Augustine’s Late Style

This essay makes three points. First, in his work Augustine sought to craft something like what Theodor Adorno called a “late style”—a style achieved after maturity has been realized, when a thinker or artist finds their work frustrated by the received cultural expectations, and they seek to overcome those expectations. So understood, a “late style” expresses both frustration and hope. However, second, Augustine’s late style differs from Adorno’s Romantic aesthetics, in both content and form, and usefully illuminates his overall project: It explains his repeated troubling of his own acts of writing and his culture’s practices of reading, and what reading was expected to produce in its practitioners. Across his whole career he struggled, increasingly self-consciously, against his culture’s formal expectations about authoritative teachings, and its material fantasy of a straightforwardly successful life. He attempted instead to communicate both his own flawed and ongoing path, and the inevitable difficulty and frustrations of post-lapsarian life, as he understood the Christian faith to depict it. The final manifestation of his late style is found in the City of God, where it produces a mode of writing, and a picture of the wayfaring Christian, capable of both skeptical critique, confessional affirmation, lively compassion, and humble gratitude. Third, recognizing and appreciating Augustine’s late style can provoke us to our benefit, in facing the challenges of religious life today, both as individuals and as people seeking to live together for the common good.