Over the past decade or so, Garry Wills has produced a string of elegant volumes on and/or of Augustine. The most substantial is his translation of the Confessions (New York: Penguin, 2006), which compares well with other new versions and is marred only by the editorial section-headings (“How To Begin?,” “Conforming to a Deforming Society,” “Other Friends,” and so forth) that it throws out like pontoons into the torrent of Augustine's prose. The way to that translation was prepared by a lively “Penguin Life” of the saint (St. Augustine [New York: Penguin, 1999]) and by separately titled, lightly annotated renderings of each of Books 1, 3, 8, and 10. There were also probing chapters on less frequented parts of Augustine's oeuvre in Wills's Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York: Doubleday, 2000). Most recently, in Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Wills has reclaimed Ambrose from the deflationary “revisionists” and re-evaluated his role in Augustine's intellectual development. For students wanting to engage sympathetically but critically with Augustine's writings and persona, as for all who appreciate seeing the best modern scholarship on those subjects filtered through the mind and style of one of America's most robust Catholic historians, Wills's lingering love-affair with Augustine has been a blessing.

It is, therefore, easy to understand why the editors of a new series of “Lives of Great Religious Books,” having handed the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Donald S. Lopez, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison to Martin E. Marty, should have invited the author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and Verdi's Shakespeare to situate Augustine's Confessions in its time and traditions. Whether they or he fully measured the task may, however, be doubted. On the one hand, not much can be known for certain about the genesis, composition and initial uptake of the Confessions, and most of what is known or can be responsibly conjectured was laid out long ago by Pierre Courcelle, in his Recherches sur les “Confessions” de saint Augustin (1950; 2nd [greatly expanded] ed. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1968; only the former cited by Wills) and Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: Antécédents et posterité (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1963; 750 pp.; not mentioned by Wills). On the other hand, scholarship on the sixteen-hundred-year reception of “Augustine (of Hippo)” has burgeoned since the early 1990s, with the Confessions receiving the lion's share of attention. (For a representative survey, see Oxford Historical Guide to the Reception of Augustine [New York, 2013], edited by Karla Pollmann and others.) There is a terrific book to be written on the “life” of Augustine's Confessions, but Wills's falls well short of the promise of its title.

An opening chapter speculates that the Confessions was produced by a “sustained single effort” (10) and adopts James J. O'Donnell's happy hypothesis that it was the fruit of enforced idleness caused by a bout of piles. (If one is going to channel another Augustine scholar, as Wills does O'Donnell, this is an excellent choice. Still, it is almost a relief when even the master himself is said to “miss the point” of Augustine's confession of sins in Book 10 [99].) Next, a chapter on genre insists that “the whole book is one long prayer” (21), a position predictably no more tenable than any other single-genre characterization of the Confessions (cf. 63, 66, 84–5). Subsequent chapters (“The Book's African Days,” “The Book's Ambrose,” “The Book's ‘Conversion,’” “The Book's Baptismal Days”) are not really about “the book” at all but about Augustine. They are mostly a deft mingling of paraphrase and translation of a kind at which Wills excels, seasoned with critical asides that tend to make other scholars look plodding. The masturbatory fantasies of psychiatrists misinterpreting a reference to the youthful Augustine's nakedness at the baths are gleefully dismissed (23–4 on Conf. 2.3.6, registering an important train of biblical allusion). But then Wills seems to overplay his own account of the famous garden scene in Book 8, as Augustine's “struggle to break his addiction to sex” (63). Courcelle, who is also the unacknowledged source for the idea that the elements of a separately drafted “Life of Alypius” could resurface in the Confessions (ibid.), is taken to task for doubting the literal veracity of that scene. Yet Wills himself has no difficulty allowing that Augustine's depictions of his relationship with Ambrose and of a mystical experience shared with his mother at Ostia could be partly fictionalized to match his emergent sense of God's providential design for his life (94). Although he may go too far in having his subject “acknowledge the graces that make his life part of sacred history” (22, my italics)—Augustine typically reserved that epithet for the uniquely authorized narrative of the Bible—Wills's sensitivity to the biblical stylization of Augustine's narrative is one of the strongest features of his book. Nor, in this instance, does he exaggerate Ambrose's part in inculcating Augustine's “typological” style (55–57; a caution apparently ignored in Font of Life). Two further chapters guide the reader helpfully through the last four books of Confessions, to end on a grace-note from Dante's Paradiso, echoing Augustine verbatim (132).

So what of the life of the book after its author? A line at the end of chapter 1 suggests that “since much of the debate during the book's Nachleben has been dealt with in the biography of the book itself, the last chapter can be summary” (16). That, alas, is wishful thinking. Apart from scholarly jousting and fleeting quotations of Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a few other canonical figures, there is next to nothing on the reception of the Confessions in the main body of this slim book, and the fifteen-page final chapter neither breaks new ground nor provides any serious orientation to existing scholarship. A single sentence on Luther and half a paragraph on Erasmus and Colet account for Reformation and Renaissance (no sign of Petrarch on Mont Ventoux!). The Romantics, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, et al. fare no better. Several names and titles are misspelled and there is a clutch of proofreading errors.