Augustine

On Christian Doctrine and Selected Introductory Works

TIMOTHY GEORGE

EDITOR

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

Theological Foundations:

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine and Selected Introductory Works

Copyright © 2022 by B&H Academic

Published by B&H Academic

Nashville, Tennessee

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-0877-7031-4

Dewey Decimal Classification: 230

Subject Heading: CHRISTIANITY--DOCTRINES /

DOCTRINAL THEOLOGY / AUGUSTINE, SAINT

This content has been selected from Aurelius Augustinus’s works On Christian Doctrine, A Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed, A Treatise on Faith and the Creed, and A Treatise on the Spirit and the Letter. All sources are public domain. Every effort was made to retain the original text for each work. However, when needed, changes were made to correct errors or for matters of clarity.

Cover design by Emily Keafer Lambright. Cover image by kovalto1/Shutterstock.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Timothy George

On Christian Doctrine

BOOK I

BOOK II

BOOK III

BOOK IV

A Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed

A Treatise on Faith and the Creed

A Treatise on the Spirit and the Letter

Subject Index

Scripture Index

INTRODUCTION

Timothy George

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430), or as he is better known to us, Saint Augustine of Hippo, was one of the most able thinkers in the ancient world and the best theologian between the death of the Apostle Paul and the birth of Martin Luther. Other great thinkers of this period including Boethius, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas all drank deeply from the well of Augustine. Luther was an Augustinian monk and Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is replete with quotations from the “Doctor of Grace,” more than any other source except the Bible. With good reason, Hans von Campenhausen could state that Augustine is the “only church father who even today remains an intellectual power.”1

Augustine was born in the Roman province of Numidia in what is today the country of Algeria. As a young man, he gave himself to the study of rhetoric and the pursuit of wisdom. This led him on a long spiritual journey—pilgrimage (peregrinatio) is one of his favorite words—through various religious and philosophical movements of the day. These included Manicheanism with its radically dualist worldview; Academic Skepticism, a kind of stylish agnosticism; and on to Neoplatonism with its transcendent view of reality. This brought him to the threshold of the Christian faith, but it was the prayers of his mother Monica and the preaching by Bishop Ambrose of Milan that led to Augustine’s conversion in 386. At age thirty-two, Augustine was baptized by Ambrose during the Easter vigil of 387. The baptistry where this happened can still be seen in the cathedral of Milan.

Returning to his native North Africa, Augustine was pressed into the service of the church, first as a priest in 391, and four years later as the bishop of Hippo. In his more than thirty-five years as bishop, Augustine dealt with both local ...