Owen Chadwick proclaimed that Brown had “attained to the measure of his subject” which is the best endorsement that a biography can receive, and particularly difficult for a biography of this subject. Henry Chadwick later described this book as a “biography without the theology,” with which Brown agreed. The portrait of Augustine and his development is careful, sensitive, and brilliantly written. Scholarship has continued to progress but has not ceased to benefit from this book. The two chapters on “New Evidence” and “New Directions” are helpful addenda to this now-50 year old book. The “final word” on Augustine is impossible, so Brown’s biography is best if followed up by other studies and, of course, reading the primary sources.
On a personal note, I must say that reading and experiencing Augustine’s life in this way was a moving experience. It makes me all the more grateful for the grace of God and for the (not all flawless!) influence this man has enjoyed.

Very good. I finished the main part of the book on Dec. 18, 2012. I read an updated copy (2000), so Brown discusses what new developments have happened since the book was first published in 1967.

Peter Matheson has a helpful review here.

A dense, fascinating study of one of the central figures of Christian history. I took a few breaks from the book over the past few months, but it was fairly easy to pick things up when I wanted to with Brown's short, clear chapters (although, it probably helps if you already have some idea of the shape of Augustine's life). Brown writes with a precocious authority (he was 32 when the book was published), and he provides a detailed, if sometimes idiosyncratic, account of Augustine's growth and change over time. In the anniversary edition I read, Brown chides his younger self for a lack of sympathy with the older Augustine the Bishop, but I was actually impressed by the young Brown's ability give texture and nuance to Augustine as he aged. I'm no expert in this area, and while I know scholarship has shifted in multiple ways (Brown identifies some key points in the epilogue of the anniversary ), I still found it to be a worthwhile read. The book is a little thin on Augustine's theology, but I found it helpful in giving something of a flavor of who Augustine was and the times he lived in. The final chapters, describing the fall of the empire in Africa and the destruction of Augustine's life's work, are as poignant and harrowing as a scene from a contemporary post-apocalyptic novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed this account of the life of my patron Saint. His autobiography the “Confessions” is more responsible for my conversation than any other book I have read. This great man, one of the great intellects of western history, felt his most important duty was to serve the people of his diocese in Hippo and to defend the Holy Roman Catholic Church against the many heresies which would seek to divide and destroy it.
Whether it was the Pelagians, the Donatists or the Arians, they all were thoroughly dispatched by the clear and concise logic of this great Saint. He left a legacy unmatched by any western theologian with the possible exception of Thomas Aquinas.
Unlike Aquinas, he had to be converted to the faith from a life of sin and even had a child out of wedlock. Once converted at the age of 32, he became a great man of God who lived a holy and austere life. He was the greatest of the North African Bishops of the 5th century and this book dives deep into the details of his ministry and life. Excellent read.

I loved this book, even though it took me forever to finish it and I probably absorbed half or less of the detail. This is a biography and a history of philosophy from a time that I am totally unfamiliar. In a word, it's dense. Favorite line in the book is: "All this show's how a man's character is decided, not only by what actually happens in his life, but, also, by what he refuses to allow to happen."

A great biography!

Writing biographies of ancient people is a difficult art. Many popular biographies of figures like Cleopatra, Cicero, Augustus, and other Greco-Roman movers and shakers quickly devolve into fantastic conjecture that borders on sheer fiction, especially when historical evidence is sparse for certain periods of people’s lives. For that reason, as a classicist, I tend to stay away from biographies. Great Men history is a relic of a more oppressive academic era, and social, economic, and political trends tell us more about ancient societies than the exaggerated deeds of their leaders anyhow. Nevertheless, Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine of Hippo, a man who quite literally transformed the face of the Catholic Church both in his lifetime and long after his death, stands out from ordinary surveys of ancient people’s lives. First, so much of Augustine’s writings are extant; hundreds of letters and sermons and dozens of monographs not only give a vivid picture of the saint’s life but also of the Late Antique North African society in which he lived. Second, Peter Brown is no run-of-the-mill scholar. His acute insight into the world of Late Antiquity and ancient religions has earned him a hallowed reputation among historians, religious studies experts, and classicists alike. While Augustine of Hippo is his earliest work of principal scholarship, it remains one of his most critically acclaimed, and for good reason. Brown’s historically oriented, psychoanalytic approach gives readers a profound sense of Augustine’s thinking, preferences, and theological assertions.

