, either—with the “B” class (but still great) likes of Marcus Aurelius, Francisco Suárez, and Friedrich Schiller. Call it the “A-minus” set of world-historical thinkers: Plotinus, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Hume, Wittgenstein, Augustine. But to read De Doctrina Christiana would convince anyone that Augustine belongs in the first gathering of theologians, the greatest of the many fine theological minds among the church fathers in Latin Christendom. There’s a reason, after all, that Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther alike engage Augustine in a way they do no other theological thinker. Then, too, as the Confessions show, Augustine was among the last great classical stylists, trained in a rhetorical tradition that would cease to exist all too soon.
What’s more, he stood at the moment of the failure of Rome—dying as the Vandals besieged Hippo, his Roman city in North Africa—and he had the most significant historical event of 1,000 years to explain and translate into a lasting understanding of the human condition. But it’s somehow the combination of all this that makes Saint Augustine so central: What he wrote, joined with how he wrote, joined with when he wrote.
There is no Western civilization without him. He shapes our intellectual tradition in the way others who are so good they force themselves into our minds do.
(“The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico, via Wikimedia Commons)
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