Augustine of Hippo · AD 354 – 430 · the great theologian of the Latin West
No figure between the apostle Paul and the Reformation shaped Western Christianity more deeply than Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. His Confessions invented Christian spiritual autobiography; his City of God shaped the Christian theology of history; his On the Trinity set the architecture of Latin trinitarian doctrine; and his anti-Pelagian writings established the Western Christian doctrine of grace that Luther and Calvin later recovered against medieval drift. To know Augustine is to know the theological grandfather of every Reformed evangelical confession.
WHY THIS PAGE EXISTS — The patristic era survey introduces Augustine in a few hundred words alongside Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril, and Leo. This page does the focused work the survey cannot: a sustained Reformed evangelical treatment of (1) the shape of Augustine's life, (2) his major works, (3) his doctrinal achievements — grace, sin, Trinity, City of God, the interpretation of Scripture, (4) the hard places where the Reformation later had to correct him, (5) his influence on Luther, Calvin, the Reformed confessions, and Western theology generally, and (6) a short reading path for beginners. The posture throughout is gratitude tested by Scripture: Augustine is the doctrinal grandfather we read closely and read critically, in the same spirit with which he himself submitted all his work to the supreme rule of the Word.
Read him as the church's most consequential post-apostolic theologian. Outside the New Testament itself, no Christian writer has been quoted, copied, taught, refuted, recovered, and re-recovered more than Augustine. Aquinas built on him; Anselm built on him; Bernard built on him; Luther was an Augustinian friar who recovered him against the medieval drift away from him; Calvin called him almost his own and saturated the Institutes with his citations. The Reformation's confession of sola gratia is essentially the Augustinian doctrine of grace re-articulated with sharper Pauline exegesis. To read Augustine is to read the theological vocabulary in which the Western church has thought about God, the soul, sin, grace, the church, and time for sixteen centuries.
And yet not uncritically. Augustine was not infallible, and he knew it — his late Retractationes (426–427) goes back through his own corpus and corrects errors. The Reformation preserved his core insight on grace while sharpening the distinction (which his own vocabulary blurred) between justification as God's declarative verdict and sanctification as the Spirit's renewing work. The Reformation repudiated, in Augustine's own spirit of submission to Scripture, his late defence of imperial coercion against the Donatists, his over-realised view of baptismal regeneration, and the allegorical excesses of some of his early exegesis. Read him gratefully; read him with discernment; let him send you back to Scripture, which is where he himself always pointed.
Distinguish Augustine from the medieval "Augustinianism" the Reformation contested. The medieval Latin church inherited Augustine and then partly domesticated him. The Council of Orange (529) reaffirmed Augustine's doctrine of grace against the semi-Pelagian compromise, but later medieval scholasticism (especially in some Franciscan and nominalist streams) drifted back toward a doctrine in which the believer's own movement toward God preceded the gift of grace. By Luther's time the question "did Augustine teach this?" had become contested ground: the Reformers argued — correctly — that they were closer to Augustine than their late-medieval opponents were. The Reformation is in significant measure an Augustinian recovery against an Augustinian drift.
Augustine's centre of gravity is the doctrine of grace. If Athanasius's contribution is the Son's full deity, the Cappadocians' is the precise vocabulary of trinitarian persons, and Cyril and Leo's is the Chalcedonian Christology of two natures in one person, then Augustine's contribution — alongside his trinitarian and ecclesiological work — is the doctrine of grace: that fallen humanity cannot raise itself, that God's gracious initiative precedes every saving movement of the human will, that the elect come to Christ because the Father has given them to him, and that those whom the Spirit has regenerated are kept to the end. Everything else in Augustine flows from, or returns to, this centre.
1. Life at a glance
Augustine was a North African, born and raised in the Roman province of Numidia (modern Algeria), educated in the Latin classical tradition, formed for nine years by the Manichaean sect, converted at thirty-two in Milan under the preaching of Ambrose, baptised at Easter 387, and from 396 until his death thirty-four years later the bishop of the small coastal city of Hippo Regius. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo and the western Roman Empire was collapsing around him.
