Augustine the African

 As a present for a recent birthday, I received a copy of Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare. It is a short book, quickly read. Much of the matter will be familiar to anyone who has read Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo. Conybeare gives greater emphasis to the African context of Augustine's life and work.

 On a number of points I wondered about her approach. She has an eye for the dramatic, and she exercises it in recounting the struggles with the Donatists. The question of the objective validity of the sacraments--in this case, baptism--gets a paragraph. The struggle with the Pelagians also gives one more of the drama of personal conflict than of doctrinal concerns. Yet Jaroslav Pelikan in a couple of places quotes Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield to the effect that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine's theology of grace over Augustine's theology of the church. Given the importance of the Donatist controversy to the development of his doctrine of the church, and of the Pelagian controversy in refining his doctrine of Grace, the author might have given more space to the doctrinal concerns, and less to the ambiguous place of North Africa, or one North African, in the Roman system.

 The diction is also of our time. One finds "dog-whistle" where in one case "proof text" would be better, and in another perhaps "catch words". A chapter on the disorientation felt by Romans (broadly understood) after the Sack of Rome is "Roman Fragility". Of course I understand these, but will the readers of 2050 or 2100?

I am glad to have read the book, and will read it again. I may want to have more of St. Augustine's work handy for reference when I do.

No Riding on Sidewalks

 For two mornings, a bike was parked on the sidewalk of the bridge that carries 16th St. NW over Piney Branch Parkway. The second morning, I half wheeled, half dragged it south thirty yards or so to where I could leave it on some grass. The injunction "no riding on sidewalks"

particularly annoyed me.

I understand the attraction of bicycles and scooters to be rented for short rides. I do not like to have to pick my way past them where the last rider has chosen to leave them. Quite often this is in the middle of of a sidewalk, often enough it is in an inconvenient place on the sidewalk.

In most of Washington, DC, it is within the regulations to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk. Of course that may not be so for powered bicycles such as this one.

A Prototype?

 About two thirds of the way through The Moviegoer, Walker Percy's narrator is reflecting on how certain encounters are supposed to work, according to fiction:

 Or--do what a hero in a novel would do: he too is a seeker and a pilgrim of sorts and he is just in from Guanajato or Sambuco where he has found the Real Right Thing, or from the East where he apprenticed himself to a wise man and because proficient in the seventh path to the seventh happiness. Yet he does not disdain this world either and when it happens that a maid comes to his bed with a heart full of longing for him, he puts down his book in a good and cheerful spirit and givers her as merry a time as she could possibly wish for. Whereupon, with her dispatched into as sweet a sleep as ever Scarlett enjoyed the morning of Rhett's return, he takes up his book again and is in an instant ten miles high and on the way.

(The movie version. which precedes this, was necessarily tamer sixty-odd years ago.)

Some days ago, in the course of clearance reading, I happened to pick up The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham, which in a couple of chapters matches Percy's description well. The Razor's Edge was published in 1944, The Moviegoer in 1961. In the intervening years, I imagine that a lot of lesser writers drew on Maugham.

The Story of a Life

 About the end of September I found myself too tired to follow an argument in print, able to read only narrative. A fat paperback, The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustofsky, had been on our shelves for some time, and I picked it up. A fortnight and 700 pages later, I was glad to have read it. I should say that this volume has only the first three of the six books in the autobiography.

The NYRB's edition of The Story of a Life takes Paustofsky through childhood to about the age of 35. It is very much the story of loss after loss, beginning with his father's death, continuing through the loss of his two brothers and a beloved during WW I, his mother's destitution and sister's blindness, and the disasters of the Civil War. The book ends with the departure of the last ships to leave Odessa before its capture by the Red Army. Paustofsky had decided to stay in Russia.

Yet the effect on the whole is not depressing. Talleyrand said that one had not tasted the sweetness of life if one had not lived under the Old Regime: Jacques Barzun glossed this to say that life during a decadence is usually sweet. And there is plenty of sweetness in Paustofsky's accounts. There are country visits to family and friends, there are friendships at school in Kiev, there are flirtations and courtships. And there is excitement: near escapes from death at the hands of the German army, Denikin's forces, and in general the trigger-happy and malicious in no man's land or in Odessa.

