Augustine may well be the most gifted, and most influential, theologian the Western church has ever produced—and perhaps the most misunderstood. Garry Wills's compact 152-page portrait is an impressive corrective.

Wills is an adjunct professor (Northwestern University) and a writer of books about more recent figures like Richard Nixon and Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer). In Saint Augustine, Wills looks all the way back to 354, the year of Augustine's birth in Thagaste, North Africa. He follows Augustine's life and career until his death in 417, in the city of Hippo, not far from where he was born.

Even those of us who nurture a love for tradition have, Wills argues, a skewed understanding of Augustine and his work. Augustine was a bishop during a time when there were nearly 700 bishops in Africa alone, and so his significance rests somewhere else: in his writings. Wills says they are "staggering in quantity"—93 books and 300 letters and 400 sermons (out of an estimated 8,000 he preached) remain extant. What Augustine said of the historian Varro was even more true of Augustine himself: "Though he read so much we are amazed he found time to write, he wrote so much that few, we believe, can have read it all."

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The truth is, as Wills takes pains to point out over a number of pages, Augustine's early sexual activity "was not shocking by any standards but those of a saint." Early in his life, he lived with and was entirely faithful to only one woman, named Una, a relationship that was sanctioned by Roman law, and with her he conceived one child, named Godsend.

When Augustine moved to Milan, and to a higher social plateau, his mother arranged an engagement to a Christian heiress, and Una ...