Brown scrupulously documents the evolution of Augustine’s thought over the course of his seventy-five long years of life, from his Manichaeist days as a university student in Carthage, to his conversion at Milan and subsequent intellectual retreat to Cassiciacum, to his final days as a beleaguered bishop at Hippo, literally surrounded by marauding bands of heretical Vandals slaughtering Catholics and touting Arianism. Whereas Confessions, Augustine’s own autobiography, offers readers a rich portraiture of his intellectual and spiritual growth up until when he was made Bishop of Hippo, Brown’s biography extends far beyond the saint’s middle years and gives detailed treatment to works like De doctrina christiana and De civitate dei. In an updated edition published in 2000, more than three decades after the biography’s original publication, Brown includes a lengthy epilogue, in which he further complicates his nuanced picture of Augustine, discusses recent discoveries of the Dolbeau sermons and the Divjak letters, and suggests new directions for Augustinian scholarship.

Brown’s discussion of the Donatist Controversy, which consumed a tremendous amount of Augustine’s energy and time for almost two decades, stands out for his noteworthy conclusions. The Donatist issue emerged after the so-called Great Persecution of Christians in 303-305 CE under the emperor Diocletian. In the midst of this chaos, a number of North African Catholic officials handed over sacred books to Roman authorities to be burnt in order to avoid persecution. These bishops were known as traditores, and sometime before 312, Caecilian, archdeacon of Carthage, was consecrated bishop by an alleged traditor. Bishops from Numidia opposed this consecration on the grounds that Caecilian and others, insofar as they were connected historically to the sin of traditio, stood outside the church and could not perform the sacraments. They selected their own bishop, Maiorinus, who was succeeded by Donatus, after whom the new sect was named. For a century, Donatists lived alongside Catholics and debated Catholic bishops on theological issues. The Edict of Unity, however, issued by the emperor Honorius in 405, essentially outlawed Donatism and promoted coercive measures to convert Donatists to Catholicism. In 411, a council of bishops at Carthage presided over by Marcellinus, an imperial official, reinforced the existing legislation and effectively ended the schism. While Donatism continued to persist in certain areas, Augustine and his colleagues had succeeded in terminating the Donatist threat to the Catholic Church with the help of imperial authorities.

First, Brown takes issue with W. H. C. Frend’s assertion that the religious differences in North Africa that precipitated the Donatist Controversy were outward manifestations of social and ethnic cleavages and that Augustine, as an urban bishop, could not fully understand the popular tradition from which Donatism emerged. “In fact,” Brown contends, “no great differences in class, race or education separated Augustine from the Donatist bishops, whose views he caricatured in his pamphlets” (212). The Donatists celebrated the same liturgy, the same sacraments, and more or less espoused the same beliefs as their Catholic opponents; they did, however, advocate rebaptism for converted Donatists with an eye toward the impurity of the Catholic Church ensured by the successive consecration of bishops connected with Felix, the infamous traditor. Augustine attacked this stance with vigor, Brown explains, and “a highly personal training as a philosopher. His writings against the Donatists will mark a final stage in the evolution of Early Christian ideas on the church, and its relation with society as a whole” (213).

Second, Brown situates Augustine’s conception of the role of the church and its relation with society amidst the saint’s Neo-Platonic leanings. “The whole world appeared to him as a world of ‘becoming,’ as a hierarchy of imperfectly-realized forms, which depended for their quality on ‘participating’ in an Intelligible World of Ideal Forms,” Augustine’s heaven of heaven. The “true Church” of Augustine, according to Brown, “is the ‘reality’ of which the concrete church on earth is only an imperfect shadow” (217). Augustine employs this logic to defend the legitimacy of sacraments administered by Catholic bishops accused of traditio. “The rites of the church take on an objective and permanent validity. They exist independently of the subjective qualities of those who ‘participate’ in them” (218). Thus, the Donatists have no claim that baptized Catholics stand outside the church and, in order to convert to the true faith, Donatism, require rebaptism. Brown outlines this line of thinking eloquently and in highly intelligible terms.