If NYRB brings out a translation of the next three books, I will read it. 

 

No Polite Shadow-Fencing

 At Second Story Books today, I looked into a volume of biographical sketches by Isaiah Berlin. The most promising name, I thought, was J.L. Austin, and the beginning of the essay did not disappoint. The two decided to teach a class on the thought of C.I. Lewis, which started such that

 Austin opened by inviting me to expound a thesis. I selected Lewis's doctrine of specific, sensible characteristics -- what Lewis called qualia--and said what I thought. Austin glared at me sternly and said, 'Would you mind saying that again.' I did so. 'It seems to me', said Austin, speaking slowly, 'that what you have just said is complete nonsense.' I then realised that this was to be no polite shadow-fencing, but war to the death -- my death, that is.

Still,

There is no doubt that Austin's performance at our class had a profound and lasting effect upon some, at any rate, of those who attended it. Some of them later became eminent professional philosophers and have testified to the extraordinary force and fertility of Austin's performance. for a performance it undoubtedly was: as much so as Moore's annual classes held at the joint meetings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association. Slow, formidable and relentless, Austin dealt firmly with criticism and opposition of the intelligent and stupid alike, and, in the course of this, left the genuine philosophers in our class not crushed or frustrated, but stimulated and indeed excited by the simplicity and lucidity of the nominalist thesis which he defended against Lewis.

Probably I should have purchased the volume this morning, perhaps I will yet. 

 

Recently Read

 In A Concise History of Italy by Christopher Duggan, chapter 1, "The geographical determinants of disunity", there appears the paragraph beginning

One reason why so many subversives believed in the revolutionary potential of the Italian peasants was that they knew very little about them. Most of the leading republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists came from urban middle-class families, and their knowledge of the countryside was rarely direct. The fact that in Italy a large cultural and to some extent economic divide existed between towns and countryside (many peasant families consumed what they grew and did not sell their produce at market) reinforced this ignorance. In such circumstances, it was easy for a romantic notion of 'the people' as an army of downtrodden soldiers waiting for generals to lead them to the promised land to flourish; and this idea survived many indications that a majority of peasants where in fact deeply conservative, if not reactionary.

 

Water Views

At the beginning of The Bostonians, Henry James shows Basil Ransom visiting a cousin in Boston, looking out from a window from which

there was a view of the water; Miss Chancellor having the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which, in the rear, the afternoon sun slants redly, from an horizon indented at empty intervals with wooden spires, the masts of lonely boats, the chimneys of  dirty 'works,' over an expanse of anomalous character, which is too big for a river and too small for a a bay. This view seemed to him very picturesque, though in the gathered dusk little was left of it save a cold yellow streak in the west, a gleam of brown water, and the reflection of the lights that had begun to show themselves in a row of houses, impressive to Ransom in their extreme modernness, which overlooked the same lagoon from a long embankment on the left, constructed of stones roughly piled.

Later, at dinner,

he had another view, through a window where the curtain remained undrawn by her direction (she called his attention to this--it was for his benefit), of the dusky, empty river, spotted with points of light... 

A matter glossed by the hostess's sister:

'That's what they call in Boston being very "thoughtful," Mrs. Luna said, 'giving you the Back Bay (don't you hate that name?) to look at and then taking credit for it.'

 One infers that this takes place in the early 1870s.

In 1872, George Santayana arrived at his mother's house in Boston, where

 They took us into the dining room to show us the "beautiful view" from the back of the house--a great expanse of water, with a low line of nondescript brick and wooden houses marking the opposite bank. It was Bostonian to show us the view first; ...

He gave that view qualified praise:

This view of a vast expanse of water reflecting the sky was unmistakably impressive, especially when the summer sunset lit up the scene, and darkness added to distance made the shabby bank opposite appear inoffensive. Gorgeous these sunsets often were, more gorgeous, good Bostonians believed, than any sunsets anywhere else in the world, and my limited experience does not belie them. The illumination often had a kaleidoscopic quality, with fiery reds and yellows, but at other hours the seasons and aerial effects of the Charles River Basin were not remarkable.

 (Persons and Places)

From the description, Mrs. Santayana's house may have been one of those extremely modern houses to the left of Charles Street; certainly there was an embankment between her house and the river.