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On Augustine
Since his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury and his return to academic life (Master of Magdalene College Cambridge) Rowan Williams has demonstrated a massive new surge of intellectual energy. In this new book he turns his attention to St Augustine.
St Augustine not only shaped the development of Western theology, he also made a major contribution to political theory ( City of God ) and through his Confessions to the understanding of human psychology. Rowan Williams has an entirely fresh perspective on these matters and the chapter titles in this new book demonstrate this at a glance - 'Language Reality and Desire', 'Politics and the Soul', 'Paradoxes of Self Knowledge', 'Insubstantial Evil'. As with his previous titles, Dostoevsky, The Edge of Words and Faith in the Public Square this new study is sure to be a major contribution on a compelling subject.
St Augustine not only shaped the development of Western theology, he also made a major contribution to political theory ( City of God ) and through his Confessions to the understanding of human psychology. Rowan Williams has an entirely fresh perspective on these matters and the chapter titles in this new book demonstrate this at a glance - 'Language Reality and Desire', 'Politics and the Soul', 'Paradoxes of Self Knowledge', 'Insubstantial Evil'. As with his previous titles, Dostoevsky, The Edge of Words and Faith in the Public Square this new study is sure to be a major contribution on a compelling subject.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published June 7, 2016
48 people are currently reading
257 people want to read
About the author
Rowan Williams
261 books338 followersRowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is an Anglican bishop, poet, and theologian. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002-2012, and is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Chancellor of the University of South Wales.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 19, 2023
I’ve read through the first half of this book, but I haven’t picked it up for at least a couple months. I should probably just admit that I’m not going to finish it in the near future and move it off my “currently reading” list.
Rowan makes some interesting points, but overall this reads like one Augustine expert writing to other Augustine experts—complete with untranslated Latin phrases. I think I’m just a bit out of my depth here.
Rowan expounds on various topics relevant to Augustine’s work and thought, but each discussion seems less concerned about what is true philosophically or theologically than what Augustine thought was true. Which is actually much less interesting to me.
Maybe I’ll come back to this one again someday.
Rowan makes some interesting points, but overall this reads like one Augustine expert writing to other Augustine experts—complete with untranslated Latin phrases. I think I’m just a bit out of my depth here.
Rowan expounds on various topics relevant to Augustine’s work and thought, but each discussion seems less concerned about what is true philosophically or theologically than what Augustine thought was true. Which is actually much less interesting to me.
Maybe I’ll come back to this one again someday.
possible-tbr
March 5, 2025Skimmed for thesis research. What a lovely hybrid of scholarly research and personal reflection. I would like to read this whole thing someday.
November 28, 2022
One of my favorite theological books of the year.
Williams successfully displays what is so engaging about Augustine…
“…but what is most engaging and challenging is the sense of being in the company of a thinker whose doctrinal convictions open unexpected vistas on questions that are not narrowly theological. In other words, he shows theology at work in the shaping of wisdom - both in its broader meaning of discerning, patient assimilation of our environment, and in his own more specialized sense of attunement to the eternal life of the Trinity. If these chapters have conveyed something of how Augustine sustains such a vision, they will have served their purpose.”
The book is so rich it can certainly only be enjoyed if read more than once.
Williams successfully displays what is so engaging about Augustine…
“…but what is most engaging and challenging is the sense of being in the company of a thinker whose doctrinal convictions open unexpected vistas on questions that are not narrowly theological. In other words, he shows theology at work in the shaping of wisdom - both in its broader meaning of discerning, patient assimilation of our environment, and in his own more specialized sense of attunement to the eternal life of the Trinity. If these chapters have conveyed something of how Augustine sustains such a vision, they will have served their purpose.”
The book is so rich it can certainly only be enjoyed if read more than once.
May 25, 2016
Augustine was a complex and multifaceted thinker whose intellectual abilities dwarfed his contemporaries and continue to challenge and baffle us 1600 years later. Much of course could also be said for former Archbishop Rowan Williams, though I suspect that he would be too modest to concur.
