Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 839.82374
EAN num: 9780374253844
ISBN number: 0374253846
Label: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 167
Printing Date: 1998-02
Publishing house: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
Sale Popularity Level: 1033265
Studio: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
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Product Description:
A fictional love letter to St. Augustine from Floria Aemilia, his longtime concubine, by the author of 'Sophie's World'. A true historical figure, Floria lived with St. Augustine for over a decade, during which time they had a son together. He 'renounced' her when he elected to spend the rest of his life abstaining from sensual love. In some sense a feminist missive, this passionate and occasionally erotic letter challenged the Church's view of women and of love .
Amazon.com Review:
In his very first and most famous novel, Sophie's World, the Norwegian Jostein Gaarder took on the entire history of Western philosophy, neatly sandwiching Socrates, Sartre, and everybody in between into a series of letters to a 14-year-old schoolgirl. This time around, Gaarder has again produced a philosophical novel in epistolary form. In That Same Flower, however, he narrows his focus to a single figure--St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, whose classic Confessions anticipated the current memoir boom by almost 16 centuries. The saint himself fails to get a word in edgewise. Instead, the book consists of a long, grief-stricken letter from his former mistress, Floria Aemilia (a figure whom the author has reconstructed from passing references in Augustine's own writings). This most articulate correspondent has a good many bones to pick with her former lover; he abandoned her on several different occasions, often at the behest of his 4th-century yenta of a mother, and kept her from the child they had together. Yet along with these personal matters (and perhaps inseparable from them) is Floria's critique of Christian dogma--particularly the ascetic tradition that Augustine embodied. Deriding his renunciation of all earthly pleasures, she reminds him of the good old precelibate days: 'Can you still remember how you stroked me all over and seemed to tighten every bud before it opened?... And then you went away and sold me for the sake of your soul's salvation! What infidelity, Aurel, what guilt! No, I don't believe in a God who demands human sacrifices. I don't believe in a God who lays waste to a woman's life in order to save a man's soul.' An erudite and intelligent argument on behalf of the senses, That Same Flower is also an oddly moving love story--or at least half of one--with an unmistakable feminist twist.
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Rated by buyers 
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I HIGHLY recommend you read St. Augustine's "Confessions" very first BEFORE reading this book! I read the book once, then read Confessions out of curiosity, then came back and re-read this book and... WOW!! It really makes all the difference in the world! Single sentences speak volumes after you have read "Confessions", because there is a story behind everything Floria writes. In a single sentence she has you laughing at some irony involving St. Augustine, and just as quickly have you feeling great despair, disgust, or even frustration... and of course, love! Nothing is stronger than the love from a woman, but then, nothing is as cruel as what Augustine did to that love. After reading this book you will want to sit in a quite place and ponder...
Rated by buyers -
I HIGHLY recommend you read St. Augustine's "Confessions" very first BEFORE reading this book! I read the book once, then read Confessions out of curiosity, then came back and re-read this book and... WOW!! It really makes all the difference in the world! Single sentences speak volumes after you have read "Confessions", because there is a story behind everything Floria writes. In a single sentence she has you laughing at some irony involving St. Augustine, and just as quickly have you feeling great despair, disgust, or even frustration... and of course, love! Nothing is stronger than the love from a woman, but then, nothing is as cruel as what Augustine did to that love. After reading this book you will want to sit in a quite place and ponder...
Rated by buyers -
That's how Jostein Gaarder titled the book, and I think it fits remarkably! It shows how we should sense our world and not just worry about the afterlife. A beautiful lovestory, and if it is true, an important historical found as well. And with the footnotes in the marrow, we get a much deeper insight to the letter than we would have with only the text.
I think it is genuine. Gaarder is not the kind of man to lie about this. With all his footnotes and even a referance to his Latin teacher at "Katta", I think he is telling the truth about how he found Codex Floriae.
Read this book! It is a beautiful lovestory, and a great introduction to the philosophical questions around St. Augustine.
Rated by buyers -
Norwegian-born, international bestselling novelist Jostein Gaarder splendidly exhibits the timelessness, the universality, and the agony of filial, but repudiated love in his book, That Same Flower. The book, Gaarder maintains, is a genuine reproduction of a personal letter composed for St. Augustine, one of the Latin Fathers of the Christian Church and one of the greatest figures in Western philosophy, by his former lover Floria Aemilia.
