published on July 30, 2025

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¡±¡ªa 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.