Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 90:358 (Apr 1933)
Article: Saint Augustine
Author: Stewart Means

BSac 90:358 (Apr 1933) p. 185

Saint Augustine

Stewart Means

(Saint Augustine, Par Louis Bertrand)

Saint Augustine has been dead nearly fifteen centuries. In that long period of time one would think a biography of so great a man would have been produced, a biography too which would take its place as the final authority on the subject. There are some reasons connected with the subject itself however, which will modify our surprise and help explain this apparently obscure situation.

Biography itself, as it is understood today, the presentation, not merely of the circumstances and history of the man, but his inner life, his personal qualities, his spiritual temper, the very soul of him in fact, is really a modern literary product. The first great biography, and perhaps the greatest of them all, is not a century and a half old.

The secret of this new and great type of literature, which is one of the most striking and distinguishing characteristics of modern life, lies in the new and vivid self-consciousness and deep sense of personality which separates the ancient from the modern world. Like portrait painting, to which it is so closely akin that one can say they are but two forms of the same thing, biography has failed or succeeded not by virtue of knowledge or skill, but by something more intimate and subtle, by a certain spiritual insight and sympathy, a feeling hidden from the eye, by which one soul has felt and understood another.

Great technical skill is not always necessary for the expression of this spiritual understanding and intimacy. The greatest literary geniuses and the greatest artists are not always the most successful biographers or portrait painters. But in those rare cases in which we have the qualities combined we have the supreme thing, the perfect revelation of the man which stands for all time, as Holbein’s Erasmus or Lenbach’s Bismark. Sometimes the contrast is so extraordinary between the painter and his subject that it seems as if it were impossible for the former to enter into the

BSac 90:358 (Apr 1933) p. 186

soul of his sitter and the result in this case leads us into the baffling region of psychology which is still so largely an unknown land.

No two men could seem to be more widely different than Carlyle and Whistler, yet the unfinished study of Carlyle by the latter reveals, in some respects, the inner man even better than the finished portrait. In that incomplete sketch we see, as in the soul of the man himself, the whole spirit of the 19th century, its wild revolt, its passionate hope, its magnificent energy, its infinite sadness and its mournful despair. In those deep sunken eyes lies the intolerable melancholy, the ever changing hu...