Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
A New Augustine
By Peter Brown
Saint Augustine
by Garry Wills
Lipper/Viking, 152 pp., $19.95
The Works of Saint Augustine III/11: Newly Discovered Sermons
translated by Edmund Hill
New City Press, 452 pp., $39.00
Saint Augustine: Letters VI (1*-29*)
translated by Robert B Eno
Catholic University of America Press, 208 pp., $31.95
Not often, but every now and then, a truly gifted film director takes up well-known material—a famous short story, a novel, a biography—and turns a subject with which we thought we were thoroughly familiar into something once again strange and challenging. To do this, he must exercise a dictatorial power over the material. It is he who now decides what to cut and what to retain, when the camera should linger in a gripping close-up and when it should slide quickly to another scene, and, above all, exactly when and in what manner characters already well known to the audience should make their first entry. Garry Wills's Saint Augustine has done this, in a little under 150 pages. Seldom has a long-familiar figure, whose works fill thirteen double-columned volumes in the standard edition, and whose life and thought have been debated for sixteen hundred years, emerged so fresh and challenging, from under so masterful a 'director's' hand. For a scholar such as myself, who has spent much time in the company of the bishop of Hippo, it is a rare pleasure to watch, in this compact account, a deft and ingenious expositor set to work upon a great thinker.
Review, 6322 words
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