Product Description

'Years have passed and much has changed since we two had our arms around each other. Thus what I write will perhaps be equally a letter to the whole Christian church, for today you are a man of great influence.'

In a second-hand bookshop in Buenos Aires, Jostein Gaarder makes an exciting find: a transcript of a letter to St Augustine, author of the famous Confessions, from Floria Aemilia, the woman he renounced for chastity.

Vita Brevis is both a classic love story, beautifully told, and a fascinating insight into St Augustine's life and that of his discarded concubine. It is up to the reader to determine its authenticity...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #527572 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 164 pages

Customer Reviews

A most painfully beautiful book
It really doesn't matter whether the letters that Gaarder claimed to find were authentic. There is so much grace in the prose and this "love" story is the most poignant I have ever read. The philosophy reaches deep inside my heart. As the Confessions can tell, "love" (no matter what this word means in our contemporary lexicon) stands in the constant struggle between losing and regaining yourself. "Life is so short we do not have time to pronounce any damning judgment on love. We must first live, Aurel, then we can philosophize" (131). This sentence symbolizes the conflict between the Greek and Christian world views. It is Floria's answer, with stunning lucidity and sanity.

A good philosophy book...
First of all, as another user has said, this book was written by Gaarder, not by Floria. At the beginning, Gaarder says that he found an old document from the XVI century in a bookstore in Argentina. He bought the document because he thought it was a letter written by Floria, a woman who was St. Augustine's lover when they were both young. Just ignore what Gaarder says about how he found the document, because that's something he made up from his mind.

Now onto the book. Gaarder uses Floria to refute a lot of Augustine's ideas about virtue, sins, chastity, celibate and the relationship between God and men. Gaarder's philosophy is the opposite of Augustine's: Whenever Augustine says to ignore the beauty of the world because it may lead you to sin, Gaarder will tell you to enjoy it because it's God's creation.

The purpose of Gaarder is to show us the true nature of Augustine's ideas, more close to those of the asceticism than to Christianity (he is even ashamed for enjoying food, for Christ sake!). To deny the human nature is to deny the works of God, it was never His purpose to build a beautiful world just to demand us to ignore it.

You may be in disagreement with Gaarder's ideas, but at the end this is a great book and the best of it is that you will be anxious to know more about St. Augustine's life and works. I recommend you to look forward for The Confessions of St. Augustine, so you can have the whole picture and learn about a man that shaped modern morality like few people have been able to do. You won't regret it.

Misleading
This book wants to be an answer to Augustin's famous "Confession". This book is fiction and it is strange that some reviewers think the letters to be real.

Gaarder lets the woman, with whom Augustin lived together for a long time, speak in letters answering to the Confessions of Augustin. The problem is that Gaarder's view of this woman is a woman of the 20th century, a woman who has no understanding for Augustin's religious belief or sexual morals. It seems Gaarder read this book, quickly judged it after the standards of our time and left it with that. Would he for a moment consider if there may be some true meaning in such a classic as the confessions of Augustin, a book, which has been a classic for more than 1500 years?

He even misrepresents cleary what Augustin said. Augustin syas how even in children you can observe envy. That you can see a baby who screams angrily at another baby, just because that other baby gets fed. Even though there clearly is enough for both. That's what Augustin wrote. Gaarder accuses him of saying that a baby is sinful just because it wants to be fed in the first place, and that is clearly not what Augustin said, as anyone can read in Augustin's confessions.