34 pages • 1 hour read
David BrooksThe Road to Character
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Ordered Love”
Born and raised at the North African edge of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine led a life of relative comfort and excess that was dominated by his devoutly Christian mother, Monica. He spent his youth in harmony and conflict with her by turns, eventually taking up with a philosophical Christian sect, the Manicheans, whose simplified teachings concerning a Kingdom of Light and Kingdom of Darkness enabled Augustine to indulge his lustful excesses. When Augustine left his hometown of Thagaste in his late 20s, accompanied by his common-law wife of 15 years and their son, Monica followed him to Carthage—and afterward to Milan and Rome, in which locations he worked as a teacher and eventually at the court of Emperor Valentinian II.
Continuing to disapprove of her son’s philosophical, religious, and romantic choices, Monica drove Augustine’s common-law wife and son out of his life and arranged his marriage to a 10-year-old heiress whose family adhered to a more austere form of Christianity. Eventually, a conversation with a close friend led Augustine to conclude that his association with the Manicheans had made him self-centered and indulgent, had scattered his attention amongst too many earthly pleasures. Galvanized by that conversation, as well as by his mother’s death, Augustine read the Bible and decided to surrender both his life and his love to Christ. With a renewed sense of focus, Augustine would spend the rest of his life writing, teaching, and serving the early Church as a bishop and theologian.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Augustine’s life functions as an example of surrendering one’s passions to the love of something higher—the love of God, the love of community, the love of a cause greater than oneself. Similar to Marshall’s institutional-mindedness and passion for serving his country, Augustine exemplifies the kind of love that extended to not just his contemporary religious and philosophical thinkers and the people he served as a bishop, but also to the entirety of Western society that has been influenced by his writings centuries later. Augustine’s love has been so far-reaching that modern-day Christianity would not be the same without it, in particular the Catholic Church, whose adherents revere him as a saint. Augustine’s love has not only been far-reaching, but life-changing and comforting to millions who have felt as directionless as Augustine once did himself: “[Augustine] started with the belief that he could control his own life. He had to renounce that, to sink down into a posture of openness and surrender” (212).
Augustine and his mother, Monica, serve as the dual character-focus of this chapter. The average Catholic may not be aware of the full extent of his foibles and struggles; they may certainly not have had exposure to the presence and influence of Monica in Augustine’s life. Mother and son influenced each other in complex ways, neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. Augustine would not have achieved his level of soul-searching epiphany without Monica’s constant attempts to direct his life, and Monica’s later years and death would not have been as filled with peace and reassurance if Augustine had not been able to reassure her that his soul-searching had led to a new depth of faith and purpose.
North Africa in the 300s AD—specifically the part that is modern-day Algeria—and the center of the Roman Empire’s government and commerce, the Italian peninsula, serve as the backdrop for Augustine’s life story. Few periods in history, and few ancient societies, have captured modern imagination as thoroughly as the Roman Empire in its sprawling complexity. Augustine’s experience of Christianity is inseparable from his life and times, as the span of his life was fraught with competing Christian sects also coming into conflict with pagan traditions and philosophical schools that were still thriving. Without access and exposure to the Empire’s rich and complex religious and philosophical culture, Augustine’s writings might not have been as diverse and accessible as they have been to many of the different sects of modern Christianity—and to non-Christian religious thinkers, as well.
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