Gaarder says he discovered the letter in 1995 while shopping in an antique bookstore in Buenos Aires, Argentina and agreed to purchase it from the owner for a little more than $12,000 even though it was uncertain at the time as to its authenticity. Following an examination of the letter's style, terminology and grammar, however, Gaarder says he became convinced it could have only originated in medieval days.
The letter, titled the Codex Floriae, if indeed genuine, represents a major historical find. Over the centuries, very little has come to light regarding the lover of St. Augustine and their son Adeodatus. We do know that they lived together for several years in North Africa and Italy before Augustine's conversion into the Christian faith. Previously, all that has been known about Floria Aemilia has been derived from Augustine's own writings, chiefly his famous autobiographical Confessions.
In That Same Flower, however, Floria Aemilia writes candidly of her relationship with Augustine and of her feelings about his conversion. At times she corroborates what Augustine, himself has written and portrays him as a man prone to attacks of anguish and confusion. The major part of the letter, however, is dedicated to a bitter denouncement of Augustine's decision to separate forever from both Aemilia and their son. Aemilia, it is clear does not share Augustine's faith in a God that "desires above all that man should live in abstinence...I have no faith in such a God."
Augustine, himself, suffered deep sorrow over his decision to part from Aemilia. In his Confessions, he laments, "The woman I lived with was not permitted to stay at my side...My heart, which was deeply attached to her, was pierced, and wounded so that it bled...My wound, inflicted when my relationship with the woman I lived with was brought to an end, would not heal either."
Augustine's pain, however, pales in comparison to the anguish that surges forth from Aemilia's writings. Her distress is convincing and compelling and we feel the enormity of her pain. The victim of Augustine's conversion, Aemilia expresses her heartbreak most eloquently in her letter. "My heart," she says, suffered the same hurt...for we were two souls torn from each other...because you loved the salvation of your own soul more than you loved me."
Augustine's mother, Monica was one of the factors that led to the end of Aemilia's relationship with Augustine. Monica, described as a willful and ambitious woman, by Aemilia, and one who opposed her, banished Aemilia from the household and arranged for what she assumed would be a more suitable engagement for Augustine. Rightfully expecting Augustine to come to her defense, Aemilia was crushed and defeated when he refused to do so, even though he later withdrew from the engagement.
Augustine, however, also refused to return to the one woman he truly loved. Convinced that eternal damnation could only be avoided by a total renouncement of the pleasures of the body, he withdrew from all physical pleasure, including the company of Aemilia.
Aemilia, herself, has no sympathy for Augustine's views. Instead, she views them with the utmost contempt, having no faith in a God who places the existential and spiritual worth of a man over that of a woman. "I don't believe in a God," she writes, "who lays waste to a woman's life in order to save a man's soul."
Aemilia also writes much of the medieval "theologians and Platonists" who were the influential players in Augustine's intellectual and spiritual development. Their ideas, she says, transformed Augustine from a man living a carefree existence into a God-fearing mortifier of his own flesh. Aemilia denounces these men as ruling within a "dark labyrinth" and swears that Augustine was misguided by them.
Scored with the basic theme of Augustine's anti-materialism and aversion to bodily appetites, Aemilia accuses him of carrying his denial of physical gratification to extremes, regarding everything from eating nutritious food to listening to an enjoyable piece of music as a sin against God.
And, in his Confessions, Augustine writes that the sense of hearing "offers its perilous enticements" and that "I still find satisfaction in the melodies to which your words give life and should when they are sung artistically by a fine voice...So I sin in this without noticing; but after I feel it is sin."
After reading Aemilia's ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
This book provides a glimpse the shadowy life of Saint Augustine through the words of the woman he loved, if it is true it challenges his role as a moral hero, if it is false it at least provides a poignant alternative view of Christianity. I rate it a 5, and feel for the strikingly human woman who has suffered under the guise of "religious virtue." Her loss, of man and child, connects to those of the modern world where families are so bitterly divided by divorce and other social institutions of escape. I recommend it to any free thinker, who believes that "the truth will set you free." By her courage to record her experiences this woman reaches out to history to remember, and question.
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