Elegant and well annotated: of considerable interest to students of the church fathers and doctors.
Fourth and last volume (after Saint Augustine’s Sin, 2003, etc.) of classicist/historian Wills’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, a key document of the early church.
Did Augustine really all of a sudden cast off paganism and sin suddenly and come to embrace Christianity in that Milanese garden way back in a.d. 386? According to the Confessions, he did: He and friend Alypius were entertaining a visitor who filled their heads with tales about St. Anthony and the Christian ascetics, suddenly Augustine felt overwhelmed by his failure to take up the rigors of the faith, not least of them celibacy. Tormented, he repaired to the garden—gardens being the site of many important happenings in the life of Jesus and his followers—and looked into his soul: “So sick was I, so tortured,” he writes, “as I reviled myself more bitterly than ever, churning and chafing in my chains, held more loosely now, but still held.” Hearing a voice telling him to read, Augustine adds, he turned the Bible to Romans 13, with its quite explicit instructions to give up the usual sins: “Clothe yourself in Jesus Christ the Lord, leaving no further allowance for fleshly desires.” Et voilà!: a future saint was born. Well, says Wills, it’s a powerful story, but a story all the same: Augustine had already converted, and there probably was not much suddenness to be had except as suited the needs of the narrative, which demands its own road to Damascus. “The pull,” he writes, “came from the fact that he was not simply accepting Christianity but aspiring to be a Christian philosopher,” later adding that the Confessions are better read as a work of theology rather than as an autobiography per se, “a larger testimony that celebrates the word of God more than the life of Augustine.”
Elegant and well annotated: of considerable interest to students of the church fathers and doctors.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03352-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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