Brown’s discussion of the Pelagian Controversy, the other great episode that came to define Augustine’s later years as bishop, also stands out for his nuanced treatment of Augustine’s very, very dark stance on human nature. To put it simply, Pelagius, a provincial from Britain who made his name through theological acumen at Rome, “had no patience with the confusion that seemed to reign on the powers of human nature” (343). Unlike Augustine, who left so much of the human decision-making process up to God—“Command what you will, give what you command”—Pelagius vociferously defended the human ability to conform one’s will entirely to the will of God. In Pelagius’s view, human persons can fulfill each and every one of God’s commands; our refusal to do so stems not from some notion of original sin inherited from Adam, but from our own human weakness. Thus, “the Pelagians placed the terrifying weight of complete freedom on the individual: he was responsible for his every action; every sin, therefore, could only be a deliberate act of contempt for God” (351). Those who call themselves Christians must, therefore, strive for perfection. In the words of Brown, “Pelagius wanted every Christian to be a monk” (348).

Brown quickly points out how Augustine, in opposition to this view, “was in no mood tolerate the coteries of ‘perfect’ Christians . . . For this reason, the victory of Augustine over Pelagius was also a victory for the average good Catholic layman of the Later Empire, over an austere, reforming ideal” (349). For Augustine, the Church welcomed everyday sinners who consistently failed to obey God’s commands, so long as they recognized their failures, repented, and gave glory to God. Moreover, Brown notes that despite “his harsh emphasis on baptism as the only way to salvation,” Augustine actually “appears as the advocate of moral tolerance: for within the exclusive fold of the Catholic Church he could find room for a whole spectrum of human failings” (351). Accordingly, unlike Pelagius, Augustine would rely less upon threats of the inevitable approach of the Day of Judgment in his moral exhortations, and more upon the notion of “love for a distant and immemorial country: ‘the ancient City of God’” (314). Brown demonstrates how Augustine emphasized love, not fear, alongside his determined stance on the ineluctability of human failing.

In the epilogue, Brown encourages readers to approach Augustine not as if he were a modern theologian or philosopher, but as a highly intelligent and articulate bishop very much tied to the sociopolitical culture of his time. “We must never read Augustine as if he were a contemporary with ourselves,” Brown exhorts when discussing Augustine’s attitude toward sexuality. “He was the contemporary of Jerome, who spoke of marriage as a tangled thornbush, good only to produce . . . the ‘roses’ of new virgins; of Ambrose, who, when faced by married candidates to the episcopate, expected his readers to agree without question that voluptas, sensuality alone, had driven Adam from Paradise” (500). In this light, Augustine, who defended sex within marriage and envisioned Adam and Eve as fully sexual beings capable of intercourse in Eden, seems far more moderate. Brown’s appeal applies to issues beyond sex, however. “The more we have been enabled to place Augustine against the wider landscape of late antiquity,” he says, “the more we have come to realize that many of the aspects of his thought which seem closest to modern persons were often those which struck his contemporaries as the most idiosyncratic” (502). He then points to Augustine’s interest with the self and “fascination with the working of the will” as evidence.

In the end, Augustine was a complex man. He flirted with Manichaeism for nearly a decade, briefly pursued a secluded intellectual life as a Christian ascetic, was quite literally forced into ordination as a presbyter, then consecrated bishop, and ultimately earned an international reputation as one of the most influential voices in early Christianity. His philosophical and theological views metamorphosed, sometimes drastically, over the course of each of these chapters of his life. In Augustine of Hippo, Brown acknowledges, as I do, that Augustine’s authoritarian streak evident in the midst of the Donatist Controversy and especially the Pelagian Controversy is disturbing. Augustine’s defense of religious coercion authorized by the state and his ardent desire to silence Pelagius, whom he deemed a dangerous heretic, remind modern readers like myself of the horrors condoned by the Catholic Church centuries later through institutions like the Inquisition. Nevertheless, Brown adds, the recent discoveries of the Dolbeau sermons and Divjak letters demonstrate Augustine’s admirable commitment to pastoral care and the individual lives of those in his flock, like the small girl he interviews after she has been kidnapped by slave traders, and the father of a teenage boy who, upon Augustine’s request, sends the bishop his son’s rhetorical dictiones. In these instances, we appreciate that, unlike many of his contemporaries, and certainly unlike many theologians today, Augustine refused to sit perched upon an ivory tower musing about the origin of the soul and an allegorical interpretation of Genesis. No doubt, he thought deeply and wrote many books on topics like these, but he also penned hundreds of sermons in simple Latin intended for the ears of those who worshipped at his basilica in Hippo. Over fifteen hundreds years later, Augustine still speaks to the faithful through these impassioned moral exhortations. At a time when the role of the Catholic Church in the world is unclear and groups like Black Lives Matter grapple with the tension between love and justice, Augustinian thought is perhaps more relevant than ever. Peter Brown captures the man behind the message vividly; his biography of North Africa’s most influential saint will no doubt persist as the definitive account of Augustine’s life for many years to come.

