Ignatius Press has been for some time promoting this new film based on the life of St. Augustine. I saw it the other night at one of the public showings that Christian groups are encouraged to sponsor, and while the rest of the largely church-going and Catholic-student-group audience seemed appreciative, including a teenager I know with fairly picky taste, I must confess that I thought it was pretty bad.
The film was originally done in Italian, along the lines of a mini-series, and while the dubbing is occasionally distracting, probably a bigger problem for its American screen version is the editing, which becomes a bit jarring as the film very rapidly features excerpts from post-Confessions episodes—ones dealing with the Donatist controversy and the Vandal siege of Hippo—that were obviously much more carefully developed as full episodes. The casting and acting seem decent enough, but they cannot overcome the problems with the script, which is just corny and insubstantial at times.
This is related to a problem that will drive anyone who has read the Confessions to distraction: the script changes Augustine’s story quite a bit. What the screenwriters have done is to put an element of St. Ambrose’s story, his conflict with the Arian-favoring imperial family over the church’s ownership of a basilica, into the heart of Augustine’s. Why does Augustine, formerly a Manichaean and then a Neo-Platonist, convert? In the Confessions, Augustine becomes convinced by the arguments of Bishop Ambrose and others, as well as by his own reading of the Scriptures, that the Catholic position is correct, that the Christian faith is true, but for reasons not entirely clear to him he does not convert, does not get baptized. He dallies, hesitates. It is only after several acquaintances convert and become monks and nuns, and especially after he reads the Athanasisus’ (somewhat terrifying) Life of St. Antony, that he has his famous struggle in the garden and hears a voice saying take up and read.
In Restless Heart the garden struggle takes place after something else altogether, namely, Augustine’s having witnessed an attack upon Ambrose’s crowd of non-violent resisters, who are defending the Catholic ownership of the basilica, an attack ordered by the Imperial family. You see, in this film “based” on the life of Augustine, he goes to Milan to be made “court orator” for the emperor, specifically charged with the task of attacking Ambrose, of being a sort of scourge-to-the-Christians in the sphere of intellectual debate. Whereas in actual life, he and his other rhetoric-specialist friends were merely hoping to be noticed by and given certain unspecified favors by the emperor or someone else high up. And I’m not sure that Augustine, even as a Manichaean, ever publicly argued against Christianity. Anyhow, in the film, he’s supposed to provide the speech that will justify the attack on the basilica crowd, and appalled by the way some of the hymn-singing pacifist protestors were cut down by the troops, he can’t do it and is thrust into the turmoil of a (trippy, drawn-out, and wordless) spiritual experience that culminates in the “take up and read” incident.
We thus lose almost all the arguments that led up to this, indeed we are given the false impression that he was utterly unfamiliar with the Scriptures. The doctrinal content of his conversion struggle, including all his later meditation upon the non-intellectual reasons of his heart, is reduced to something visual. To something sentimental. The cinematic logic is: a) you can see that Ambrose is a good guy, b) you can see, and so can Augustine, that soldiers killing non-resisting protestors is really bad, and c) Ambrose says something somewhere about “love being all”–therefore, Augustine decides to follow Jesus.
I wouldn’t complain so much if we had gained something from this loose adaptation, say, a presentation of a Saul-like intellectual enemy of the Christians albeit one made to half-fit the name and life of Augustine. Say, some equivalent of what the writers of Troy did with Achilles, and Briseis too. But no, the script is too poorly written pull off anything along those lines. We don’t gain anything in dramatic and character exposition for the loss of basic biographical accuracy.
The script also brings Augustine’s African mistress, Khalida, into the story, which is a perfectly fine thing to do, and as far as I know completely accurate. It is weird when you read the Confessions and finally figure out that this aspect of his life is being shoved into the background. It is likely the screen-writers have taken the best guesses about the full story as learned from biographers like Peter Brown. But, in truth, we gain little. Monica’s character gets developed more, and the actress who plays Khalida pleases us with her serene beauty, but that’s it. The screenwriters don’t do much with the Khalida-Augustine story other than to both humanize him (Look, he has a “wife” and kid!)and simplify his waywardness for contemporary audiences.
