life to the service of God, Christ, and the church. Others receive the name with distaste, as if sensing something unsavory within. Augustine is imaged as an austere and forbidding figure, whose long gaze at the depths of his own sins has led him to look with unsparing eye into the souls of others and convict them harshly of their errors. This notion of the forbidding Augustine could not be more different from one of his major roles in the history of Christian theology: champion of the grace of Christ,