(Numidia, North Africa)
(takes a concubine)
(joins the Manichees)
(Milan; hears Ambrose)
("tolle lege")
(Easter, with Adeodatus)
(Hippo Regius)
(holds office to death)
written
(City of God begun 413)
(two decades)
(Vandal siege)
2. Conversion and the Hippo ministry
Augustine's intellectual and spiritual journey from the classical rhetorical schools, through nine years as a Manichaean "hearer," to the Neoplatonic philosophy he encountered at Milan, to the catechetical preaching of Ambrose, to the famous garden in 386 where a child's voice chanting tolle, lege ("take up and read") sent him to Romans 13:13–14, is one of the most familiar narratives in Christian history. He recounts it himself in Confessions Books 1–9, in prose so penetrating that the genre of Christian spiritual autobiography in effect begins with him. Two convictions of the mature Augustine were already converging in those Milan years: that the philosophical longing of the soul for the true good cannot be satisfied apart from the God of Jesus Christ ("you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you"), and that the human will is bound by sin until God by grace renews it.
Augustine returned to North Africa in 388, intending a quiet contemplative life with a small community of friends. In 391, visiting Hippo, he was forcibly ordained presbyter by the congregation against his will — a not-uncommon mode of clerical appointment in the late patristic church. In 395 or 396 he was consecrated bishop of Hippo and held the office until his death in 430. His ministry combined the heavy local work of a bishop in a small port city — preaching, presiding, judging civil disputes, catechising new converts, administering the church's affairs — with an extraordinary literary output: roughly five million words survive, including 113 books or treatises, more than 240 letters, and over 500 sermons. The combination of pastoral office and dogmatic productivity is, in the patristic church, almost unparalleled.
Three controversies dominated Augustine's life as bishop, each producing a major literary corpus: the long-running quarrel with the African schismatic Donatists (who insisted that sacraments administered by clergy who had compromised under persecution were invalid); the response to the Manichaeans with whose dualist cosmology Augustine knew intimately from his own former membership; and the late and decisive struggle with the British monk Pelagius and his disciples (Caelestius, Julian of Eclanum) over original sin and the necessity of grace. The anti-Pelagian writings, produced from about 411 until Augustine's death, are the foundational documents of Western soteriology.
3. The major works
Augustine's surviving corpus is so vast that even a focused page can only signal its principal landmarks. The works below are the ones a Reformed reader should know first; each will eventually get a focused page treatment.
Confessions
Why it mattersConfessions is two things at once: a personal autobiography of Augustine's journey from infancy through his conversion and baptism (Books 1–9), and a sustained theological meditation on memory, time, and the act of creation (Books 10–13). It is one of the most-read Christian books outside the New Testament and the founding document of Christian interior spiritual writing. The famous opening — "you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you" — is the keynote of the whole; the equally famous garden scene in Book 8, with the child's chant of tolle, lege and Augustine's reading of Romans 13:13–14, is the conversion narrative.
Reformed readingRead Confessions first. It is luminous, accessible (in modern translation), and gives you the man before you read the theologian. Note in particular how thoroughly Augustine attributes his conversion not to his own decision but to God's prior, gracious, effectual work on his heart — the anti-Pelagian theology is already implicit in his account of his own coming to faith. Confessions page.
On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)
Why it mattersThe first three books treat the interpretation of Scripture: how to distinguish signs from things, how to handle figurative and literal language, how the rule of love (Matt 22:37–40) governs all valid interpretation, how a reader prepares himself morally and intellectually for the task. The fourth book treats the communication of Scripture in preaching — drawing freely on Cicero's rhetorical categories but bending them toward the Christian end of making divine truth plain and persuasive. It is the most influential hermeneutical and homiletical text the patristic church produced.
Reformed readingReformed expository preaching stands on this book, even when the preacher does not know it. Augustine's insistence that obscure passages must be interpreted by clearer ones, that the rule of faith (the church's confession of the gospel) bounds legitimate readings, and that the goal of all interpretation is love of God and neighbour, are the working assumptions of every faithful Reformed pulpit. Where Augustine's allegorical method exceeds the warrant of the text (see the "hard places" section below), the Reformation pruned that excess by stricter attention to the literal sense and the original languages.
