True Fire cover image

True Fire

Saint Augustine in Our Age of Crisis

Free in your trial month

Pre-order for €0.00 with membership
Prime logo Are you an Amazon Prime member?
Try Audible free for 60 days
Start your free trial with the flexibility to pause or cancel monthly.
After your free trial, enjoy a diverse selection of audiobooks, children's audio dramas, and Audible Originals for €9.95 a month.
Choose 1 title a month from our entire catalogue and keep it.

True Fire

By: Bart van Es
Narrated by: Tbc
Pre-order for €0.00 with membership

€9.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order Now for €18.94

Pre-order Now for €18.94

Season's Savings | 0.99 €/mo for 3 months

6.99 €/month thereafter - terms apply. Cancel monthly.

'Spellbinding, elegant, and urgent . . . Held me from the first moment to the last' Katherine Rundell

The great quest of Augustine's life was for truth. This was his true fire.

Today, we are still the product of Augustine's thinking, only most of us don't know it. Our world is shaped by his ideas on time and language, his understanding of the self, his theory of 'Just War', his attitudes to sex and the body, his conception of God. Augustine wrote the world's first autobiography, the first soliloquy, and he gave us the concept of Original Sin. He was both a wily pragmatist and an absolutist, a hero and a warning. He lived through an age of catastrophe, the fall of the Roman Empire, and his writing speaks to a future that is almost upon us.

Inhabiting the four places that changed him - Milan, Cassiciacum, Ostia and Hippo - True Fire invites us to see Augustine anew. Van Es's Augustine speaks to a twenty-first-century sense of crisis: climate change, mass migration, viral media, and the question of what we should believe and why. This is biography at its most original.

©2027 Bart van Es (P)2027 Faber & Faber
Ancient Philosophers Professionals & Academics Science
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet