True Fire

'Spellbinding, elegant, and urgent . . . Held me from the first moment to the last' Katherine Rundell


The great quest of Augustine's life was for truth. This was his true fire.


Today, we are still 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 understanding of the self, his theory of 'Just War', his attitudes to sex and the body, his conception of God. Augustine wrote the world's first autobiography, the first soliloquy, and he gave us the concept of Original Sin. He was both a wily pragmatist and an absolutist, a hero and a warning. He lived through an age of catastrophe, 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. Van Es's Augustine speaks to a twenty-first-century sense of crisis: climate change, mass migration, viral media, and the question of what we should believe and why. This is biography at its most original.