On the Trinity (De Trinitate)
Why it mattersAugustine's On the Trinity is the great Latin counterpart to the Cappadocian fathers' trinitarian work in the East. Books 1–7 expound the biblical and creedal data — the unity of the divine essence, the real distinctions of the three persons, the relations of origin (paternity, filiation, procession) by which the persons are distinguished without being divided. Books 8–15 explore his famous "psychological analogies" for the Trinity in the structure of the human soul — memory, understanding, and will; or lover, beloved, and the love that joins them — analogies he himself repeatedly qualified as inadequate to the mystery they image.
Reformed readingThe Latin doctrine of the Trinity that the Reformation inherited, confessed at Nicaea and Constantinople and refined here, is Augustinian in its dogmatic vocabulary. Calvin's treatment of the Trinity in Institutes Book 1 chapter 13 is recognisably in this lineage. The psychological analogies — handled carefully, as Augustine himself handled them — remain a fruitful (not foundational) way to meditate on the divine life. See The Trinity.
City of God (De Civitate Dei)
Why it mattersBegun after the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, when pagan critics blamed the Christian abandonment of the old gods for the city's fall, City of God answers in twenty-two books. The first ten refute the pagan religious and philosophical defences of Rome. The last twelve construct the positive Augustinian theology of history: two cities — the city of God (formed by the love of God to the contempt of self) and the earthly city (formed by the love of self to the contempt of God) — running together through history from creation to consummation, distinguishable only by their loves, becoming finally separable only at the last judgement. The work is the most ambitious patristic treatment of the Christian view of time, history, the state, and the church.
Reformed readingThe Reformed doctrine of the two kingdoms (in any of its forms), the Reformed theology of vocation in the civil realm, and the Reformed reluctance to identify any earthly polity with the kingdom of God all owe Augustine. Where the Reformation departed from Augustine — on, for example, the proper limits of civil coercion in matters of conscience — it did so in part by listening more carefully to other strands of his own thought against his late defence of imperial action against the Donatists (see below). City of God page.
The anti-Pelagian writings
Why they matterFrom around 411 until his death in 430 Augustine devoted enormous energy to refuting the British monk Pelagius's claim that human nature is fundamentally healthy and capable of choosing God without inward regenerating grace. The principal works are On the Spirit and the Letter (412), On Nature and Grace (415), On the Proceedings of Pelagius (417), On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin (418), On Marriage and Concupiscence (419–421), On Grace and Free Will (426/427), On Rebuke and Grace (426/427), and the late masterpieces On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance (both 429). Together they establish the Western Christian doctrine of original sin, of the bondage of the unregenerate will, of the necessity of effectual grace, of gracious election, and of the perseverance of the saints.
Reformed readingThese are the books on which the Reformation's recovery of sola gratia was built. Luther's Bondage of the Will (1525) is consciously Augustinian; Calvin's exposition of predestination and effectual calling in Institutes Book 3 is consciously Augustinian; the Synod of Dort's canons (1618–19) and the Westminster Confession's chapters on the decree, on effectual calling, on justification, on sanctification, and on perseverance are consciously Augustinian. The Pelagian controversy itself is treated more fully on the Pelagianism page and in the wider Heresies survey.
Other works the Reformed reader should know
The corpus is far too large to survey here, but four further bodies of work deserve mention. The Expositions on the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos, c. 392–418) — Augustine's running theological commentary on the entire Psalter, preached and dictated over more than two decades — remain one of the great patristic commentaries and a treasury of Christ-centred Old Testament exegesis. The Tractates on the Gospel of John (124 homilies, c. 406–420) are a sustained pastoral exposition of John from a mature Augustine. The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love (c. 421) is the closest thing Augustine wrote to a single-volume systematic theology, organised around the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the love command. And the Retractationes (426–427), in which the aged Augustine reviews his own corpus chronologically and corrects errors, is one of the most striking acts of intellectual honesty in the history of Christian writing — a model for the discriminating posture every Reformed reader of the fathers should adopt.
4. The doctrinal core
Augustine's contribution to Christian doctrine cuts across nearly every locus, but five clusters are load-bearing for the Reformed tradition. The cards below summarise each in the order they typically appear in a Reformed dogmatic exposition.
