August 28 -- Feast of Saint Augustine of Hippo

This Saint Augustine (there are a few) stands out, even in the kennel of the Big Dogs. He was a brilliant philosopher, a provocative education theorist though a lousy teacher, and he has a mixed record as a family member, but he was repentant for the latter at least.

Confessions, his most famous book, is only a misnomer to modern readers. It means 'a profession of faith.' Of course, to make it more confusing (to modern readers), Augustine mentions a few of his moral lapses and regrets, but that only whets the appetite for many of us. You stole some pears? And you just threw them away without eating them? To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "Run for the hills, John Dillinger. Here come the cops!" True, he did offer some more substantial sins later, but in such a cerebral way that they just fail to titillate.

Okay, here are some confessions in the modern sense about this post.

1. I've been writing and deleting for about forty-five minutes. I ramble on with too many details and no thread or theme. That's not unusual for me, but there's so much info about him that the post would be interminable. So, I keep deleting and starting over.

2. I am only about halfway through Garry Wills' biography of Augustine, so I don't even know that I would hit the best things about him.

3. He's an easy target on the love-and-marriage thing, but to be fair, the Manicheans had a different code and the Platonists and Ciceronians screwed up his views. Their ideas of sexual continence were pretty whack. He was aspiring to chastity before he even became Christian, but his recommendations for others were still too demanding.

4. There's far more to this guy (I haven't even mentioned City of God) than I can cover. Whole courses are taught on him, so one blog post will hardly do him justice.

5. The kids in the pear stealing picture might look a little more European than North African, but remember that Carthage was a Phoenician settlement, taken over by the Greeks, then the Romans. Since it was pre-Arab conquest, the picture is probably pretty good. The woman holding Young Augustine's hand is his mom, Saint Monica, who is bathed in light while he's in the shadows. I have no idea what's down with Augustine and the Devil.

6. I resisted the opportunity to exploit the gap between his education theories and his classroom practice. He is the patron of brewers, but not schoolteachers, so I won't belabor the point.