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As modern convention has it, we draw a sharp distinction between "theology" and "history." According to this distinction, James O'Donnell is a historian of the first order. His three-volume commentary on Augustine's Confessions will remain the unsurpassed reference for generations. His skills as a classicist make for easy familiarity with the Latin primary sources. His keen critical eye allows him to pose probing new questions and uncover potential embarrassments in our hagiographies that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. In Augustine: A New Biography, he works hard to blaze a trail in Augustinian biography by asking more deeply critical questions of the church father's life, in hopes that he can "wring a real confession or two from him against his will."
Augustine: |
As a theologian, alas, O'Donnell's skills are less patently on display. Because he mistrusts Augustine's own accounting of his life—which mistrust marks his skill as a critical historian—he pays either very little or very poor attention to the intellectual content of Augustine's work. A reader of this book will be left wondering how Augustine could have had such wide readership for so many centuries when his ideas are so flimsy. That Augustine comes in for intellectual criticism here is no surprise—scholars for decades now have complained about his inability quite to leave off the dualism of his Manichaean past, his ruthless use of imperial power against his Donatist enemies, and his late-life grumpy and inadequate responses to the intellectually spry Pelagian, Julian of Eclanum. But at every turn in O'Donnell's critique, Augustine is portrayed as dreadfully anxious, intellectually inferior to his enemies, and so inclined to deal with them duplicitously and brutally, and to tell the story subsequently in such a way as to exonerate himself and excoriate their memory.
O'Donnell begins with Confessions, a "triumph of self-absorption" in which Augustine so deftly managed to "dramatically mislead his readers" that few before O'Donnell have had the gumption to challenge Augustine's narration of his life. Certainly this ur-memoir whitewashes history. Augustine's "one truly impassioned religious experience," for example, was with the very Manichees whom he here disavows, and the deepest allegiance of his mother Monnica (O'Donnell uses an old Punic spelling of her name) was to the Donatists, mention of whom Augustine surgically omits to avoid this embarrassment. At the time he was writing his life story, Augustine was a bishop of a nowhere town in North Africa (ordination to that ecclesiastical jurisdiction was the only genuine conversion in his life, O'Donnell says, in a characteristically withering jibe), and nowhere does he mention that he only retreated to Africa from Italy with his tail between his legs when his social ambitions proved a failure.
Confessions, then, in O'Donnell's reading, is really a book about failure. It ends with Augustine's supposed conversion in order to hide the disillusionment that had already set in before he set to writing and that would steadily creep over his entire life, chasing away his friends, clouding his philosophical judgment, and sweeping him up in anxiety about God's indifference and his own frailty—an anxiety so consuming that it bordered on paralyzing dread. For O'Donnell, "the real power of this text [comes] to the surface just as the hegemony of its author's ideas and his church's ideas begins to fade from memory." Luckily for Augustine, his work helped birth modern psychological introspection and even the literary form of the novel—for without this unintended success we would not so readily believe the false version of events he craftily constructed and would think no more of him than of any number of unimportant late antique Latin clerics.
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