Christopher Howse

Agony and ecstasy in the garden

Robin Lane Fox has made an intense study of a critical decade in St Augustine’s life when he produced his most famous book — ‘like no other, before or since’

From ‘Scenes from the Life of St Augustine’ by Benozzo Gozzoli [THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY]

I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of Hippo in the spring of 1966, after lunch and his first taste of brandy, in frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli at San Gimigniano. The quattrocento painter showed a figure with an academic air, in a gown and cake-tin-shaped hat, sitting beneath a tall, smooth-barked fig tree in the garden of a villa, his head in one hand and the fingers of the other on some lines of script in an open book on his knee. Beside him stands a man gesturing towards him.

This scene is the heart of an intense (if extensive) study by the ancient historian and garden master of New College of a man ‘educated to write like a marvel’. The marvel he has decided to explore is St Augustine’s Confessions, a book ‘like none other before or since’, an autobiography in a way, but, as Lane Fox rightly stresses, one long prayer to God, confessing in two senses: confessing sins and testifying by praise.

The turning point of Augustine’s life, half way through Lane Fox’s book, took place in a garden in Milan around 4 August in AD 386. The details are specific. The garden was a real garden, the author insists, not a figure for the Garden of Eden, or the virginal body (as in the Song of Songs); the fig tree was just a fig tree, not a reference to the tree under which the Apostle Nathaniel prayed.

Augustine, from Africa but as Latin as you like (he never mentions camels in an African context), had just taken up an academic post in Milan. As usual he was beset by questioning: where was philosophy leading; what had the Platonists to offer; what was wrong with the Manichaeans (a rum lot, quite as rum as the Catholic Christians); should he give up sex? It was already more than a decade since he had prayed, ‘Give me chastity — but not yet.’

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