["St. Augustine"] stands out above its predecessors both in beauty of style and significance of thought. A popular biography only in being easy and delightful to read, Miss West's flexible and trenchant style here wholly at her command, mingling wit and eloquence without disharmony, her book is also a keen analysis of the character and meaning of one of the world's greatest men. Here with a subject worthy of her steel, Miss West has risen above her lesser self, somewhat too generous of casual impressions, and has given us a volume rich in reflection as well as daringly alive in treatment. Augustine stands before us almost a contemporary, a tortured spirit, fellow with Tolstoy, Lawrence, Proust, and Joyce, yet at the same time a citizen of the dying Roman Empire when under the strokes of Goth and Vandal and the weight of its own decrepitude an age-old civilization was breaking up much as Western civilization seems to many to be breaking up today.
Miss West's volume begins appropriately with a letter from Bishop Cyprian of Carthage to a Roman official in which the Christian attributes the manifest decline of civilization to the weakening of the forces of nature…. It is against this background of a failing world that the portrait of Augustine is limned, its exponent and interpreter…. The sack of Rome by the Goths which broke the aged heart of Saint Jerome aroused in Augustine a fiery exultation and inspired "The City of God," a work which Miss West, while applauding its genius, fearlessly recognizes as "a shocking and barbarous book." Shocking and barbarous Augustine himself often appears in her work, in his arrogance and tactlessness and in his cruel persecution of heretics, but the arrogance and tactlessness arise out of timidity, and his heresy hunting out of an anguished need for an infallible other-worldly religion. Miss West, it is true, speaks of him in several places as "a lion," but the picture which she draws is not at all leonine. It is that of a poet-philosopher, sick at heart over the intrinsic vileness of mankind and seeking a great cleansing….
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