So what happens then when Lord Williams of Oystermouth explicates Saint Augustine of Hippo? Unfortunately, for the most part the answer is a magnification of complexity and bafflement. Williams, rarely an easy read, takes no prisoners in this volume. The reason for this is book is a collection of essays and lectures given over a lengthy period, frequently to a specialist Augustine audience or readership. Lengthy quotes in Latin are given without translation and debates are entered into with authorities that some of us will have heard of though few of us will have read. This is not a book to come to if you want a clear and concise explanation of what Augustine really wrote about the Trinity (and, in fairness, this would probably be an impossible task).
That being said, the first and last chapters are excellent, as is the closing sermon. Tough going, but every now and then something becomes momentarily clear.
So what happens then when Lord Williams of Oystermouth explicates Saint Augustine of Hippo? Unfortunately, for the most part the answer is a magnification of complexity and bafflement. Williams, rarely an easy read, takes no prisoners in this volume. The reason for this is book is a collection of essays and lectures given over a lengthy period, frequently to a specialist Augustine audience or readership. Lengthy quotes in Latin are given without translation and debates are entered into with authorities that some of us will have heard of though few of us will have read. This is not a book to come to if you want a clear and concise explanation of what Augustine really wrote about the Trinity (and, in fairness, this would probably be an impossible task).
That being said, the first and last chapters are excellent, as is the closing sermon. Tough going, but every now and then something becomes momentarily clear.
January 17, 2019
With so much secondary literature available on Saint Augustine, it can be difficult to know where to start, let alone to identify which aspects of the saint’s immense body of work are most pertinent to one’s research or spiritual aims. With On Augustine, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has made that task much easier, at least for those with some prior familiarity with Augustine’s most famous texts. On Augustine collects eleven essays and a sermon which address the Bishop of Hippo’s reflections on time and self-awareness, biblical hermeneutics, creation, evil, politics, love, and the Trinity. Published over twenty-five years, some of the essays, like “Sapientia: Wisdom and the Trinitarian Relations,” have considerably influenced recent scholarship and debate, whereas others are aimed at a more popular audience. While Williams does not cover the entirety of Augustine’s written corpus—an impossible task for any one volume anyway—and quite deliberately eschews some of the saint’s most well-known (and controversial) themes (neither sex, the Donatists, nor the damnation of unbaptized infants features here), he does probe elements in Augustine’s work he believes interpreters have misunderstood or misinterpreted. That is to say, in most of these essays, Williams seeks to defend Augustine from readers less scrupulous than the former archbishop, and he does so with characteristic patience, charity, and intellectual acumen.
While the scope of Williams’s inquiries is vast, one central theme inflects all the essays: we are finite, time-bound creatures, and the sooner we realize and appreciate this fact about ourselves, the better off we will be. With respect to time and consciousness, Williams writes that we are “inescapably unfinished, consistently in search . . . never just ‘there’” (3). We can come to know ourselves only once we accept our dependence on God, and we can only draw closer to God in and across time. “The question of who or what exactly I am, the nature of self or soul,” Williams writes, “is to be understood in relation to the story of Christ’s acceptance of the weakness of mortality” (12). The Confessions attests to this temporalized spiritual process, and thus Williams explains how, rather than some Neoplatonist ascent toward mystical union with the divine, incarnation is “the path we must follow,” an “embrace of our creatureliness” (142). The incarnation, Williams demonstrates with reference to On the Trinity, testifies to God’s embrace of our limited material and temporal condition, by which God incorporates humanity into the divine life. “Death-directed experience in humanity is embraced by the incarnate Word” (146), he explains, and in this radical act of love Christ unites divine and human voices as one; thus even the very human, very pained “Psalms [become] the words of Jesus, the Word who speaks in all scripture” (27). On the same token, when we recite the Psalms we appropriate Christ’s life, “and from this act of appropriation, the church as a whole is revealed as the community where humanity is allowed full scope to say what it is, in terms of its failure and pain, so that it may fully become what it is created to be, the multiple echo of the Word’s response to the Father” (30). As noted, this theme of limited, temporalized human finitude manifests in all the essays: one could comment on many more similar strands Williams sensitively interlinks.
