Caveat lector.

One cannot judge a book by its cover: that old saw is especially true here. While I was not familiar -- ignorant even -- of Miles Hollingworth before I purchased Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, the title, traditionally beautiful cover art, and publisher (Oxford University Press) not only intrigued me but gave me confidence in my purchase. After forcing myself to wade through this series of thoughts in search of an editor, I can only rate this work one star on the Goodreads spectrum.

As I've written in other reviews, a work of nonfiction must deliver on its title as a starting point. The title sets a framework -- a gauge of expectations. Mine were sorely disappointed, which I'll address momentarily. But even with the title (and implied expectations) stripped away, this monograph would be hard-pressed to be judged as an academic book worthy of the OUP imprint.

Back to the title. Biographies are a genre of their own, and thus need little explanation. The etymology literally means "life writing." In this particular case, the biography was described as an "intellectual" one; thus I believe my expectations were well within the bounds of reason by thinking that this work would explore the intellectual and philosophical precursors to Augustine's own thought, as well as perhaps the influence of Augustine's own philosophy on the intellectual tradition that came after him.

Rather, while this work does have brief accounts of Augustine's early days and death near the beginning and end of it -- and, to be fair, an obligatory chronology of his life at the beginning -- the balance consists of long quotes from both Augustine and various other writers, along with Hollingworth's own musing (sometimes related to the quotation, sometimes not). The book would be half its length were it not for the long-winded quotations. And there is little in the way of biographical order involved. A better title for this book might be: Intellectual Snippets: Musings in the History of Ideas. By that title, the book might have some merit. But considered as an Augustinian intellectual biography, the book fails miserably.

Hollingworth's musings are all over the map. Consider the following: around page 229 in the Kindle version, over the span of a few paragraphs, Hollingworth moves from some creative urge of Augustine in the Confessions, to a quote on vomiting (not just any vomiting, mind you, but the type mentioned in the Aeneid and then glossed by Montaigne), to a reference to Beethoven via his countryman Nietzsche, all wrapped up in a little bow by Plato.

Lest one think that the aforementioned example is an anomaly, let's look at the index -- ostensibly compiled by both Hollingworth and an editor or two. Assuming it to be accurate, it is telling that there are as many references to Aquinas (1) as Hannah Arendt (also 1). Or WH Auden, King Bahram I, Ernest Barker, Buddha, Edmund Burke, GK Chesterton, Cecil Day Lewis, Michel Foucault, Edmund Husserl, James Joyce, Gottfried Leibniz, John Stuart Mill, Vladimir Nabokov, Howard Nemerov, Blaise Pascal, Philo, Pliny (Elder or Younger? doesn't say), Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Seneca, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, William Styron, Tertullian, and William Wordsworth: each has precisely one reference.

I forgot to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also receives a reference. As does Vaclav Havel -- Hollingwood would not want to miss the connection between Augustine and the Czech literary scene! Also Immanuel Kant, Pierre Simon Laplace, Lucretius and St. Peter: one reference each. Ned Rorem also got one.

This list is not exhaustive, by the way.

Calvinism merits a single reference, but John Calvin doesn't get one himself. That guy Luther -- not the civil rights one, but the Reformation one -- he also gets one reference. It is as if Hollingworth's goal was to include every author he's ever read, and think up a way to connect the author to Augustine.

Bertrand Russell? Five references. To Hollingworth's credit, the great Augustinian and late antiquity scholar Peter Brown is referenced on six different occasions; one could only hope that it was more. ( )

"Ever since [the Pelopennesian War and other politico-military circumstances for philosophy] the Western intellectual has had to bear the suspicion that he is 'behind the times' if his ideas do not show the proper respect to the 'facts.' In times of revolutionary zeal, the facts have a way of swapping places with his ideas, so that they become the ardent, utopian dreams of the regime, and his conservatism (now seen for what it is) can be extinguished as the obstacle to progress." 29 One of Augustine's enduring collatoral achievements was to be the conduitof safe passage for a whole range of classical learning that would have been burnt and trodden to dust by the barbarians had it not turned up all over his writings 33 There are some things that are designed to be caught by the human mind: but the understanding of them has nothing to do with the catching: but consists rather of handing them back, intact, to their maker. 44 Serm 9.12--virtuous man feels ashamed in lewd company We are the remembering race, always looking back to a reality from which to make sense of the moving forwards. (243, 244, 248) So this is A saying that the whole gift and art of writing, the gift and art of all human forms of expression, is possible only because we have been so damnably deceived yet continue to perform the sacramental onomastic role of seeing and naming the animals in Eden. 220 "such intensive home-schooling" 235