The series “Mapping the Tradition,” for which Paul Rorem, the author of St. Augustine, His Confessions and His Influence serves as an adviser, is an attempt to give a succinct introduction to key authors and texts in the Christian tradition. Far more than an attempt to assign Augustine his obvious place, Rorem's book is the fruit of the author's teaching during his 27-year tenure as the Benjamin B. Warfield Professor of Medieval Church History at Princeton Theological Seminary, a position from which he retired in 2021.

Rorem is known to medieval scholars as the author of painstakingly researched works that, despite their attention to detail, never lose the forest for the trees. Eriugena's Commentary on the Dionysian “Celestial Hierarchy” (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), for example, is a fine attempt to get at the intricacies of Eriugena's Latin commentary on Dionysius’ complex Greek text, which Eriugena's biographer Maïeul Cappuyns called an important panel of the triptych that makes up his entire oeuvre. Hugh of Saint Victor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) is a broad introduction to this major twelfth-century thinker in the valuable Great Medieval Thinkers series. Rorem's Dionysian affinity also bore fruit in an earlier title in the “Mapping the Tradition” series, his The Dionysian Mystical Theology from 2015. The latter titles both foreground Rorem's abilities as a teacher.

Augustine may not be as esoteric as Dionysius, but his accessibility is deceptive insofar as it can breathe an easy familiarity. Who in the area of church history, religious studies, and even beyond would confess not to know the Confessions? For whom is it not a favorite religious text? We are inclined to think that we know Augustine inside out, since his work presents itself to us as an intimate self-portrait. But is it really? For, what do we actually know about Augustine? And what do we need to know today? It is in the constellation of these and similar questions that Rorem tries to find room to present Augustine to us afresh: as a Christian convert and yet a man from distant antiquity. Rorem's smooth text betrays a density of thought that stems from years of teaching and of honing and carefully calibrating his ideas, and the result is all the richer for it. This is a book to be read slowly so as to allow the reader to reflect on Augustine anew. It is a book both for novices to the study of Christianity and seasoned connoisseurs of Confessions, for whom Rorem's comments can be a real delight.

The book has two parts. In the first Rorem walks us through Confessions, organizing his thoughts around themes that coincide with the work's 13 books. Insofar as they avoid, or collapse, the oft-assumed division between an outer and an inner story of Augustine's life-journey, these headings are quite accurate and ingenious: 1. Beginnings; 2. Sin; 3. Monica; 4. Manichees; 5. Ambrose; 6. Donatists? 7. Platonists. 8. Decisions; 9. Conclusions; 10. The Inner Life; Pelagius. 11. Creation in Time. 12. Receiving the Word; 13. Creation and Goal. Rorem's narrative pattern unfolds from them, with sin (book 2) focused on the pear-theft story and Ambrose (book 5) focused on Augustine's embrace of scripture through Ambrose's allegories. I want to cheer Rorem on for his choice to see (anti-)Donatist influence in book 6, for which he could have drawn on Karl Morrison's Conversion and Text (Charlottesville, 1992), 8–14. In the same way as Rorem avoids separating Augustine's outward journey from his inward one, so he avoids separating the biographical (1–9) from the exegetical books (11–13). On the whole, Rorem's account is clear and comprehensive, theologically balanced, and historically accurate. Only occasionally does he give in to a schematic interpretation, as when he follows Robert Crouse (31) in seeing Augustine's journey as going from outward to inward to upward with reference to Enarr. In Ps. 145,2, which to my knowledge goes back to Gilson, Introduction à l’étude de S. Augustin, 24. This schema does no harm but also does not shed much light, which laying out the chiasmic pattern of books 1–9 on p. 18 helpfully does. Rorem's connection on pp. 53–54 between Confessions and City of God makes for a short but meaningful segue to the book's second part.

The book's second part on “Augustine's Influence” puts Rorem's capacious command of the medieval tradition on display. But the second part does not hang together as well as the first, since it is not as neatly tied to Confessions whose fame really took off after the Middle Ages. Dealing with Augustine's broad medieval influence, the second part's chapters are a somewhat artificial structure to present this material, even though they nicely correspond to those in the first part: 1. Genre and Biography; 2. Original Sin; 3. Saint Monica; 4. Medieval Manichees; 5. Augustinian Communities; 6. Neo-Donatists? 7. Platonism; 8. Conversion; 9. Mysticism; 10. Introspection: Descartes and Petrarch; 11. Creation in Time; 12. Scripture; 13. The Trinity. Chapter 5 touches on Augustine's influence on later medieval monastic life (64–67), while chapter 6 gives us an overview of medieval heresies (67–69). Chapter 7 returns to the exterior-interior-superior motif from p. 31 by linking it to Bonaventure (72). The medieval Bonaventure could also have been treated in chapter 9 on mysticism, where he is briefly mentioned but three medieval women (Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Catherine of Siena) take pride of place. I quite like the mention of Petrarch in chapter 10, who quotes Conf. 10.8.15 at the summit of the Mont Ventoux, but it is precisely the absence of such precise literary connections that makes the book's second part generally less compelling. The mention of Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon in chapter 12 is fine, but, of course, that book has a more organic connection with Augustine's On Christian Doctrine than with Confessions. Rorem ends with a useful 14th chapter on Grace, Election, and Predestination (86–96) in which he gives us a brief treatment of Augustine's theology of grace, this time going up through the seventeenth century.