IN MINIATURE.

Saint Augustine 

Garry Wills

Lipper/Viking, $19.95, 152 pp.

The main source of dissatisfaction for most readers of Garry Wills's new book on Saint Augustine is apt to be that there is not more of it. Rather than a many- colored portrait in oils, Wills offers a small etching-done with great care and skill. Almost everyone, even those already well-versed in Augustine, will learn from examining the etching; to say that they are apt to wish it were larger is a way of praising it. There is, however, a danger attached to a short account of so many-sided a figure as Augustine. Readers may fail to appreciate how large a personage Augustine is in the history of the Western mind and of Western institutions.

Within the limits set by his project (his book is one of the Penguin Lives series), Wills deals with Augustine in a fresh and original way. The man he shows us is not exactly the same as the man with whom many of us are familiar. He is not, for example, someone who came to Christianity from a wild and licentious youth, despite the title of his best-known work-the Confessions; rather, he lived from late adolescence until past the age of thirty, and as sanctioned by the customs of his era, with one concubine. Contrary to a tenacious myth, it is unlikely that his mother played a crucial role in his conversion to Christianity. His relations with other people were characterized by a gentleness which is often not recognized. He was, for example, heavily dependent in his thinking on the presence and responses of other minds, so that his intellectual posture was to a marked degree dialogical rather than simply dogmatic; as a bishop, he was a balanced, judicious, and kindly administrator; and his initial attitude toward the Donatists was pacific and dialogical (as exemplified by his desire for public discussions), and even after his attitude had hardened, he pleaded for mercy in the case of Donatists arrested for the murder of one of his priests. Finally, he appeared less towering in the late Roman world than he does from the perspective of the twentieth century. He lived in one of the provinces, far from Rome; he neither spoke nor easily read Greek, the established intellectual tongue of the times; and as a bishop, he was only one of almost seven hundred African bishops.

Not that Wills's Augustine will be a stranger to those who know him. But he will bear details they may not hitherto have noted. Exemplifying the unfamiliar nuances in Wills's portrait is the suggestion that Augustine's spiritual landscape was framed by mountains, seen daily from his earliest years, and symbolizing "God's stability" and "skyward reach," and by the sea, "an image of death," known to Augustine from two crossings of the Mediterranean. Illustrative of Wills's discriminating treatment of more intellectual matters is his argument that Augustine's early and longstanding reluctance to employ force against the Donatists had little to do with such principles as tolerance, freedom of inquiry, or separation of church and state, these not belonging to the language of his times. Rather, it expressed an overriding respect for truth: People should not be induced to lie about their beliefs. And underlying his ultimate abandonment of such "tolerance" was Augustine's growing emphasis on will, rather than intellect; faith became a matter not entirely separate from choice.

Still, the narrow boundaries within which Wills works pose a problem. Augustine was a personality and mind of great complexity. Not only was he far-ranging in his main concerns. He appears sometimes to be self-contradictory, as in his predisposition toward both dialogue and dogma, and in his fusion in one theology of both Plotinus and Paul. Moreover, as a Christian living in the twilight of antiquity, he cannot be characterized simply as an inhabitant of the ancient world. He foreshadows not only the Middle Ages but the modern world as well; this is shown in R. A. Markus's splendid Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine, where Augustine takes on some of the features of a twentieth-century liberal. So multifaceted a mind can hardly be encompassed by an etching, although Wills probably comes as near to such an achievement as anyone could. Thus Wills mentions Augustine's "most characteristic themes-time, memory, the inner dynamic of the self, the inner dynamic of God, the continual activity of God in the soul, first by ongoing creation and then by regeneration in grace." Although Wills notes that it took a great thinker to develop such themes, he does not explain the revolution in Western consciousness which these themes effected.

Broadly, the Augustine we do not clearly see in Wills's etching is the disputatious, unyielding, and profoundly creative church father whose career marks a turning point in Western history. There is practically nothing, for example, on Augustine's war with Pelagius and the development of the concept of Original Sin. It is no exaggeration to say of this concept that it forms the dividing line between two different ways of viewing the human situation and the scope of human possibilities in the world. At the heart of Marxism, for example, lies a tacit rejection of Augustinian psychology. Humans might, Marx assumed, become largely sinless. On the other hand, undergirding all serious alternatives to Marxism, whether those found in religious sources, like papal encyclicals and the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, or in the works of secular realists, such as Albert Camus, is the assumption that human nature, apart from grace, is irremediably distorted. Human historical prospects are seen as limited, even if not entirely bleak. This is because of a premise grounded historically and theologically in the doctrine of Original Sin-that undiluted and unopposed righteousness will never reign on earth.

Such a premise clearly has political implications of first importance. Hope must be, if not severely confined, then eschatological. And human efforts in history must be sustained either by lives of heroic futility, as symbolized in the myth of Sisyphus (so prized by Camus), or else by an apocalyptic sense of history. Augustine, of course, embraced the latter alternative. The consequence of his doing so was a transformation of the political attitudes inherited from antiquity. No longer was there much concern for the satisfactions offered by civic activity and a common life, as in the Greek polis, or for the glories of global human harmony intimated by the Roman Empire. Only the City of God was worthy of unconditional allegiance. The fall of the Roman Empire-as fearful an event as the human race has ever witnessed-was not, for Augustine, the sort of thing that belonged among our ultimate concerns. Few people today are capable of occupying steadily the eschatological vantage point which enabled Augustine to maintain such political equanimity. Yet awareness that the importance of happenings in the political universe is at most penultimate, and that political agencies like the state rarely reach into the final depths of existence, is firmly seated in our minds and is closely related to those modern ideals, such as privacy and the rule of law, which set the realms of the intimate and personal apart from the realms of the common and political. We are all more Augustinian than we realize.

It is integral to Augustine's greatness, however, that he could argue that political and many other earthly affairs had only secondary importance without arguing that they had no importance at all. The latter extreme was closed to him as a Christian who believed not only that God was creator of the universe, and had placed in every existing thing traces of his glory, but also that God was sovereign over history and that everything occurring in history therefore had meaning. Augustine philosophized under constraints. He could not utterly despise any created reality or any historical occurrence. The upshot was a view of history that has become one of the main structural features of the Western intellect. This view was only vaguely defined by Augustine, but it contained at least two vital tenets: that the history of the human race constitutes a single story, not just a miscellaneous collection of stories; and that this history has an end and purpose. Apart from these principles, so commonplace a concept as the Enlightenment's doctrine of progress could never have come into being.

One hears very little of such matters from Wills. To say this, however, is less to criticize Wills, given the boundaries of his study, than to note the manifold character of the man whom he sets before us. It is to remind ourselves of a writer who wrote more, as has often been noted, than probably any one person has ever read; whose inner tensions and variations almost defy balanced treatment; whose stubbornness and anger and self-assurance can be exasperating and even repellent; and whose influence, to be adequately appraised, demands a survey of all subsequent history. One way to indicate Augustine's stature in a few words is to say that he forces us to look back at him, and to take his measure, again and again. For those facing this recurrent task, Wills offers a bright, if fleeting, moment of illumination. n

Glenn Tinder, the author of The Political Meaning of Christianity (1989), is professor of political science emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Boston.