SON OF TEARS

Another fictionalized biography of Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippe, this bears more heavily on his years of skepticism, attempts a more familiar recreation than de Wohl's The Restless Flame (Lippincott, 1951) which maintained more of a doctrinal thesis approach to its subject. Here is the boy who questioned why stolen sweets were sweeter, who, when sent to Carthage from his home in Tagasle, to finish his education, found an answer in the principle of Mani; the young man who took Melanie as a mistress but for whom there was no marriage even when they had a son; who as a teacher of rhetoric, when he had been discouraged with the Manichasans, denied there was a God, that he had a soul, and who, in humbleness and despair, found his release in the Christian church. His regeneration led him to found a monastery, to be faced with forced ordination as a priest, and to fight other doctrines that beset his faith -- and his reputation. With the approach of the vandals, after the fall of Rome, as Bishop of Hippo his was the voice, the challenge and the inspiration for all of his followers. A loving -- but not always living -- picture of an early century servant of Christ, this has a defined audience.