One of the most helpful essays in the collection is also the last, Williams’s patient explanation of the nuances of uti and frui—use and enjoyment—a central distinction in On Christian Doctrine, which, Williams contends, Hannah Arendt fundamentally misinterprets in her famous doctoral thesis. Her interpretation has, in turned, influenced commentators such as Werner Jeanrond and Martha Nussbaum, thus Williams finds it imperative to clarify this consequential confusion. Briefly, Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine that while we are called to love God and to love other persons, we can only “enjoy” God, whereas “no human person can be loved in and for himself or herself” (191). We can, to be sure, love other people, yet we “use” them such that they are a “means to a more final satisfaction”—i.e. God (43). This use and enjoyment distinction is “superimposed” on another critical distinction in On Christian Doctrine, namely the difference between res and signum: God alone is purely res—“he alone is what he is, confined by no function,” determined by no other entity (ibid). Each human subject, alternatively, is both res and signum, both “a true subsistent reality” and a signum which points to and opens up on to God (196).
Williams observes that these are tricky concepts that invite anachronistic notions of instrumentality and, prima facie, offend our Kantian sensibilities. Yet Augustine’s point is a sophisticated one and, Williams insists, helpful once we discard the idea that he thinks we are permitted to instrumentalize others in an effort to draw closer to God. Instead, his concern is that “we should not pretend that any human other is God: that is to say, we should not treat them as if relation with them could secure our eternal bliss” (196). In fact, if we erroneously believe that another person can provide such fulfillment, we do instrumentalize them insofar as they become a means to ensure our satisfaction, the end of our desire. “Our temptation is constantly to project on to . . . persons around us expectations they are unable to fulfill, and so to shrink both them and ourselves. . . . We enslave ourselves to objects of desire that pretend to a finality . . . they cannot have” (200). Thus, to “enjoy” another person is not only deceptive for she who seeks illusory fulfillment, it also reduces the other person’s metaphysical complexity and overlooks their role as signum—i.e. their capacity “to prompt and nourish the awareness in other subjects of the infinity of love that is God” (201). The upshot, Williams demonstrates, is that when we love another person, we participate in God’s love, which alone constitutes the human subject. To love another person entails an intimate connectedness between God and the object of love wherein Christ’s love is active. In short, to love another person is to love Christ, and to love Christ, the Head of the Church, is to love his Body here on earth. The two are inseparable.
Despite its virtues, it is unclear to me whether this collection of essays is meant for a popular or academic audience. Academic journals first published many of the essays here, Williams frequently cites the work of other academics with some sense that we should know who they are, and most of the Latin is left untranslated. Moreover—and this is perhaps what tips the scales for me—Williams paraphrases considerable portions of texts like Confessions, City of God, and On the Trinity in the assumption—or so his tone insinuates—that the reader has some familiarity with these texts. I have read Confessions twice and written a thesis on Book XIX of City of God, yet I often found it difficult to trace where, exactly, Williams was in a text, even when he provides specific citations. In fact, one may do well to read these essays with Confessions or On the Trinity at hand, such is the rate at which Williams alludes to particular sections. In the end, it therefore seems that this collection is intended—or at least most enjoyed by—an academic audience familiar with the major themes of Christian doctrine. It may also be difficult to appreciate fully for readers who do not share some of Williams’s orthodox Christian assumptions—about the Incarnation, for example.
Williams is an artful expositor whose multi-decade study of one of the Western church’s most influential saints yields rich dividends. If Williams overlooks those aspect of Augustine which seriously offend our twenty-first century moral sensibilities, to which he alludes in the sermon that concludes the book, this is only because so many other commentators have already covered this territory, often uncharitably. Based on such interpretations, Augustine has morphed into a caricature for many modern readers—anti-feminist par excellence, foremost sexual pedant in Christian history—and such one-sided, erroneous portraitures fail to do justice to the saint’s complexity as a thinker and as a teacher. Williams, on the contrary, offers an extremely charitable, albeit not uncritical, appraisal. He both clarifies muddled points of dispute and emancipates some of Augustine’s most profound ideas from fallacious scholarly accretions. One walks away from this text with a more complicated, less stylized appreciation for a thinker who still has much to say to modern readers.
