Despite the ill-advised try at translation, Wills continues to burn brightly in illuminating one of the most profound, if...
The prolific Wills, already with a short biography of St. Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine, 1999) and two translations of portions of The Confessions (Saint Augustine’s Memory, 2002, etc.), demonstrates anew his formidable powers as cultural commentator—and the devilish difficulties of translation.
Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Rebecca West criticized Augustine’s rhetorical style, particularly his discussion of sin. Years later, Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988) assailed the bishop for influencing Church notions on sex, the role of women, and the need for governmental authority. Wills, however, has little use for such arguments: “For a man supposedly obsessed with sex, Augustine spent very little time on the sins of the flesh in his sermons.” In analyzing Book Two of The Confessions (or, as he prefers to call it, The Testimony), Wills likens the saint’s theft and destruction of a pear at age 16 to Adam’s fall: both involve a fruit and were committed due to an association (in Adam’s case, with Eve; in Augustine’s, with his youth gang). Adam’s fall, together with Satan’s rebellion against God and Cain’s murder of Abel, form an Augustinian trio of “founding sins” that Wills glosses in his introduction and notes. Wills is never afraid to fly in the face of conventional wisdom—noting, for instance, that contrary to stereotype, Augustine was not particularly dissolute as a youth, staying faithful to one woman in a common-law marriage for about 15 years. As biographer and critic, Wills seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence. But as translator, he’s not as inspired. In an attempt to convey the “continual wordplay, the acoustical effects, (and) the intermeshing verbal arrangements” of Augustine’s “jazzy” style, he sometimes employs rococo flourish more reminiscent of his spurned conservative mentor, William F. Buckley Jr., than of the immortal cleric (e.g., “At the time of my young manhood, when I burned to be engaged with vile things, I boldly foisoned into ramifying and umbrageous loves”).
Despite the ill-advised try at translation, Wills continues to burn brightly in illuminating one of the most profound, if complex, figures in Western civilization.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03241-7
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
