Product Description

The life and works of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) have shaped the development of the Christian Church, sparking controversy and influencing the ideas of theologians through subsequent centuries. His words are still frequently quoted in devotions throughout the global Church today. His key themes retain a striking contemporary relevance - what is the place of the Church in the world? What is the relation between nature and grace? Augustine's intellectual development is recounted with clarity and warmth in this newly rediscovered biography of Augustine, as interpreted by the acclaimed church historian, the late Professor Henry Chadwick. Augustine's intellectual journey from schoolboy and student to Bishop and champion of Western Christendom in a period of intense political upheaval, is narrated in Chadwick's characteristically rigorous yet sympathetic style. With a foreword reflecting on Professor Chadwick's distinctive approach to Augustine by Professor Peter Brown.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37766 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Review
Gem of a biography. (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Literary Review )

Augustine's intellectual development is recounted with clarity and warmth...Chadwick's deep scholarship is evident throughout this book. (Methodist Recorder )

Thank goodness we had Chadwick, level-headed and drenched in the sources, to unravel the threads of Augustine's musings. (Jonathan Wright, Catholic Herald )

Read Chadwick, then read him again. You will learn. (Jonathan Wright, Catholic Herald )

Chadwick succeeds in a spectacular manner. (R A Marcus, The Tablet )

Uncanny skill in catching...the odd revealing detail, moving about Augustine's vast textual output with magisterial ease. (R. A. Markus, The Tablet )

His Augustine emerges from his pages as an altogether more human and more humane figure than we meet in many of his interpreters. (R A Markus, The Tablet )

Customer Reviews

Augustine as Christian and man
Henry Chadwick describes his work as an attempt to "introduce (Augustine) and his ideas in the intellectual and political context of his age". In doing so he addresses two fundamental problems when trying to make sense of Augustine: the remoteness in time and character of the late classical world from our own; and the many-sidedness of Augustine. He was a scholar, orator, philosopher, teacher, writer and bishop; a person at the heart of the ancient world and its encounter with Christianity; someone inwardly divided and conflicted between who he found himself to be and that to which he aspired. In that last he has exercised his most powerful contemporary appeal, but it is an appeal that has resonated down the centuries, and provoked the finest minds to grapple with his sombre estimate of human nature. The shadow of his thought falls over the history of Christian thought, rising to especial prominence at moments of crisis. Both Luther and especially Calvin recognised in his restless introspection a framework with which to make sense of issues that time and again come to haunt Christianity: freedom and grace, and the nature of the Church in the world. In modern times the greatest Christian theologians can be understood as Augustinians,and they are drawn from both sides of the divide created by the Reformation: Karl Barth, Hans von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger.

Chadwick's achievement is to link a thorough understanding of Augustine's intellectual hinterland in Neoplatonism and Manichaeism with his developing maturity as a Christian leader and teacher. Augustine the bishop is as powerfully delineated as the writer and thinker: "The experience of doing the work of a bishop made far deeper and more obvious changes in Augustine's character than even his conversion at Milan ten years before... Shouldering the initially highly unwelcome responsibilities turned him into a great man such as he would never have become had he remained a professor of rhetoric".

This insight perfectly captures what all who seek to follow Christ recognise through experience: that the transformative nature of discipleship comes above all through self-sacrificing immersion in daily life and the service of others. Chadwick's insight gives authenticity not only to Augustine's measure of holiness, but also to his own achievement as an interpreter of Augustine. The book is a condensation of a lifetime of study and learning. Like all such works it is marked by clarity and brevity that reveal the depths of knowledge and understanding on which they are based. This achievement evokes admiration and gratitude in the reader, which are movingly expressed in Peter Brown's gracious introduction, a fine example of one master of his field saluting another, something sadly rare in a scholarly world so often disfigured by small-minded envy.