Augustine in Context assesses the various contexts - historical, literary, cultural, spiritual - in which Augustine lived and worked. The essays, written by an international team of scholars especially for this volume, provide the background against which Augustine's treatises should be read and interpreted. They are organized according to a rationale which moves from an introduction to the person (the so-called 'personal context') to the contexts of Augustine's works and ideas, starting from the intellectual setting and extending to the socio-political realm. Collectively the essays highlight the embeddedness of Augustine in the world of late antiquity and the interdependence of his discourse with contemporary forms of social life. They shed new light on one of the most important figures of the western canon and facilitate a more enlightened reading of his writings.

A useful and accessible work, this book introduces readers to Augustine by placing his life and central teachings in the context of his place and time. It displays the development of Augustinianism in a way that is at once chronological, biographical and philosophical, offering readers a better sense of Augustine as a person and a thinker.

St. Augustine, the North African bishop of Hippo (AD 354-430), has been much studied. But there has been no systematic attempt to consider the context which shaped his life and thought. Augustine's long and controversial career and his vast literary output provide unrivalled evidence for understanding the diverse ways in which Christianity confronted, assimilated, and finally transformed the traditional society of late antiquity. This book sets Augustine in his cultural and social context showing how, as a Christian, he came to terms with the philosophical and rhetorical ideals of classical culture, and, as a bishop, with the ecclesiastical, ascetic, and political structures of late antique society. According to Augustine, the Fall of man and Original sin fracture and vitiate mankind's ability to know or to will the good. This is revealed as the keystone of his theology, effecting a decisive break with classical ideals of perfection and shaping the distinctive theology of Western Christendom.

"This narrative of the first half of Augustine's life conjures the intellectual and social milieu of the late Roman Empire with a Proustian relish for detail." -- New York Times In Augustine, celebrated historian Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine of Hippo on his journey to the writing of his Confessions. Unbaptized, Augustine indulged in a life of lust before finally confessing and converting. Lane Fox recounts Augustine's sexual sins, his time in an outlawed heretical sect, and his gradual return to spirituality. Magisterial and beautifully written, Augustine is the authoritative portrait of this colossal figure at his most thoughtful, vulnerable, and profound.

This volume offers a comprehensive portrait--or rather, self-portrait, since its words are mostly Augustine's own--drawn from the breadth of his writings and from the long course of his career

An indispensable resource for those looking to understand Augustine's place in religious and cultural heritage Augustine towers over Western life, literature, and culture--both sacred and secular. His ideas permeate conceptions of the self from birth to death and have cast a long shadow over subsequent Christian thought. But as much as tradition has sprung from Augustinian roots, so was Augustine a product of and interlocutor with traditions that preceded and ran contemporary to his life. This extensive volume examines and evaluates Augustine as both a receiver and a source of tradition. The contributors--all distinguished Augustinian scholars influenced by J. Patout Burns and interested in furthering his intellectual legacy--survey Augustine's life and writings in the context of North African tradition, philosophical and literary traditions of antiquity, the Greek patristic tradition, and the tradition of Augustine's Latin contemporaries. These various pieces, when assembled, tell a comprehensive story of Augustine's significance, both then and now.

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Garry Wills, the story of Augustine’s Confessions In this brief and incisive book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills tells the story of the Confessions--what motivated Augustine to dictate it, how it asks to be read, and the many ways it has been misread in the one-and-a-half millennia since it was composed. Following Wills's biography of Augustine and his translation of the Confessions, this is an unparalleled introduction to one of the most important books in the Christian and Western traditions. Understandably fascinated by the story of Augustine's life, modern readers have largely succumbed to the temptation to read the Confessions as autobiography. But, Wills argues, this is a mistake. The book is not autobiography but rather a long prayer, suffused with the language of Scripture and addressed to God, not man. Augustine tells the story of his life not for its own significance but in order to discern how, as a drama of sin and salvation leading to God, it fits into sacred history. "We have to read Augustine as we do Dante," Wills writes, "alert to rich layer upon layer of Scriptural and theological symbolism." Wills also addresses the long afterlife of the book, from controversy in its own time and relative neglect during the Middle Ages to a renewed prominence beginning in the fourteenth century and persisting to today, when the Confessions has become an object of interest not just for Christians but also historians, philosophers, psychiatrists, and literary critics. With unmatched clarity and skill, Wills strips away the centuries of misunderstanding that have accumulated around Augustine's spiritual classic.