Best biography of augustine!
A major new treatment of Augustine on all fronts, this superb intellectual biography shines a bright light on a genuinely neglected element in his writings.The Best Augustine Books
Before we get to the books, how do we even begin to introduce a figure as complex and as influential as St Augustine of Hippo? What would be your own way into that formidable task?
Well, in light of what I’m working on at the moment, I would take the subversion of Western tradition line. Here is this figure who influenced almost every area of Western humanistic thought: philosophy, theology, political theory, linguistics, rhetoric, you name it.
But he’s not actually from Europe. He spent his entire life—bar five years—in North Africa. What do we make of that?
Augustine of hippo biography
We have this really exciting intellectual thinker in this supposedly dominant elite tradition, who is actually African.
In terms of Christian doctrine itself, Augustine is fundamental to the way in which the very concept of orthodoxy is developed.
That’s something very hard for most people to get a handle on. There’s this sense in which all this stuff that one takes for granted in the structure o