[Flaptekst] Augustine was one of the West's first public intellectuals. A brilliant philosopher and gifted writer, he is known primarily as one of the great figures of Christian late antiquity. In this new biography, Miles Hollingworth presents Augustine through the complexities of his personality and demonstrates how it was that the philosopher turned against his age to explore the shocking relevance of life to God and history - a fact which has long led many to call his autobiographical Confessions the first truly modern book. Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography reintroduces a cardinal but neglected fact to the centre of Augustinian studies - that there is a direct line from Augustine's own early experiences of life to his later commentaries on humanity. Augustine's new Christianity did not so much replace what had gone before it with dogma and doctrine, as catch a subtle and reflective mind at the point where it was despairing of finding the truth. Christianity resolved a disquiet that Augustine had been feeling all along: that it alone spoke to his serious rage about man - abandoned to the world and dislocated from all real understanding by glimpses of the Divine. In this new, extensively researched, intellectual biography, Miles Hollingworth explores the sense in which Augustine understood his newfound faith to be a response to life itself, rather than a choice between philosophy and religion.