Augustine: conversions and confessions
ROBIN LANE FOX

Robin Lane Fox, though no fellow Christian, admires Augustine’s literary skills and his perceptiveness about human social life – and therein are this book’s strengths and weaknesses. It recognises Augustine’s Confessions as prayer, and gives an immensely detailed account of Augustine as religious seeker, rhetorician and passionate teacher, whether as a Manichaean, or later – disillusioned by the vices, intellectual and moral, of Mani’s world view – as a “Catholic” Christian: the scare quotes presumably representing Lane Fox’s unwillingness to view Augustine’s Christianity as the direct ancestor of the more developed theological system we now call Catholicism. That blindness points up problems: thus Lane Fox is correct to point to mistranslations from Greek in Augustine’s Latin Bible that sometimes misled him, but too cavalier in dismissing the Old Testament as foreshadowing the New.

Lane Fox shows deep knowledge of Augustine’s earlier life and many (not all) strands of contemporary scholarship. His love of Augustine (despite his Christianity) is unmistakable and he is generous in his praise for several “classic”, “great”, “important”, ­“fundamental” contemporary scholars. It is refreshing to read an academic respecting his colleagues, but there are informative gaps in his bibliography.