In which Augustine takes over my life

The day before Ash Wednesday, Cambridge University Press dropped 400+ pages of copyedited manuscript in my email inbox. The result is that there hasn’t been much break in my spring break. Apart from tracking down two obscure references—a job I’ve outsourced to the relevant contributors—I’ve answered all the queries and reviewed the whole thing yet again. (How am I still finding typos? I’ve read through this thing so many times! Aloud! In an RP accent just for that extra concentration!) The files will be ready to send off on Monday.

The volume is Augustine’s Confessions: A Critical Guide. I had submitted the complete MS back in June of 2024, just before a cybersecurity incident shut down the whole press for several months. Naturally, once they were up and running again, they (or, more accurately, the production teams to whom they outsource this stuff) were eager to get moving as quickly as possible. So the files that had been in limbo for eight months or so now required a ten-day turnaround. The book is due out in July. As you’ll see if you follow the link, it’s priced for libraries, not for actual people. The image above will be the cover image. It’s from the oldest surviving MS of the Confessions, probably from the second half of the sixth century, held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome.

I’m happy with my own contribution, which somehow manages to quote from two hymns and an Amy Grant song.

As I was working on this (truly the most boring kind of work my profession offers), I got an idea. I could do a book of essays on various themes in the Confessions. It wouldn’t be a commentary on the Confessions, exactly: I don’t have a big-picture synoptic key-to-everything take on the work. But I have that piece on grace and providence, I’ve thought through the saving work of Christ (here’s my Costan Lecture on that topic from last fall), and maybe (I mused) I have some other such essays in me.

I opened a new document and jotted down some topics I felt confident I could cover in new and interesting ways. It took maybe sixty seconds to come up with quite a few:

  • ascent

  • atonement (that’s the Costan Lecture, so done already)

  • grace and providence (also done already)

  • family

  • fragmentation and integration

  • friendship

  • sex

  • sacraments

  • knowledge

  • goodness

  • virtue

  • love

  • senses

  • mind

  • time and eternity

  • language

  • light.

Yeah, there’s definitely a book in that, one that would be a blast to write. I’d want to aim at non-specialists as much as possible. I’ve already pitched it to Cambridge, although on reflection maybe I should try to make it a trade book instead.

While I’m at it, why not do a podcast? Let’s make the next year or so All Augustine, All the Time.

Oh, and I’m teaching the Confessions in my Ignatius Seminar in the fall.

Plus I’m leading a quiet day on the Confessions at a friend’s church in Michigan a week from today. I was supposed to be preparing for that this week, but my adventures in copyediting pushed it back.

Yes. All Augustine, All the Time.

As soon as I finish that Scotus book, of course.

Thomas Williams1 Comment