Worst Resolution Ever

In what may well prove to be the worst New Year's resolution ever, I have decided to read through St. Augustine's massive City of God.  I am torn, honestly, between excitement and dread.

It is one of the masterpieces of early Christian theology, a book with long and continuing influence.  I admire Augustine; he is easily my favorite among the Church Fathers, and a terrific Latin stylist.  It is actually exciting to read his sermons and pretend you are preaching them, at least if you're a complete preaching nerd.

But the City of God is not a sermon.  It is big and dense and, frankly, likely to get pretty boring in places.  Like most modern people, I have a comically short attention span -- measurable in seconds, these days, more than minutes or hours or days.  Attention spans have been deteriorating for a while:   Tolstoy wrote War and Peace; Hemingway, a generation later, wrote novels a tenth as long.  Today, we have compressed our thoughts to 140 characters or six seconds of video.  There may never be another Paradise Lost, because we live in an age of haiku.

The good news is that, for all its massive weight, the City of God is divided up into many small, manageable morsels.  It consists of 22 "books," each divided into 30-50 or so "chapters."  My plan is to take it a chapter or two at a time, reading in English and occasionally checking the Latin, following up on the topical references and literary allusions, and then jot down a few notes.

I expect to spend about a year breaking the book into small, manageable morsels, and taking time to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest" them, as the old collect for Advent 2 says of the Scriptures.  I'll feel free to chase some rabbits here and there, trying to figure out what a 5th-century theological meditation on the sack of Rome has to offer 21st-century Americans.  The result won't be a Cliff's Notes guide to the book, and it most certainly won't be an academic commentary.  It will be more a personal reflection, a few talking points for conversation with people smarter than I am, and the rough material for some later and more rigorous study.

Really, all I want to do is finish the thing.

So far as English editions go, there aren't all that many to choose from.  My plan is to use the 1998 translation by R.W. Dyson, published in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series.  Unfortunately, the copy I ordered from Alibris has been delivered to an old address, so at the moment I am stuck with the old and fusty Marcus Dods version.  I don't like it, and will swap it out as soon as possible.

I'll supplement this with the Latin original, available online at the incredible Augustini Omnia Opera, an Italian website that I simply cannot recommend highly enough.  It offers many Augustine resources, including his entire works in Latin and Italian.  They aren't necesarily the most up-to-date critical editions, but ... come on.  It's a magnificent resource.  In a perfect world, I'd be using the seven-volume Loeb Classical Library bilingual edition, supplemented with the incomplete P.G. Walsh edition, with commentary.  Sadly, those are well beyond my modest preacher's book allowance.

Anyway, that's the plan.  We'll see if it works out, or if instead I get distracted by the mundane details of my daily life and this blog is left unattended for months at a time.  That is not by any means impossible.  But spero meliora and all that.

And, finally, this: I'd love it if you were to join me.  Pick up your own copy (and a highlighter, and some pencils for marking the margins) and read along.  Share your own thoughts, respond to mine, raise your own questions or help to answer mine.  We can have some fun with this.