A. D. 383: an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old provincial teacher of rhetoric boarded a ship in Carthage. He was bound for Rome, where powerful friends promised “better earnings,” “high honors,” and, above all, an escape from the unruly students of North Africa. Unfortunately, he had failed to reckon with his formidable mother: “She, indeed, was in dreadful grief at my going and followed me right to the coast, passionately determined that I should either go back home with her or take her to Rome.” Instead, he deceived her in order to get away, persuading her to stay overnight in a nearby chapel: “I lied to my mother—and such a mother.” As she wept and prayed on land, “the wind blew and filled our sails and the shore dropped from our sight. She went home and I to Rome.” Thus, in his own rueful words, we begin to know Aurelius Augustinus, the man who would become St. Augustine.

Of course, the students in Rome proved no better. After an unhappy year, Augustine moved to Milan. There, under the patronage of Symmachus, a senator and Milan’s pagan prefect, Augustine was appointed professor of rhetoric. More important, he came under the influence of Symmachus’s cousin Ambrose, the Christian bishop of Milan. It was in Milan—now joined by his mother, Monnica—that Augustine heard the fateful words, “Tolle, lege,” that finally led to his baptism (387) and to his embrace of the celibate life. Returning to Africa (388) in the hopes of founding a monastic community, he assumed an ever more important role in the North African church, being ordained a priest (391) and eventually bishop of Hippo (395). He passed his last thirty-five years in Hippo, dividing his time between institutional duties and the writings that would define his legacy to the Church.

In the events of Augustine’s life, the reader can trace the rapid and dramatic decline of the Roman Empire. From his early years as a schoolboy weeping over the story of Dido and Aeneas in a secure Roman province to his death as the Christian bishop of a North African port under blockade by the Vandals, barbarians from Southern Sweden, we see the end of the Pax Romana that had secured the Mediterranean for five hundred years. He was thirty-three years a man of the classical world and forty-three years a Christian ascetic; an admirer of Cicero and Plotinus, he lived to hear of the sack of Rome. But not only was his outer world in flux, Augustine himself was constantly changing. And, by writing, by acting, by influencing an ever-growing body of people, Augustine himself helped to precipitate changes in the world around him that were no less dramatic than his own inner transformation from pagan to Manichean to neo-Platonist to Christian.

What is more, we can follow this journey in his own language; Augustine of Hippo is the last person of the classical world whom we know firsthand. To the best of my knowledge, there is not another autobiography written in the west for about a thousand years. At the same time, as one scholar has written, Augustine is “the only church father who even today remains an intellectual power”; “he attracts pagans and Christians, philosophers and theologians alike by his writings and makes them come to terms with his intentions and his person.”

What accounts for this fascination with Augustine some 1570 years after his death? I would suggest that it is not simply Augustine’s intellectual strength or his astonishing output—a corpus of some five million words. Augustine draws the modern reader to him by the force of his personality, by the timelessness and timeliness of his spiritual journey. Even though his answers ultimately may not be not our answers, his questions are most definitely our questions.

Indeed, the personality that lay behind Augustine’s spiritual journey resonates through his writings as with no other ancient theologian. Certainly, we have a feeling for the others: Tertullian is cranky; Jerome a bit prickly; Origen a dreamy idealist. But who except Augustine could have written of his own spiritual yearnings, “Oh Lord make me chaste, but not yet”? And who among us does not understand precisely what he meant? This is also the reason, I would venture, that modern writers and readers are so disappointed when Augustine proves himself a man of his age and not ours; when, for example, his attitudes toward sexuality or women or a host of other things turn out to be those of a man of late antiquity.

Of course, it is important not to give short shrift to Augustine’s intellectual achievement, a body of work that ranges from quotidian letters and sermons to treatises on systematic theology and controversialist tracts. (As one writer noted, it is instructive to note how many of Augustine’s titles begin with the word “contra.”) Leaving aside the Confessions, surely one of the great books of all time, it is difficult to think about political philosophy without the pessimistic realism of the City of God. It is difficult to conceive of the modern exegetical tradition without On Christian Doc- trine, which permitted the use of secular learning in scriptural interpretation, broadening the existing parameters of textual exegesis. In speculative theology, in works ranging from On the Trinity to his Sermons, Augustine’s influence extended through the Middle Ages and the Reformation, to the present era. And, with his writings against theological dissidents—as much, if not more, than in his constructive works— Augustine defined the direction of the Church for the next millennium and a half.