So skip the film and take up and read. The F.J. Sheed translation of the Confessions is the best one. And believe it or not, Garry Wills has some good little studies on some of the books. All agree that the Brown biography is great, but you want to read Augustine on his life first.
October 25th, 2012 | 4:45 am
I’m sorry to hear the movie was so dissapointing. I would think Confessions would be a tough movie to make, not terribly cinematic. It seems to me a more cinematic treatment of Augustine would be his City of God, since it was in response to the sack of Rome. And, I seem to recall, Augustine’s place of residence in Hippo was being sacked when he was on his death bed.
A movie that juxtaposes the shalom of Augustine’s account of the City of God against the violence and pillaging taking place in the Citry of Man during Augustine’s period of writing would be both very Epic and yet introspective.
October 25th, 2012 | 7:59 am
Pseudoplotinus, the mini-series did try to do that with the last episode, and inserts the elder Augustine’s Vandals-at-the-gates reflections throughout, but from the fragments of this episode we’re given from the film, it seems mainly just visually striking, albeit in a B-level way–the weak dramatic conflict is that Augustine wants to cut a peace deal giving the city to the Vandals, whereas the governor pins his (vain) hopes on the Roman fleet coming to the rescue.
There is an interesting scene after Hippo falls where the Vandal king saves Augustine’s books from the fire–lots of historically interesting tidbits like this throughout, although, alas, given the treatment of the Confessions you’re not always sure you can trust them. And maybe, since it is the only film I’ve ever seen that mentions the non-pseudo Plontinus, you might still want to see it. Just be prepared for a C-minus script.
October 25th, 2012 | 9:13 am
Thanks for writing this Carl; from your description of the movie, I think I would make the same criticisms.
To sympathize with the scriptwriter for a moment, I agree with Pseudo that it would be very difficult to do do a good film version of Augustine’s life, much more the “Confessions.” I had difficulty following the basic storyline of the book when I first read it, because there are so many philosophical reflections and moments of prayer and introspection. To work as a movie I think it almost would have to be written from Augustine’s first person perspective as narrator.
A good place to start if the screenwriter had wanted to sort all the threads of Augustine’s life out would be Vernon Bourke’s “Augustine’s Quest of Wisdom.” It’s one of my favorite books. Bourke tells the story of Augustine’s life not solely based on evidence from “Confessions,” but from all of the texts where clues about his life are given; especially important in that regard are the “Retractiones.” And Bourke really nails what you described about Augustine, Carl- his conversion of the head followed by his conversion of the heart in the garden.
BTW- Did they make a big deal out of Monica’s death at Ostia? It was a big deal to Augustine
October 25th, 2012 | 10:50 am
Great use of “toll et lege” Carl.
CJ, you’re absolutely spot-on with the two-part, two-stage conversion: first of the mind, then the heart. It’s astounding how often people, including scholars (e.g., Chad Pecknold) miss it; their analyses are thus truncated and misleading. To add to the point: to really understand Book VIII, I would suggest that one go back to Confessions III, 4 (or is it 5?) to understand 19-year old Augustine’s own initial understanding of what “conversion” entailed for him. This rather definite (and questionable) understanding set his intellectual-and-existential agenda.
While it’s true that one should not just use the Confessions to understand and tell Augustine’s “life”, it provides essential architecture and event, I would argue. By “architecture,” I mean that his notion of what he’s doing — which we blithely call “autobiography” — is rather theo-centric, i.e., his story is really God’s story, with, I would argue, Monica the second most important agent in his life’s story.)
