Henry Chadwick

Henry Chadwick

William M. Klimon

Center for Norbertine Studies

1920

With the close of the 20th century, another cycle had come and brought with it another round of new translations of the Confessions. One might say that these new versions are less confessional and more scholarly. They include Maria Boulding's inaugural volume (1997) for the Augustinian Heritage Institute's The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Carolinne White's selections illustrated with reproductions of illuminations from manuscripts in the British Library (2001), and Garry Wills' new version for Viking Penguin (separate volumes, 2001-04; single volume, 2006). Most important among these is the work of the British patristics scholar Henry Chadwick. Having served as regius professor of divinity at both Oxford and Cambridge, he spent a career immersed in early Christian thought, with a special concentration on Augustine. At the end of such a career, and without reference to the translations that preceded his, he produced a translation that “[b]etter than any other,” as Peter Brown has concluded, “has caught the precise flavour of Augustine as a philosophical writer steeped in an austerely Platonic world-view that is notoriously hard to catch in modern words.”

REFERENCES: Brown, p. 487; Better, pp. 20-21.