St. Augustine’s magisterial book “City of God” is usually considered his greatest work. It is the book that attracts the most scholarly attention, cited for various purposes by philosophers, theologians and political theorists alike. In 2017, “City of God” was also the subject of a pioneering — and highly successful — seminar on Twitter (as it was then called) by Catholic University of America theology professor Chad C. Pecknold.
But as important as “City of God” is for scholarly and magisterial consideration, St. Augustine’s “Confessions” is probably his most accessible and widely read book. Part of the reason for that is its comparative brevity. But I think the more important reason is that “Confessions” resonates more with the layperson. It plumbs the depths of the subjective human experience in a way that almost every reader can relate. While the particular impediments on St. Augustine’s road of faith are specific to him and his time, the themes they represent are universal. Every human heart is restless until (if!) it finds its rest in God, to cite the most famous sentence in “Confessions.” Thus, it is a great pleasure to read Pecknold’s new book, “Fire on the Altar: Setting Our Souls Ablaze Through Augustine’s ‘Confessions,'” recently released by Emmaus Road Publishing.
A guide for the lay Catholic reader
While Pecknold is a noted Augustine scholar, “Fire on the Altar” is written with the layperson in mind. While always erudite and learned, it serves either as an introduction to the “Confessions” for the first-time reader or an insightful commentary for those who, like me, return to the “Confessions” over and over. Pecknold wears his scholarly acumen lightly, more intent on speaking to all of us Christians through the lens of Augustine’s great memoir than on impressing his scholarly colleagues. And we are the winners for it.
The book’s introduction perfectly summarizes both the error of modern thought about the human person, and the value of Augustine in reclaiming a proper understanding of who we are. Attacking the individualist anthropology of modern moral and political philosophies, Pecknold suggests that Augustine shows us the better way. “If we turn to Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ with this errant anthropology,” he writes, “we are going to be reading things into his story rather than letting his story shape our own.” Thus does Pecknold introduce the goal of the book: to show us how Augustine’s journey toward the truth of faith helps us to understand our own. Put another way, “Fire on the Altar” is a valuable companion to the “Confessions,” one that I will keep handy as I return to the great saint’s work.
Both philosophical and devotional
From my perspective, the best features of “Fire on the Altar” fall under two attributes.
The first is Pecknold’s concise, highly readable explanation of the philosophical world from which St. Augustine emerged, which, again, is strikingly similar to our own. He explains, for example, how the Manichaeism of St. Augustine’s early adulthood is as relevant a philosophical and theological problem in 2025 as it was in 400. Along the way, Pecknold accounts for St. Augustine’s highly original (at the time) definition of evil as the privation of good, a doctrine that has been adopted by the Church ever since. “Seeing the transcendent cause” of the universe, “the essence of existence itself,” writes Pecknold, “sheds new light for Augustine on the goodness of all that exists, and on evil as the privation of good.” His further explanation of that point alone is worth the price of the book!
The second defining aspect of “Fire on the Altar” is the book’s intentionally devotional purpose. The “Confessions” is a book-length prayer to God. In publishing it, St. Augustine invited his readers to join him in the prayer, sometimes repentant, other times supplicant and always grateful. In keeping with this aspect of Augustine’s book, Pecknold ends each of his five chapters with a brief “Preparatio.” These are invitations to apply St. Augustine’s theological and spiritual insights to our own life of prayer and liturgy. Among other things, these short exhortatory sections are excellent to prepare for confession, Mass or personal prayer. They serve as a kind of examination of conscience as we contemplate the development of St. Augustine’s own deep faith.
A reasonable argument can be that St. Augustine single-handedly shaped the thought of the Church about many fundamental doctrines. In writing “Fire on the Altar,” Chad C. Pecknold invites us to pray with St. Augustine, and thus to enter into that thought — to “think with the Church” as St. Ignatius of Loyola would later coin the phrase. As such, “Fire on the Altar” is an excellent addition to any Catholic home library.