While the scope of Williams’s inquiries is vast, one central theme inflects all the essays: we are finite, time-bound creatures, and the sooner we realize and appreciate this fact about ourselves, the better off we will be. With respect to time and consciousness, Williams writes that we are “inescapably unfinished, consistently in search . . . never just ‘there’” (3). We can come to know ourselves only once we accept our dependence on God, and we can only draw closer to God in and across time. “The question of who or what exactly I am, the nature of self or soul,” Williams writes, “is to be understood in relation to the story of Christ’s acceptance of the weakness of mortality” (12). The Confessions attests to this temporalized spiritual process, and thus Williams explains how, rather than some Neoplatonist ascent toward mystical union with the divine, incarnation is “the path we must follow,” an “embrace of our creatureliness” (142). The incarnation, Williams demonstrates with reference to On the Trinity, testifies to God’s embrace of our limited material and temporal condition, by which God incorporates humanity into the divine life. “Death-directed experience in humanity is embraced by the incarnate Word” (146), he explains, and in this radical act of love Christ unites divine and human voices as one; thus even the very human, very pained “Psalms [become] the words of Jesus, the Word who speaks in all scripture” (27). On the same token, when we recite the Psalms we appropriate Christ’s life, “and from this act of appropriation, the church as a whole is revealed as the community where humanity is allowed full scope to say what it is, in terms of its failure and pain, so that it may fully become what it is created to be, the multiple echo of the Word’s response to the Father” (30). As noted, this theme of limited, temporalized human finitude manifests in all the essays: one could comment on many more similar strands Williams sensitively interlinks.
One of the most helpful essays in the collection is also the last, Williams’s patient explanation of the nuances of uti and frui—use and enjoyment—a central distinction in On Christian Doctrine, which, Williams contends, Hannah Arendt fundamentally misinterprets in her famous doctoral thesis. Her interpretation has, in turned, influenced commentators such as Werner Jeanrond and Martha Nussbaum, thus Williams finds it imperative to clarify this consequential confusion. Briefly, Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine that while we are called to love God and to love other persons, we can only “enjoy” God, whereas “no human person can be loved in and for himself or herself” (191). We can, to be sure, love other people, yet we “use” them such that they are a “means to a more final satisfaction”—i.e. God (43). This use and enjoyment distinction is “superimposed” on another critical distinction in On Christian Doctrine, namely the difference between res and signum: God alone is purely res—“he alone is what he is, confined by no function,” determined by no other entity (ibid). Each human subject, alternatively, is both res and signum, both “a true subsistent reality” and a signum which points to and opens up on to God (196).
Williams observes that these are tricky concepts that invite anachronistic notions of instrumentality and, prima facie, offend our Kantian sensibilities. Yet Augustine’s point is a sophisticated one and, Williams insists, helpful once we discard the idea that he thinks we are permitted to instrumentalize others in an effort to draw closer to God. Instead, his concern is that “we should not pretend that any human other is God: that is to say, we should not treat them as if relation with them could secure our eternal bliss” (196). In fact, if we erroneously believe that another person can provide such fulfillment, we do instrumentalize them insofar as they become a means to ensure our satisfaction, the end of our desire. “Our temptation is constantly to project on to . . . persons around us expectations they are unable to fulfill, and so to shrink both them and ourselves. . . . We enslave ourselves to objects of desire that pretend to a finality . . . they cannot have” (200). Thus, to “enjoy” another person is not only deceptive for she who seeks illusory fulfillment, it also reduces the other person’s metaphysical complexity and overlooks their role as signum—i.e. their capacity “to prompt and nourish the awareness in other subjects of the infinity of love that is God” (201). The upshot, Williams demonstrates, is that when we love another person, we participate in God’s love, which alone constitutes the human subject. To love another person entails an intimate connectedness between God and the object of love wherein Christ’s love is active. In short, to love another person is to love Christ, and to love Christ, the Head of the Church, is to love his Body here on earth. The two are inseparable.
