Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica. Her feast day immediately precedes his.

A Short Augustine Reading List

Elizabeth Bruenig
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

August 28th marks the feast day of Saint Augustine of Hippo. I’ve been into Augustine for years now, and I only appreciate him more as time goes on. So, to celebrate him this year, I put together a small reading list of some of my favorite books, papers and chapters about the man, his thought, and the world he helped create. I tried to pick out things that are independently interesting; things that might fascinate a general reader whether they have any particular focus on Augustine or not. Not too much inside baseball, in other words.

One thing I am often asked is: With Augustine, where do I start? The answer is that you can start anywhere you like, dive in anywhere, and it will still take you a long time to develop a full, complex understanding of Augustine. Learning is like a spiral; you start far outside the thing you want to know, and slowly, by working around and around it over and over again, begin to approach it. That is just how learning is. It’s how most good and cherished things are: You don’t ‘start’ in any particular place with a marriage; one day you aren’t married, and the next day, you are. It’s only decades later that you look back on the accomplishment of many years and realize that you have built for yourself an understanding of the other person that is real, rich, thick and complex.

So settle in. No need to rush. Augustine isn’t going anywhere. He’s waiting for you in eternity. Find a question or two that you pursue like a detective, sniffing for clues as you read, making notes and tracing back. (For me, clearly, those questions have always been political. But that is by no means the limit of Augustine’s influence.) Re-read old things; they’ll be new again. You’ll see things you didn’t see before, because it’s not really quite the same you, anyway.

Books

On Augustine: The Two Cities” by Alan Ryan is this weird, tiny little book that packs a great punch, in that it has one of the clearest understandings of the tensions between Augustine’s view of politics and modern liberalism that I’ve ever read. And it’s itty-bitty. You could read it during a slow work commute. It also has some selections from Augustine in the back, which is nice.

“The Pilgrim City: Social and Political Ideas in the Writings of St. Augustine of Hippo” by RW Dyson. I’m a Dyson partisan myself, and this is essentially a bunch of commentaries on Augustine’s political thought which includes swatches of source text.

“The Pilgrim City: St. Augustine of Hippo and his innovation in Political Thought” by Miles Hollingworth. Helps put Augustine in modern context. So does Jean Bethke Elshtain’s “Augustine and the Limits of Politics,” though I tend to agree less with her.

“Saeculum: History and society in the Theology of St. Augustine” by RA Markus. A classic, heavy and dense. Make a friend read it with you.

“Love and Saint Augustine” by Hannah Arendt. Always fun to read the masters on the masters. Rowan Williams’ piece on City of God in the Eerdman’s Reader (below) is a very good critique of Arendt’s reading of Augustine.

“Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship” by Eric Gregory is a big, hefty book that’s fun to read alongside a sharp little polemic like Ryan’s. Gregory obviously has a different view of how Augustine might be adapted to liberal political orders. But he’s a very companionable and morally upright narrator, and enjoyable to read, wherever you come down on the debate.

Papers

Freedom Beyond our Choosing: Augustine on the Will and its Objects” by DC Schindler is a dense read, but a fantastic key to understanding Augustine’s view of freedom, free will and moral choices.

Chapters

The Augustine chapter in O’Donovan’s “From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought” is predictably great. Over the years, I’ve read it for so many different projects and in so many different periods that almost the entire thing is highlighted in a patchwork of different colors.

Similarly good is Rowan Williams’ chapter on Augustine, “Politics and the Soul: A Reading of the City of God” in “Eerdmans’ Reader in Contemporary Political Theology.”

“In Interiore Homine” in Charles Taylor’s “Sources of the Self” is an excellent read on Augustine’s ontology, and helps illuminate his role in contributing to the modern idea of the self.

“The Weakness of the Will” in Larry Siedentop’s “Inventing the Individual” traces similar ground, but nicely underscores the socially revolutionary aspects of the kind of interiority Augustine exemplified and argued for.

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