An author’s affinity for his sainted subject

At the same time Garry Wills’ “Saint Augustine’s Sin” hit bookstore shelves, he also put out the bracingly controversial “ ‘Negro President’: Jefferson and the Slave Power.” Perhaps the prolific author of a concise biography of Augustine and two previous partial translations in a planned series on the works of the 5th century Bishop of Hippo is moved by a certain solidarity with his subject, also a prodigy of literary output with more than 100 titles to his credit.

In any case, Wills’ empathy with and affinity for Augustine, who escaped his provincial base in North Africa for only four short though crucial years in or near Rome, shines through every well-wrought line of this slim book.

“Saint Augustine’s Sin” is a new translation, along with notes and commentary, of Book Two of Augustine’s 13-volume “Confessions” -- or as Wills prefers to call it, “The Testimony,” for the original meaning of the Latin word confessiones.

The new book’s virtues are twofold: He renders Augustine’s famous and influential text in direct language with all the spirited wordplay and poetic strength intact, bringing a matching rhetorical brio to the task; the resulting verbal flashes provide new insight into the working of Augustine’s mind.

For example, when Augustine recalls his parents’ worldly ambitions for him, Wills notes that Augustine puns on the similar-sounding Latin words, disertus and desertus. “His father wants him to be verbally deft; so he turns a verbal trick on him ... ‘so long as I shall be verbally fertile-futile....’ ” (Granted, a reader has to like this sort of game; I do.) Language, however, is but means to an end. Wills’ ultimate goal, captured in the title, is to show the true genesis and structure of Augustine’s concept of sin -- and in passing, to demolish once and for all the assumption that “Augustine + sin = sex.”

In Book Two, Augustine describes with self-deprecating humor his life from 16 to 30. Though he took a mistress during that period, in recollection his sense of transgression isn’t focused on the sexual urge. What haunts him most is a prank.

Short on tuition, he’d come home from studies to live with the parents. (Does this sound like a recipe for trouble, handed down the ages?) With pals, Augustine colludes in an act of petty vandalism: They steal and destroy pears from a neighbor’s orchard. It’s through the parsing of this motiveless crime that he uncovers the lure of nothingness that prompts man’s free choice to abase his nature.

In places, Wills’ analysis feels labored. But elsewhere ‘ah ha’ moments abound, as in the “catalog of beauty some sins pretend to.” Addressing God, Augustine writes, “Pride ... feigns loftiness (though you alone are high above all).... Sloth affects to seek serenity (though where can true serenity be but in the Lord).... Melancholy pines for lost things by which it was comforted ... (though you are the one who loses nothing).” To round out the picture of Augustine’s discernment of sin, Wills ranges beyond “The Testimony” into “The City of God” and other texts. In the end stands a trinity, if you will, of original sins: the choice of the fallen angels, the choice of Adam, the choice of Cain. All reducible to pride.

Wills is no zealous apologist for Augustine. He holds himself hors de combat in many places, choosing to let stand without comment such lines as “the woman ... the inferior member of the human pair.” Or in the longer historical and theological context, perhaps more significant are his thoughts on the nature of good and evil. “It is possible for a thing to be entirely good, but not entirely evil. For even natures that are disordered with evil intent are evil only in their disordering, not in the things being disordered, which are good in their own nature....[T]o the good that is being disordered is the punishment brought on by the disorder, since that is just, and all forms of justice are good things.” What is the point of a new translation of Augustine in our day and age? Perhaps, after a century marked by the widespread impunity of evil, the question is its own answer. We still have to struggle, to understand.

“Saint Augustine’s Sin,” apparently aimed at the lay reader, commits a sin of omission: a short overview of Augustine’s life and “The Testimony” would make reading the core text much easier. One hopes, too, that the publisher eventually will put out one volume containing all of Wills’ Augustine monographs, and at a reasonable price. Is there not some taint of venal sin in charging $23.95 for a slice of translation with commentary, however elegant the former and sinewy the latter, that barely makes 104 pages?