Despite its virtues, it is unclear to me whether this collection of essays is meant for a popular or academic audience. Academic journals first published many of the essays here, Williams frequently cites the work of other academics with some sense that we should know who they are, and most of the Latin is left untranslated. Moreover—and this is perhaps what tips the scales for me—Williams paraphrases considerable portions of texts like Confessions, City of God, and On the Trinity in the assumption—or so his tone insinuates—that the reader has some familiarity with these texts. I have read Confessions twice and written a thesis on Book XIX of City of God, yet I often found it difficult to trace where, exactly, Williams was in a text, even when he provides specific citations. In fact, one may do well to read these essays with Confessions or On the Trinity at hand, such is the rate at which Williams alludes to particular sections. In the end, it therefore seems that this collection is intended—or at least most enjoyed by—an academic audience familiar with the major themes of Christian doctrine. It may also be difficult to appreciate fully for readers who do not share some of Williams’s orthodox Christian assumptions—about the Incarnation, for example.
Williams is an artful expositor whose multi-decade study of one of the Western church’s most influential saints yields rich dividends. If Williams overlooks those aspect of Augustine which seriously offend our twenty-first century moral sensibilities, to which he alludes in the sermon that concludes the book, this is only because so many other commentators have already covered this territory, often uncharitably. Based on such interpretations, Augustine has morphed into a caricature for many modern readers—anti-feminist par excellence, foremost sexual pedant in Christian history—and such one-sided, erroneous portraitures fail to do justice to the saint’s complexity as a thinker and as a teacher. Williams, on the contrary, offers an extremely charitable, albeit not uncritical, appraisal. He both clarifies muddled points of dispute and emancipates some of Augustine’s most profound ideas from fallacious scholarly accretions. One walks away from this text with a more complicated, less stylized appreciation for a thinker who still has much to say to modern readers.
June 22, 2018
Williams is a theologian, minister, and social commentator whose thoughts are always worth listening to. The same is true of Augustine. So when you get the one commenting on the other, you're sure to find some real pearls of wisdom. On Augustine was really excellent, especially the last few chapters. Drawing most heavily on the Confessions, City of God, and On the Trinity, he helps the reader see why Augustine remains so relevant 1600 years after he lived. He pushes back on simplistic stereotypes of Augustine's theology (e.g. He emphasizes oneness instead of threeness in the Trinity; his "enjoy/use"distinction undermines human solidarity and love for individuals, etc.) and does so in a way that takes his opponents seriously but still takes a real stand against them. Seminary level reading here, and not the sort of book you want to use as an introduction to Augustine, but if you've read some of the major works, this is an excellent piece of commentary that you'll definitely want to pick up.
May 2, 2020
If you already have a deep knowledge of St. Augustine's writings, of modern criticisms of those writings and of philosophy, Christology and theology in general, and above all, are a Christian, then I've no doubt that reading this book will be an incredibly enriching experience. But as an Atheist with only a basic understanding of philosophy and theology who just wanted to know the basics regarding Augustine's contribution to Christian thought, (specifically, why his writings are considered to be 'The Next Great Leap' in Christian thinking,) I was lost from pretty much the first moment I began reading and soon gave up hope of grasping more than the most superficial meaning.
Indeed, having already mentioned modern criticisms of Augustine's writings, a great deal of this book reads like a rebuttal of books and theses that I've never even heard of, let alone read. And having been written by a former Archbishop, much of the rest reads like a sermon, intended to reinforce a faith which I simply do not have.
And then of course, there are the parts where being an Atheist is a genuine road block; the parts which, in my faithless, heathen mind, essentially read as "If we assume that Invisible Unicorns are Pink, then that causes a massive, faith shattering contradiction. However, Augustine argued that they are Purple. And so if we agree with him, then the problem with believing in Invisible Unicorns ceases to exist."
Which, I hasten to add, is not to belittle anyone's faith. Instead, I simply want to emphasise that this book has an 'INCREDIBLY' specific and niche target audience. And if you don't fall into all of the categories that I specified above, then you may as well save your money and/or time.
Indeed, having already mentioned modern criticisms of Augustine's writings, a great deal of this book reads like a rebuttal of books and theses that I've never even heard of, let alone read. And having been written by a former Archbishop, much of the rest reads like a sermon, intended to reinforce a faith which I simply do not have.
And then of course, there are the parts where being an Atheist is a genuine road block; the parts which, in my faithless, heathen mind, essentially read as "If we assume that Invisible Unicorns are Pink, then that causes a massive, faith shattering contradiction. However, Augustine argued that they are Purple. And so if we agree with him, then the problem with believing in Invisible Unicorns ceases to exist."