It is this remarkable life that forms the background for Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. The book is, quite simply, magisterial. It is also, equally evidently, a labor of love. The volume contains almost five hundred entries representing contributions from more than 140 scholars—most of whom are from North America—in fields ranging from classics, philosophy, and political science to theology and patristics. It treats separately each of Augustine’s nearly 120 extant works, some of which are not translated into English. Entries also consider the works by category, such as those against the Donatists or the Pelagians. Moreover, there are articles on classical and Christian influences in Augustine’s works, and on persons and historical periods influenced by him. Finally, there are thematic entries whose topics range from reason, sin, and evil to the background of the late classical period.

Each entry has an extensive scholarly apparatus, including bibliography and cross-references to other entries. Further enhancing its usefulness, the book begins with a complete list of entries and ends with a full index to aid the reader in locating subjects that are not apparent from entry titles. Moreover, as part of its introductory material, the book contains tables listing all of Augustine’s works, including Latin and English titles, English translations, and generally accepted dates for each.

The accompanying publicity suggests that the book is aimed at academic, seminary, and public libraries. And certainly there is much of the academic study about it. Consider for example, the entry “World” in which the reader is guided through the differences in Augustine’s writings between “mundum”—the spatial world, the world opposed to Jesus, and what is to be used rather than enjoyed—and “saeculum”—the temporal world or history.

Yet, there is much to recommend the volume to the general reader. Dipping into the book more or less at random, one comes up with such gems as the entry “Manuscripts.” Here, the non-specialist learns in passing that Augustine usually dictated his works to a stenographer (noterarius) who recorded his words in a shorthand called tironian notes, named after Cicero’s secretary, M. Tullius Tiro. The dictation was then written out longhand, corrected, and edited—both an insight into life in the late Roman empire and a curious sidelight on the importance of Cicero. A related entry, “Epistulae,” discusses the vagaries of the postal arrangements of the late empire, explaining how Augustine kept in touch with his far-flung acquaintances, concluding drily that “given the uncertainties of the delivery system, it was wise not to put into writing sentiments you would not want strangers to read.”

Or consider the lovely entry “Friendship, Friends,” which shows how Augustine transformed Cicero’s classical understanding of friendship—“nothing other than agreement on all things divine and human, along with good will and affection”—into an explicitly Christian concept—“a bond between souls that cleave to each other through the love ‘poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.’” Although the Confessions amply illustrates the importance of friends in Augustine’s life, the entry drives home the point with a poignant passage drawn from the end of the City of God, in which Augustine wrote, “What consoles us in this human society, so full of errors and hardships, except unfeigned faith and the mutual love of good and true friends?” So central was friendship to Augustine that he explored the idea of “friendship with God,” a relationship established when God grants human beings a share of his eternal wisdom. Indeed, as the author tells us, at one point, Augustine mused that the Holy Spirit might well be the friendship of the Father and Son.

Less theological in orientation, consider “Ostia,” where we find out that the ancient seaport was founded, according to tradition, at the place where Aeneas made his landing to become the progenitor of the Latins. From the Augustinian perspective, Ostia is the place where St. Monnica died and was buried after sharing an ecstatic vision with her son (387); in the entry, we learn that in 1945, two boys digging a hole in the courtyard of the church of St. Aurea found a marble slab bearing a portion of an epitaph from Monnica’s grave. As the writer suggests, “monuments of great interest are there to be seen.”

The entries vary, of course, greatly depending on the contributor. For example, the disappointingly thin “Life, Culture, and Controversies of Augustine” is lumbered by a writing style that is best described as unduly reliant on appositional clauses. Even its effort at a time line showing key events in Augustine’s life on the one side and concurrent events in the church and empire on the other is hampered by an idiosyncratic selection on both scores.

By contrast, the elegant and comprehensive entry “Women” covers Augustine’s writings on women, his treatment of the women in his life, and modern feminist reactions to Augustine. Here we learn that, in addition to the nameless “companion” of the Confessions and the ubiquitous St. Monnica, Augustine had a widowed sister who became head of a house of consecrated women in Hippo and that after her death he assumed pastoral care over the community. We also are given a judicious discussion of the currents in feminist thought, where Augustine has not always received good press. It ranges from the apologetic —stressing the demands of Augustine’s own asceticism—to the critical—Augustine’s pessimistic views of sexuality and human nature left the Church a legacy of misogyny and sexual repression—and ends with the recent suggestion that Augustine’s theology was both culturally constructed and rested on the irony that “the man who is largely responsible for introducing sex into Eden and gender into heaven could never permit the erotic to symbolize the divine.”

If this book makes easier the life of a scholar seeking to pin down an esoteric piece of information, it will have done its job well. But if it makes Augustine more readily accessible to the ordinary reader, it will have done a greater service both to that reader and to the vitality of the western canon.