Saint Augustine

About Saint Augustine

Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What The Qur’an Meant, coming fall 2017.

Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills brings the same fresh scholarship, lively prose, and critical appreciation that characterize his well-known books on religion and American history to this outstanding biography of one of the most influential Christian philosophers.

Saint Augustine follows its subject from his youth in fourth-century Africa to his conversion and subsequent development as a theologian. It challenges the widely held misconceptions about Augustine’s sexual excesses and shows how, in embracing classical philosophy, Augustine managed to enlist “pagan authors” in the defense of Christianity. The result is a biography that makes a spiritual ancestor feel like our contemporary.

About Saint Augustine

For centuries, Augustine’s writings have moved and fascinated readers. With the keen eye of a writer whose own intellectual analysis won him a Pulitzer Prize, Gary Wills examines this famed fourth-century bishop and seminal thinker whose grounding in classical philosophy informed his interpretation of Christian doctrine. Saint Augustine explores Augustine’s thought as well as the everyday man who set pen to parchment. It challenges many misconceptions, including those regarding his early sexual excesses. It portrays Augustine as being “peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture” who didn’t even know Greek. Here is a lively and incisive portrait of a man who helped shape Western thinking.

“Wills’s agile mind matches the agility of Saint Augustine. He presents his subject with candor and with empathy.”—New York Times Book Review