Confessions
Garry Wills’s complete translation of Saint Augustine’s spiritual masterpiece—available now for the first time Garry Wills is an exceptionally gifted translator and one of our best writers on religion today. His bestselling translations of individual chapters of Saint Augustine’s Confessions have received widespread and glowing reviews. Now for the first time, Wills’s translation of the entire work is being published as a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. Removed by time and place but not by spiritual relevance, Augustine’s Confessions continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Wills brings his superb gifts of analysis and insight to this ambitious translation of the entire book. “[Wills] renders Augustine’s famous and influential text in direct language with all the spirited wordplay and poetic strength intact.”—Los Angeles Times“[Wills’s] translations... are meant to bring Augustine straight into our own minds; and they succeed. Well-known passages, over which my eyes have often gazed, spring to life again from Wills’s pages.”—Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books“Augustine flourishes in Wills’s hand.”—James Wood“A masterful synthesis of classical philosophy and scriptural erudition.”—Chicago Tribune
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- I read quite a lot as a kid. Fiction and non-fiction. I'm intensely curious, and the "why" and the "how" of things leads you into new subjects. It doesn't hurt that history is also filled with stories as compelling as most fiction. Much of the old stuff also holds up quite well. Meditations by Aurelius is amazing. Also, Confessions by Augustine of Hippo.
I have many interests but botany became a big one, and the scientific naming scheme is mostly Latin and Greek, which leads to some interesting word history. "Sativa" means anything "cultivated" (example, "Avena sativa" is "cultivated oats" and "Crocus sativa" is "cultivated saffron"). "Nemo" means "no one" (so the "Search for Nemo" is the search for no one, haha), the root word for "service" means "slave". There are many more interesting associations.
I find the deepest and most awe-inspiring truths within physics (out of which biology and chemistry are arguably sort of abstractions in terms of order of complexity). Behind this is a long awkward history of curious people fumbling for answers in the dark. I am an odd nut, but it is connecting in a comforting way the way I can see others have asked the same burning questions of the "how" and the "why" of things, and the myriad subjects it has lead them to.
As John Muir once said: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
- The Confessions by Augustine of Hippo.
- > So why, then, does truth sometimes engender hatred? Why does the servant of God come to be an enemy of those who want a happy life, even though true happiness is joy in the truth? The reason must be this: Our love of truth is such that when we love something that’s not the truth, we pretend to ourselves that we we love is the truth. Then, because we hate to be proved wrong, we’re unwilling to be convinced that we’ve deceived ourselves. In this way, then, people hate the truth for the sake of whatever it is that they love more than the truth. They love truth when it shines warmly on them, and hate it when it rebukes them.
* Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, ch. 23 / sec. 34, https://wist.info/augustine-of-hippo/46880/
- Hah! Within the last couple of weeks I read Berdyaev's The Fate of Man in the Modern World, less for any special insight into theology than because the book was lying around, I had heard his name, and thought I might as well read it. On the other hand, I did read a fair bit of Plato and some Aristotle in 2020.
The one thing the modern synopsists will give you, though, is context. Jaroslav Pelikan quotes an American theologian to the effect that the Reformation was the reaction of Augustine's theology of grace on Augustine's theology of the church. I moderately well understand this, not through reading Augustine; I have read The Confessions and a smidgen each of On the Trinity and The City of God. But it was Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo and the first volume of Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine that told me.