This is the definitive bio of Augustine. (What Bainton once was for Luther). The 2nd edition is a whole new work.

I met Peter Brown in Princeton, where he taught, a few times, and he just oozed brilliance. I have nothing new to add except an anecdote that tells it all. The story goes that Brown was so focused and mature that he came to the idea of writing this definitive critical bio of Augustine while in his early teens. He focused all of his energy on it, methodically begining to maste the secondary academic literature on Augustine before even beginning his university studies. He wrote this bio shortly after completlng his undergraduate honors thesis, publishing it to rave reviews in his early 20s.

This story has made him a legend. And once, Dr. Paul Rorem of Princeton Seminary told us, he asked Brown about it. Brown laughed and told an even more amazing one. Turns out the truth is that Brown had not developed any special interest in Augustine until the end of his undergraduate studies. Being pressed for a thesis topic, with a deadline approaching, he picked Augustine almost at random. He then set about to master Augustine, and in just 2 years ended up writing the definitive bio that changed the field forever!

The mag. opus of one of the world's great scholars.

I never finished reading this book, and it's not my favorite by Brown, however, I learned a lot about Augustine and filled in my mental picture of the milieu of early Christianity which interested me so obsessively when I was in my thirties. If you want to read a history of Augustine that is nearly as readable as a novel but infinitely more informative, this is the book for you!

Brown writes elegantly and clearly and puts Austine's thought in context.

This originally published work does a great job of tracing Augustine’s thought throughout his life from Manichaeism to Platonism to Christianity that becomes more fully formed throughout Augustine’s adult life. Brown provides useful historical context for Augustine’s life that helps inform why he thought the way he did.

I was shocked to learn that Augustine was effectively forced into becoming a bishop, and was so upset about it that he cried, preferring to live a life of study in solitude. Yet once he became a bishop he wasted no time, and become one of the most prolific writers in Christian history. He won Western Christianity’s mind on the Donatist and Pelagian controversies, and this biography provides context on Augustine’s harshness towards his ideological opponents, which included using the state to suppress them. In what may come as a shock to you as it did to me, Brown writes: “Augustine… wrote the only full justification, in the history of the Early Church, of the right of the state to suppress non-Catholics” (pg 231). This harshness is written about with disapproval by Brown, and it seems apparent Brown views Augustine as paving the way for consolidating power in the bishopric.

However, the 2 chapters added some 30 years after the original publication show a softening of Brown’s attitude towards Augustine. Letters and sermons discovered after Brown originally published the book change Brown’s mind: “There is a harshness in my judgments on the old Augustine which the indulgent reader should put down to a young man’s lack of experience of the world” (pg 492). Brown appreciates more Augustine’s commitment to the smaller man, seen especially in Augustine’s controversial view of grace and predestination. Augustine fought the culture of his time which believed there were certain religious superheroes who were empowered by God’s grace, but Augustine was eager to open his readers’ and hearers’ eyes and ears to the availability of God’s grace to all people: “Augustine set to work to bridge the gap between the triumph of God’s grace in the martyrs…and the less dramatic but equally decisive working of the same grace in average Christians…” (pg 510).

All in all I greatly appreciated this book. I would have enjoyed more theological discussion of Augustine’s ideas rather than focusing more on historical context, which Brown acknowledges in the epilogue (pg 495). But this is a great book to understand who Augustine was. Augustine had flaws, but he was a great and prolific man who I would like to get to know more.

One of my favorite quotes from Augustine from the book:

“The healthy man is one in whom knowledge and feeling have become united; and that only such a man is capable of allowing himself to be drawn to act by the sheer irresistible pleasure of the object of his love.” (Pg 377)

Excellent biography of Augustine. Learned all kinds of things I didn't know about him--and things that are useful to understanding his thinking and theology.