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Edited by Professor Marcus Bockmuehl and Bishop Stephen Platten with Nevsky Everett

I am currently reading with much enjoyment a book, recently acquired by our library, Austin Farrer: Oxford Warden,Scholar, Preacher, edited by Professor Marcus Bockmuehl and Bishop Stephen Platten with Nevsky Everett. SCM Press 2020. I was privileged to be tutored by Farrer for Philosophy of Religion in 1961. 

The first part of the book is a collection of essays about Farrer’s work in Philosophy, Biblical studies and Christian Theology, his remarkable preaching, his friendship with C.S.Lewis, and his contribution when Warden of Keble College. The second part of this book contains Farrer’s previously unpublished lectures delivered in America in 1966. Farrer’s writing is thoughtful, witty and beautifully expressed. A former archbishop of Canterbury described him as the twentieth century’s ‘subtlest and most eloquent Anglican thinker’.

By Gerald O’Collins, SJ

This is a curious little book, and that for at least two, somewhat contradictory, reasons. St Augustine of Hippo is such a towering figure in the history of Christianity, about whom such a wealth of material has been written, that it would be easy to mistake this slender volume for one of those slightly whimsical exercises in scholarly barrel-scraping that accompany all such figures. It is rather a shock therefore for those who have already prepared a place in their downstairs bathrooms for St Augustine on the Seabirds of North Africa or St Augustine on Late Antique Bear-baiting, to discover that the subject of the book is in fact St Augustine on the central mystery of the Christian faith: the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. What? Are there not already great shelves groaning with the weight of tomes devoted to this very subject? Apparently not. And herein lies the source of the book’s initial curiosity: that it does not exist already. As O’Collins puts it “very little attention has been directed to what Augustine preached and wrote about the rising of Christ himself and the questions it raises”. This is curious indeed. And yet to concede this point is immediately to draw attention to a second, rather more unfortunate, curiosity of this book. For if, as its preface claims, the purpose of the book is nothing less than to “fill that important gap” in Augustinian scholarship which O’Collins has just identified, we cannot help but register our surprise, not to say disappointment, that this much-vaunted “gap” turns out to be a mere 128 pages wide. Indeed, we begin to wonder whether the book’s curious lack of predecessors really is that curious after all.

Alas, for those who do venture inside the book’s rather diminutive spine, its contents prove to be something of a barrel-scraping exercise after all. This its author all but concedes in its opening sentences:

            Augustine never wrote a treatise on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Hence this chapter [for which read this book] has no principal source but must draw on various works: Answer to Faustus a Manichean, The City of God, Expositions on the Psalms, Homilies on the Gospel of John,                                                 Letters, Sermons, and The Trinity.

The remaining 127 pages are given over to O’Collins gathering up these fragments in the workmanlike manner that will be familiar to readers of his other books. It does not bode well for the interest of this material, however, that a rather earnest excursus on Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is required to reach the lordly sum of 128 pages. Nor would you think it possible that a book of such proportions would repeat itself, and yet on at least three separate occasions O’Collins takes the Bishop of Hippo to task for suggesting that the disciples touched the body of the risen Jesus when in fact the emphasis of the resurrection appearances is on sight, an observation that is not without interest but hardly worth repeating twice over.

In the end perhaps the greatest curiosity of this book is the somewhat heretical thought it leaves in its readers’ minds — that just possibly the great St Augustine of Hippo did not have that much of interest to say about the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

By William Fitzgerald

Latin is a beautiful language but very different from English. One really important difference is the case system. The meaning of words in a sentence does not depend on their position but on their case, so words can be positioned anywhere without losing their meaning. This can mean that reading Latin, especially Latin poetry, is a bit like doing a jigsaw, piecing the words together into a coherent English meaning. That can be very frustrating but in this marvellous book Fitzgerald (Professor of Latin at Kings College, London) shows how this freedom to position words wherever they are most effective actually enriches the poem allowing a far greater interplay between the words in a stanza and a more subtle and richer development of meaning than we can achieve in English.

At the same time he brings out the differences in personality between the different poets: the well known Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid are there but also the lesser read but equally good Lucretius, Propertius and Lucan. Their poetry is affected by the changing politics of their time; Horace and Virgil experienced the Civil War as young men and their poetry expresses relief that the war is over. Ovid offended Augustus and ended his life in exile while Lucan, after a glorious flowering, was forced by Nero to commit suicide at twenty five. There are surprises. Catullus’ poetry can be stunningly beautiful, deeply sensitive about love and feelings; or it can be mocking, sarcastic and on some occasions positively obscene.

As the title tells us the book is intended for those with little or no Latin. All poems are given in the original but with excellent translations. It is actually such a good book that even those with reasonably good Latin will enjoy it. It is clearly written, always entertaining, deeply informative and makes one want to get back to reading Latin again. How I wish Professor Fitzgerald would write on How to Read Latin Prose to open up some of the wonderful prose writers of the Latin world, too.