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.