By Campbell Collins

In his new book, Fire on the Altar: Setting Our Souls Ablaze through Augustine’s Confessions, C. C. Pecknold presents a “Catholic understanding of Augustine” (3) and thereby helps readers’ “souls to be set ablaze by that fire which burns for us in heaven and upon the Church’s high altar” (14). Pecknold’s approach is, perhaps, peculiar. The book is neither fish nor fowl: it is at once a basic exposition of Augustine’s  Confessions, a devotional text, and an attempted dismantling of a Protestant reading of Augustine’s works. Despite the book’s sometimes disjunctive feel, there is much richness to be found in it—especially for students of the liberal arts—and maybe more value for Protestant readers than even Pecknold himself would suppose.

…[B]y weaving together theological analysis and mundane recommendations, Pecknold encourages his readers to allow themselves to be transformed like—and through—Augustine himself.

Fire on the Altar is an accessible entry point into the Confessions. In his preface, Pecknold notes that his book “can be read profitably before, after, or alongside Augustine’s Confessions” (xiii). He aims to provide “selective textual commentary—akin to the medieval custom of glossing” (10) and touches on many of the familiar moments in Augustine’s work. His textual analysis, although not exhaustive, helps guide attention to the high points of the Confessions and encourages deeper meditation on its underlying themes. Pecknold’s analysis is not purely academic, however; he ends each chapter with a “Preparatio” that exhorts readers to apply aspects of his reading of the  Confessions to their own lives. The transition to these sections often feels jarring—the text jumps for instance, from “Augustine knocking powerfully on the door of God’s mercy” to the convicting but startlingly modern question “How many timelines have we scrolled?” (75). 

But, by weaving together theological analysis and mundane recommendations, Pecknold encourages his readers to allow themselves to be transformed like—and through—Augustine himself. Pecknold notes that Augustine believed that “his classical education was certainly fit for helping him understand the parts of the created order, [but] his academic studies failed to bring his mind into contact with Wisdom itself” (64). If we, as Hillsdale students, are not careful, we might find that this analysis rings all too true in our own lives. Great Books may have left our minds blazing with Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton, but have we allowed our hearts to blaze with the same intensity? Without abandoning the academic project, Pecknold works to show that Augustine can light our hearts on fire and prompt us to present a “religious offering” to “unite…[our] learning with God” (64).

Pecknold works to show that Augustine can light our hearts on fire and prompt us to present a ‘religious offering’ to ‘unite…[our] learning with God.

As he does so, he makes clear that he views his goal as a distinctly Catholic project. His reading does depend, at least in part, on a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist. He explicitly calls the “fire on the altar” the “purifying presence of Jesus Christ touching our tongues in the Sacrament of the Altar” (118). As he advances this view, he presents a simplistic—and at times harsh—view of Protestantism that might deter Protestant readers from seriously engaging with his message throughout Fire on the Altar. For example, in the introduction to the book, he makes the sweeping claim that “Luther’s rejection of the Church’s authority wasn’t really rooted in a preference for faith alone or Scripture alone; it actually came down to a preference for his own private judgement alone” (4). When describing the debate over transubstantiation, he argues that “it is the Protestants who have made the error and have subsequently excluded the saving, sacrificial logic from Christianity” (119). And he strikes an odd note in the very last paragraph of the book, noting that Augustine “does not give us a John Wesley-style ‘heart strangely warmed’ personal pietism; instead, he gives us something more elevating of the person” (145). These jabs may be disconcerting to thoughtful Protestant readers who seek to approach both the Confessions and Fire on the Altar with an open mind. But perhaps it is a contradiction in terms to expect a spirit of ecumenicism in a book that specifically sets out to present a Catholic understanding of the Confessions.

Nevertheless, there is more in the book for Protestant readers than these comments would suggest—perhaps more than Pecknold himself realizes. As a member of a liturgical, Protestant tradition,  when Pecknold writes that “Augustine has taught us that we must make an acceptable offering, namely by anguished sorrow for our sins and by a sacrifice of praise, poured out upon our interior altar,” I can’t help but hear echoes of the Book of Common Prayer Communion service where we “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness” and beseech the Lord’s acceptance of “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” Even for readers who do not share a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, Pecknold’s book is a reminder that reading Augustine well demands our hearts, not just our minds, to join with him in meditating on and responding to Christ’s cleansing blood and perfect sacrifice.

Campbell Collins is a junior studying English and Theology.

Photo by Erik Teder.