A review by marcio
Vita Brevis by Jostein Gaarder

4.0

I haven't read Augustine of Hippo's Confessions and I am not sure that I might do it in the nearer future in order to write a fairer review of Gaardner Vita Brevis, regardless of its inventive wiseness of bringing about a series of letters written by the unnamed concumbine of the saint, in here given the name Flória Emília. Yet, it is clear that its goal is to confront eros and philia in the face of agape. The former, human, thus dispensable; the latter, heavenly necessary).

Notwithstanding Augustine's thesis to the benefit of the Christian church, the truth is that as many other doctors of the church, they are holier-than-thou to a point that most probably even Jesus Christ would be considered a sinner in their visions of sanctitude. Augustine's thesis on the original sin is a great disservice to the position of women in most Christian societies through the centuries, whereas, why not see both Adam and Eve picking the fruit of the tree of wisdom together? Blaming someone else for our own errors is much easier, not? And if it were for Eve to have picked it alone, why then men condemned women to a life without knowledge, without wisdom? At the same time the Church sanctifies women as mothers, thus closer to Our Lady, the mother of Jesus, it proclaims the female sex is not able to achieve many statuses only given to men. There is also the contestation of the body as a sinful work of God, male or female. If God created beings, it created them for a reason. Everything that turns out to be excessive is bad. And Augustine's biggest mistake seems to have been one to blame on other what he thought as his own errors or sins. This is what Flória most claims about in her long and interesting letters to Augustine. And in this, Gaardene provided us with such interesting work.

Implicit in the book is also the fact that the search for sanctitude for its own sake is the worst of the seven deadly sins: superbia (pride).