Which, I hasten to add, is not to belittle anyone's faith. Instead, I simply want to emphasise that this book has an 'INCREDIBLY' specific and niche target audience. And if you don't fall into all of the categories that I specified above, then you may as well save your money and/or time.
December 5, 2023
This book of RW's essays on Augustine is dense, difficult but full of insight. It's not for the beginner: it assumes familiarity with a lot of Augustine's corpus, and some of the secondary literature debates.
RW is clearly a highly patient and reflective reader of the African bishop. His prose, however, can be barely penetrable, frequently collapsing into what feels like a 'stream of consciousness'. He resists a fixed set of technical terminology or transparent conclusions. Yet he is also a very able and robust defender of Augustine against critics ranging from Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum & John Hick, to John Zizoulas, Colin Gunton, & John Behr.
RW's also far clearer in his denials than in his affirmations: so it's not that memory and understanding are different faculties let alone representing divine persons, it's not that the soul is an object of contemplation, and it's not that Augustine is a Cartesian moving from a known self to an unknown God. At intervals through this Augustinian mist we get what are actually shots of Hegelianism, Balthasarism, and Russian mysticism polluting the analysis. But the bottom line is that I learnt a lot from this book. The highlights were probably the repeated penetrating expositions, justifications and applications of Augustine's frui/uti distinction and what it means to love humaniter, and the memorable musical and mechanical illustrations of evil-as-privation.
RW is clearly a highly patient and reflective reader of the African bishop. His prose, however, can be barely penetrable, frequently collapsing into what feels like a 'stream of consciousness'. He resists a fixed set of technical terminology or transparent conclusions. Yet he is also a very able and robust defender of Augustine against critics ranging from Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum & John Hick, to John Zizoulas, Colin Gunton, & John Behr.
RW's also far clearer in his denials than in his affirmations: so it's not that memory and understanding are different faculties let alone representing divine persons, it's not that the soul is an object of contemplation, and it's not that Augustine is a Cartesian moving from a known self to an unknown God. At intervals through this Augustinian mist we get what are actually shots of Hegelianism, Balthasarism, and Russian mysticism polluting the analysis. But the bottom line is that I learnt a lot from this book. The highlights were probably the repeated penetrating expositions, justifications and applications of Augustine's frui/uti distinction and what it means to love humaniter, and the memorable musical and mechanical illustrations of evil-as-privation.
March 23, 2021
Rowan Williams is a scary writer. How is it possible for anyone to be so clever, so well-read, to know so much? It can take a while to get into his writing. (I once read an article by him that I could actually understand... then found out to my chagrin that he had written it for The Mail on Sunday. But stick with it: after the first chapter I started getting the hang of it. A bit more.
St Augustine gets a bad press in much of modern discourse. Rowan Williams argues powerfully that most of this is based on a misreading and misunderstanding of what Augustine was really saying, and he convincingly puts the record straight. Or straighter. At least, enough for me to want to go back and reread the Confessions, and maybe even dip into On the Trinity.
St Augustine gets a bad press in much of modern discourse. Rowan Williams argues powerfully that most of this is based on a misreading and misunderstanding of what Augustine was really saying, and he convincingly puts the record straight. Or straighter. At least, enough for me to want to go back and reread the Confessions, and maybe even dip into On the Trinity.
August 17, 2021
The book, its author and topic are very good. Only EVERYONE should keep in mind that this is not an elementary-level introduction to Augustine, but serious work. To really appreciate it, I listened to some chapters several times.
Read
May 19, 2025Lots to think about with this one. Augustine always stirs up thoughts of grace, but Williams draws out many sanctifying threads on otherness, love, and communal formation in the saint's work that accords well with much of my current thinking.
December 19, 2018
A good series of essays about The Confessions and On The Trinity.
February 1, 2019
Insightful, compelling, defensive, and poetic. Rowan Williams is a superb interpreter of Augustine.
Read
July 8, 2019Only read Chapter 4, “‘Good for Nothing’? Augustine on Creation”.
Desire to read chapter 5, “Insubstantial Evil”.
Desire to read chapter 5, “Insubstantial Evil”.
October 29, 2019
I listened to this as an audiobook, and I wish I hadn't. The style of prose seems like it would be much more conducive to reading physically.
