True Fire

The Costa Prize Book of the Year–winning biographer gives us a St. Augustine for our time: fresh, urgent, tackling big questions about faith and sin, sex, redemption, just war, and the fiery fall of Rome.

Augustine is a Berber, newly arrived in Italy from North Africa, but he feels entirely Roman. He moves confidently through the marble-columned halls of palaces. Sometimes he worries that the success he craves—applause, wealth, the esteem of clever people—may not be worth it. He works obsessively, cramped by anxiety. Something buried holds him back. How should he live?

Bart van Es’s thrillingly original account of Saint Augustine’s life carries us from his youth and conversion to Christianity to his fiery denunciations of original sin in a fallen world. How did this young man, drunk on word play, end up as one of the most formative Christian thinkers of all time? How did the sensitive, intimate author of Confessions come to write City of God?

The great quest of Augustine’s life was for truth. This was his true fire. But the truth he discovered in the Bible was terrifying, and in response he demanded a radical change in society: nothing less than a transformation of human consciousness. We are the product of Augustine’s thinking, only most of us don’t know it. Our world is shaped by his ideas on time and language, his conception of the self, his theory of ‘Just War’, his attitudes to sex and understanding of God. He was both a wily pragmatist and an absolutist, a hero and a warning. He lived through an age of crisis, the fall of the Roman Empire, and his writing speaks to a future that is almost upon us.

Inhabiting the four places that changed him–Milan, Cassiciacum, Ostia and Hippo - True Fire invites us to see Augustine anew. Groundbreaking in its approach to the telling of a life, True Fire captures the anguish of a young man in crisis seeking truth and redemption. It speaks with a burning intensity to our reckless, unrooted times.