The Confessions

I bought this edition because I heard great things about the translation. It is wonderful indeed. Philip Burton successfully brings the Confessions into dialogue with the modern reader without sacrificing the beauty of Augustine's latin prose.However, as another reviewer comments above, the introduction to this edition by Robin Lane Fox is absolutely ridiculous. I say this not because he is an atheist; atheists are perfectly capable of talking about the relevance of this work for modern readers without recourse to Christian categories of thought, of course. Instead, I say that it is ridiculous because Robin Lane Fox uses his introduction as an excuse to blurt out his personal judgements on the life of Augustine and of Christians in an arbitrary (and rather ignorant) manner. As an example, consider the following extract:"More than any Neoplatonism, the two senses of 'confession' are the overriding unity to the book: confession of sin and praises, like these ones, of God. As for 'what I still am', the answer turns out to be someone still prone to entirely healthy and admirable pleasures which he represses in the name of sin (Book 10), and a meditator on the book of Genesis who has not the slightest clue of its origin and history and the evolutionary truth about the world (Books 11-13)".We are faced in this introduction with only two possibilities: either Robin Lane Fox is completely unacquainted with the Catholic interpretation of the book of Genesis (let alone that of other Christian denominations which agree with Catholics about this), or he is writing in bad faith. If the former, one cannot understand how it is that he was chosen to write this introduction to the Confessions, ignorant as he would be of their contents; and if the latter, one cannot understand how it is that someone so overtly hostile to Christianity has dedicated so much of his time and life to what, in the end, he utterly detests. That I'll leave for psychoanalysts to judge.