Stephen A. Cooper

Stephen A. Cooper’s Augustine for Armchair Theologians is a commentary on St. Augustine’s Confessions and City of God. Cooper traced Augustine’s life from childhood to the time he became a bishop of Hippo. Augustine lived not only in Africa, but Rome and Milan. He was fortunate to have a good education by having patrons, because his family couldn’t afford to provide him with such learning.
Augustine’s parents were middle class. His father was a pagan before becoming a Christian, and his mother was an ardent Catholic. Augustine’s mother prayed diligently that her son would become a Christian. But his parents wanted him to be a high official in Roman society. His mother therefore held off having him baptized as a child, since his parents realized he would be living in the secular world filled with temptations. His mother Monica hoped too that eventually her son would marry someone of their social status.
Augustine in seeking an education as a young man was tossed about in the problems of the world. He lived with lust and in debauchery. As a young man he was with a woman with whom he had a child. Monica his mother was distressed by her son’s beliefs in Manicheanism and continued praying for him to convert. Eventually Augustine and his common law wife parted company leaving him to raise their son who died at a young age.
With careers as a professor of rhetoric and an influential speaker Augustine held a prominent position in the courts of Milan – the apex of social activity at that time. But Monica never gave up dogging him about being a Christian, and succeeded in having him talk with St. Amboise – bishop of Milan. By this time Augustine was under the influence of Platonists. He was persuaded by St. Ambrose and after much delay decided to be a catechumen and was baptized a Catholic. Shortly afterwards he decided to give up teaching rhetoric. Augustine later became a priest and bishop of Hippo. St. Augustine died after seeing Rome overran by the Visigoths in 410. Many Romans had blamed the Christians for this tragedy, so he wrote the City of God to refute these claims.… (más)

I doubt anybody needs an introduction to Saint Augustine, the 4th century Bishop of Hippo. Augustine preached for perhaps 30 years and authored over 100 titles. But if you want a quick overview of his life and spiritual growth, without getting bogged down in theological discussion, this is a friendly little book. This is my first Armchair Theologians book, and I’m impressed.

Cooper follows the lead of Augustine’s most famous work, Confessions, most of which is autobiographical, to tell the story of his life. Augustine’s other most famous work, his massive City of God, gets a brief nod in the final chapter. I found that Cooper provided a proper balance to the influences and motivations of Augustine’s life: his closeness with his mother, his relationships and later determined abstinence, his foray into Manicheism, and his resultant theology of grace. A proper perspective helps overcome the shallow perception that Augustine was wracked with guilt over what he considered a terribly sinful life. Augustine did indeed condemn his youthful actions, but they hardly ranked very high on the sin scale, and he comes across in this book as much more reasonable, merely cognizant of his shortcomings.

This is not to say his denunciation of Manicheism and acceptance of Christianity was an easy one. He quickly grasped the untruths of astrology and other competing life views, and saw Christianity as the one true way, but was unwilling. One day, before feeling any strong conviction toward Christianity and feeling unfulfilled, he picked up a Bible and it opened to this passage:

Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in chambering and shamelessness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh” –Romans 13:13–14

He needed to read no further. His past ways were put behind him, and he found the strength to overcome his sinful nature—most of which amounted to a youthful lust for women. Augustine’s reputation as one who condemned the evils of sex (that whole “original sin” thing, you know) is somewhat deserved, but to be fair he was a product of his Christian times. The connection between Christianity and a preference for the virginal or celibate life was not something he or his generation manufactured. Christian asceticism traces its origins to the practices of Jesus and Paul, who were themselves both celibates. By Augustine’s time, this strain of religiosity was in full bloom, and he strove to overcome his “slavery to lust.”

The majority of Cooper’s book, then, is of the formative years of Augustine’s journey, with little attention given to his time as Bishop of Hippo. Fun and engrossing, this is an easy book to recommend.

This book was provided for review by Logos Bible Software and read on their mobile e-book software.… (más)

This book essentially just goes though Augustine's early life, following the outline in Augustine's Confessions. It uses the Confessions as an window to Augustine, assuming that readers would start with that book and graduate to others---not a bad idea.

It does really help make the Confessions even more accessible to readers unfamiliar with Augustine or his work.

The only downside is because this book focuses so heavily on his life as described in Confessions it fails to really wrestle with any of the issues that Augustine was so influential on later in his life (for example, the problem of grace and free will).… (más)