A bit more humanly speaking, perhaps the most essential characteristic of the way Augustine tells his life-story in the Confessions is its tunc-et-nunc structure, that is, how he was then (tunc), as he now (now) can discern its truth, because he’s come to the light of Christ. It would take a good scriptwriter to reproduce this, or come up with some approximation; if it’s not reproduced, however, then one only has the then-version of the story, without the deeper retrospect. And that story is too unilinear, or at least it misses what is characteristic about Augustine’s theological perspective (theocentric and retrospective-in-the light of Christ).
Thanks for the post, Carl.
October 25th, 2012 | 11:56 am
Firstly Carl, that so called Plotinus is a complete hack! Everyone knows who the true Pseudoplotinus is.
More seriously, a book I have found to be particularly luminous on Augustine is Brian Stock’s “Augustine the Reader”:
http://www.amazon.com/Augustine-Reader-Meditation-Self-Knowledge-Interpretation/dp/0674052773/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351183679&sr=8-1&keywords=Augustine+the+reader
It’s a very high end literary critical treatment of Augustine’s approach to religious formation through reading and interpretation.
Thanks to Paul Seaton for his thoughtful post above. I was trying to think of any movie that has been done in the past that had successfully conveyed the sort of inner process that Augustine’s story in confessions records.
For the life of me I can only think of one, and it only barely resembles Confessions. It’s about Dostoyevsky called the Gambler. Very worth seeing. It uses the story around his writing of the short story The Gambler to unveil the layers of complexity to the writer himself. Michael Gambon plays the Russian writer:
http://www.amazon.com/Gambler-Michael-Gambon/dp/B00005Y6Y4/ref=sr_1_11?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1351184021&sr=1-11&keywords=The+Gambler
October 25th, 2012 | 12:02 pm
Thanks for the kudos Paul, and for pointing out the relevant passages in the Confessions. I wanted to share a link about one thing that you mentioned:
“This rather definite (and questionable) understanding set [Augustine's] intellectual-and-existential agenda.”
I agree that it is questionable whether the head and heart can separately be converted, because I’m not sure how separate they really are. But as you say, on the matter of interpretation it’s certainly the way Augustine tells us it happened in his writings. The link I wanted to share is to a blog by Edward Feser, who is great on philosophy of mind. He converted to Catholicism a few years ago, and argues in this post that his conversion and conversion to Christianity in general is always intellectual in some respect:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html#more
October 25th, 2012 | 1:18 pm
Thanks, CJ. I’ll check out the link. What I had in mind was focused on something else in the adolescent Augustine’s understanding of what conversion is and entails. He thought he had to sever all ties or links with the saeculum; in Book VIII sexual attachment was the last link he had to break (others had been love of honor, fame, and $). Among other consequences, chastity within marriage therefore becomes necessarily 2nd-class, an incomplete conversion. One can question that. Gotta go …
October 25th, 2012 | 5:40 pm
Has anybody ever seen Roberto Rossellini’s TV movie about Augustine? Or for that matter his movies on Descartes, Pascal, etc.?
If so, any comments? Criterion Collection has released some of them, but I’m hesitant to indulge.
October 25th, 2012 | 9:29 pm
I enjoyed Pascal. But…we have a goal to watch all of Rossellini’s films. I didn’t know about Augustine! We’ll definitely be watching that. Netflix has a large number of Rossellini films.
October 25th, 2012 | 10:06 pm
Roberto Rossellini’s movie “Flowers of St. Francis” is magnificent.
October 25th, 2012 | 11:41 pm
So I will get Pascal and St. Francis on Netflix. From what I gather from googling, Augustine of Hippo is not available, but some interesting things are said about it here.
http://books.google.com/books?id=YbB9zKvpS88C&pg=PA311&lpg=PA311&dq=saint+augustine+roberto+rossellini&source=bl&ots=5T-ec9uejX&sig=QpSqVUkle3a43T5A8konFirVxxg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FhCKUM6mOqai2gWVlYHYBw&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=saint%20augustine%20roberto%20rossellini&f=false
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