March 11, 2022
Really good, required reading for Augustine people
July 10, 2024
Incredibly insightful and sweeping approach to Augustine.
October 27, 2024
Brilliant, analytical, beautiful.
November 21, 2025
Quite deep and thoughtful approach to his figure and theology. Sometimes too benign and flattering, some others missing the point. But overall pretty good.
December 23, 2024
For my doctoral program I’ve been thinking and writing about Augustine, paying particular attention to Rowan Williams as one of the most interesting interpreters of the famous Bishop of Hippo.
In this book—really a collection of lectures and papers spanning decades—Williams writes with subtlety and affection, exploring nuances in Augustine’s thinking we might otherwise overlook, and paradoxes we might be tempted a little too neatly to resolve. An excerpt I love from Williams’ sermon on the 1600th anniversary of Augustine’s conversion:
“The gospel still sounds through: at the heart of everything is a love that can bridge all difference and enmity, whatever the cost, however long the waiting, however hard and bloody the search for the lost. This is what is poured out for us and in us in Jesus; and we are set free by the assurance that nothing can deflect or weaken such a giving. . . . In the world we know, the world of widening gulfs, hardening enmity, violence and suspicion, this is good news we must never cease to proclaim. From over the wall which traps us in our various social paranoias we must hear the voice that cries, ‘Pick it up and read! Pick it up and read!’ Read the record of God’s mercy in Scripture and in the stories of the triumphs of his grace in the saints; read and be moved to trust and action and growth. ‘You know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep.’”
In this book—really a collection of lectures and papers spanning decades—Williams writes with subtlety and affection, exploring nuances in Augustine’s thinking we might otherwise overlook, and paradoxes we might be tempted a little too neatly to resolve. An excerpt I love from Williams’ sermon on the 1600th anniversary of Augustine’s conversion:
“The gospel still sounds through: at the heart of everything is a love that can bridge all difference and enmity, whatever the cost, however long the waiting, however hard and bloody the search for the lost. This is what is poured out for us and in us in Jesus; and we are set free by the assurance that nothing can deflect or weaken such a giving. . . . In the world we know, the world of widening gulfs, hardening enmity, violence and suspicion, this is good news we must never cease to proclaim. From over the wall which traps us in our various social paranoias we must hear the voice that cries, ‘Pick it up and read! Pick it up and read!’ Read the record of God’s mercy in Scripture and in the stories of the triumphs of his grace in the saints; read and be moved to trust and action and growth. ‘You know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep.’”
October 30, 2016
This book, by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, has been widely praised and welcomed as an excellent contribution to Augustinian studies which it is. It is a collection of essays written over the last twenty years or so and consider many of the important topics related to Augustine: the self, the Trinity, time, love. It is a fascinating read, especially for the theology geek, and, I think, as far as I, as a non-specialist can say, sound. I enjoyed reading them very much, even if I'm not entirely sure I understood them as much as I would like.
This is fairly high-level theology, I should note, which makes it not particularly easy reading. I'm lucky in that I've read several of the major Augustinian texts: the Confessions, City of God, de doctrina , so I was mostly able to follow the discussion on the Augustianian passages. Where I got lost was in the modern scholarship which is not only vast, but far beyond my philosophical ability. That is where my wife's expression of stirring concrete with my eyelashes comes in. Be ready for that, if you pick it up.
Yet, the ideas are so fascinating and the theology so enriching, it really is worth the effort to read. It is also probably worth the effort to re-read. I know that I, for example, probably need to read it again, if I want to really understand it.
This is fairly high-level theology, I should note, which makes it not particularly easy reading. I'm lucky in that I've read several of the major Augustinian texts: the Confessions, City of God, de doctrina , so I was mostly able to follow the discussion on the Augustianian passages. Where I got lost was in the modern scholarship which is not only vast, but far beyond my philosophical ability. That is where my wife's expression of stirring concrete with my eyelashes comes in. Be ready for that, if you pick it up.
Yet, the ideas are so fascinating and the theology so enriching, it really is worth the effort to read. It is also probably worth the effort to re-read. I know that I, for example, probably need to read it again, if I want to really understand it.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews