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The Next Life of Augustine

Augustine entered the afterlife on 28 August 430. The most authoritative modern interpreter of Augustine's life quotes and renders the deathbed scene thus:

"'In the midst of these evils, he was comforted by the saying of a certain wise man: "He is no great man who thinks it a great thing that sticks and stones should fall, and that men, who must die, should die."'
"The 'certain wise man', of course, is none other than Plotinus. Augustine, the Catholic bishop, will retire to his deathbed with these words of a proud pagan sage."

Those are the last words of the penultimate chapter of Peter Brown's magisterial biography.1 This book, now nearly thirty years old, has exercised a huge dominion over the field of Anglophone Augustinian studies even in an age when those studies have exploded and flourished as never before. When an Anglophone reader begins to read Augustine, the first text read is still likely to be the Confessions, and I would surmise......

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Approximate Word Count: 19635
Approximate Pages: 79 (250 words per double-spaced page)

Some common words in this essay are:

• [augustine]
• [augustines]
• [life]
• [narrative]
• [christian]
• [time]
• [book]
• [confessions]
• [years]
• [browns]
• [city]
• [christianity]
• [books]
• [conversion]
• [work]

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