The people to their own destruction sought riches that minister to pleasures: He determined to be poor. They panted for honors and empires: He refused to be made a king . . . In their great pride they dreaded insults: He bore with insults of every kind. They thought injuries were not to be endured: what greater injury can there be than that a just and innocent man should be condemned? They execrated bodily pain: He was beaten and tortured. They feared to die: He was condemned to death. They thought a cross the most shameful form of death: He was crucified. All the things which men unrighteously desired to possess, he did without and so made them of no account. All the things which men sought to avoid and so deviated from the search for truth, he endured and so robbed them of their power over us.
This treatise, written in the first few years after Augustine’s conversion experience, is seen by many as his first great work and I think that’s a fair opinion to have, though I’ve only read a few of his earlier works from this period. This is a fairly lengthy treatise, around a hundred pages or so in the edition I read, and it’s a challenging work structurally. Maybe this is because it is an early work, but it is technically kind of hard to follow. Augustine was a guy who liked proceeding step by step along lines of thought, but this work is very scattered and sometimes the way he would leap from point to point was confusing to me. But this also features some of his most beautiful rhetoric and vivid imagery. Of course, it’s hard to know how much of this is down to the translation, but I’ve read other works translated by J.H.S. Burleigh that didn’t have the linguistic beauty of this one, so I think there is something special about the Augustinian original here. Some of the passages here are just incredibly impassioned and electrifying, reminiscent of the conversion passage in the Confessions in the way they crackle with energy and exuberance. The zeal of a new convert is in these pages, in other words. Another reason I think this one is so beloved is that it is, in many ways, the most purely Augustinian of any of his works that I’ve read and if that sounds weird, well, I guess what I mean is that, scattershot as it is, by the time you finish this work, you’ll kind of be able to talk about Augustinian thought in basically all of the important areas. More than any of the other things I’ve read by him, even the Confessions, this one collects and addresses his major beliefs on the most of his major beliefs . . . if that makes sense. He gets around to basically all of his major hobby-horses, I guess, and that makes this a really compelling read. It's, unfortunately, a little opaque for me to recommend it as a good starting point for Augustine. If the connective tissue was a little better or if the big leaps from point to point were explicated a little better, this would be THE Augustinian text to recommend to people wanting to get into his worldview. As it is, I think it would probably be best to read some of his shorter, simpler pieces first, but this is still a good one to get to fairly quickly because it will help the new Augustinian contextualize what they’ve already seen and gain a good lens (or ten) for looking at whatever they go to next. Augustine isn’t at his most technically skilled yet, but the soul on display here is profoundly compelling. 4 stars.
tl;dr – certainly one of Augustine’s greatest works, this overview of his philosophy is scattershot, but also compelling, beautiful and passionate. 4 stars.