Original sin and the bondage of the will
Augustine taught — against Pelagius and against the residual rhetorical optimism of his classical formation — that the fall of Adam was not merely a bad example but a real historical loss of the race's original integrity. The human will after the fall is not neutral; it is bound. It can choose freely among the things of this world, but it cannot, of its own native power, choose God. The will is in love with its own self-love, and only the prior, sovereign, effectual work of the Spirit can free it to love God above all things. This is the Augustinian doctrine of the bondage of the will that Luther recovered with such force in 1525 and that Reformed theology has continued to teach ever since. See Soteriology.
Grace — prevenient, operative, cooperative, perfecting
Augustine's vocabulary of grace is the vocabulary the Reformation inherited and refined. Prevenient grace goes before, drawing the elect sinner toward Christ before any movement of the human will. Operative grace is the Spirit's regenerating act in which the dead heart is given life. Cooperative grace is the same grace continuing in the regenerate, now enabling the freed will to will and to do what pleases God. Perfecting grace is the gift of perseverance that carries the saved to the end. The Reformation's confession that salvation is from beginning to end the work of God's grace — election before time, effectual calling in time, justification and sanctification in the believer's life, perseverance to glory — is the Augustinian doctrine of grace re-articulated against medieval semi-Pelagian drift.
Predestination and election
In his late works — especially On the Predestination of the Saints (429) and On the Gift of Perseverance (429) — Augustine teaches an unconditional election: God's choosing of those who will be saved is not based on his foreseeing their faith or merit, but is the free and prior decision of his grace from before the foundation of the world. Those whom he so chooses are infallibly brought to faith, justified, kept, and glorified. Those whom he does not so choose are left in their just rebellion. This is the doctrine the medieval Council of Orange (529) reaffirmed against the semi-Pelagians, the doctrine the Synod of Dort (1618–19) recovered against Arminian modification, and the doctrine the Westminster Confession (1646–48) confesses in its third chapter "Of God's Eternal Decree." On these doctrines the Reformed tradition is consciously and explicitly Augustinian.
The Trinity and the doctrine of God
The Latin doctrine of the Trinity — one divine essence, three real personal subsistences distinguished by their eternal relations of origin (the Father unbegotten, the Son eternally begotten, the Spirit eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son) — receives in De Trinitate the most ambitious patristic Latin treatment. Augustine is also one of the principal sources for the Western filioque: the conviction that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, which became a permanent doctrinal difference with the Eastern Orthodox churches after the eleventh century. The Reformed Trinitarianism of Calvin's Institutes, the Belgic Confession (Articles 8–11), and the Westminster Confession (Chapter 2) stands explicitly in this Augustinian tradition. See The Trinity.
The two cities and the theology of history
Augustine's City of God bequeathed to Western Christianity a particular shape of historical theology: history is the running together of two cities, distinguishable by their loves, in which the church on pilgrimage moves through (but is not identified with) every passing political order. No earthly empire — not even the explicitly Christian Roman Empire of Augustine's own day — can be identified with the kingdom of God; every earthly polity is provisional and judged by the Word; the only enduring city is the city whose builder and maker is God. This Augustinian frame underlies the Reformed reluctance to baptise any political programme as the gospel, the Reformed insistence that the institutional church and the civil magistrate have distinct (though related) callings, and the Reformed eschatological caution about over-realised political triumph.
Scripture and the rule of love
In On Christian Doctrine Augustine sets out the principles that have governed Reformed interpretation ever since: Scripture interprets Scripture (obscure passages are read in the light of clearer ones); the rule of faith (the church's confession of the gospel) bounds legitimate readings; the goal of all valid interpretation is the increase of love for God and neighbour; the original languages are the indispensable foundation of accurate exegesis; the moral and spiritual preparation of the interpreter matters as much as his technical equipment. Where Augustine's own practice sometimes drifted into allegorical excess (especially on Genesis), the Reformation pruned that excess by stricter attention to the literal-historical sense, but did so working with — not against — the hermeneutical principles Augustine himself had set out.
5. The hard places — read honestly
Augustine was not infallible, and the Reformed tradition does him no honour by pretending otherwise. The areas below are the principal places where the Reformation, applying Augustine's own principle (Scripture as the supreme rule), found that he needed to be corrected, balanced, or rejected. Each is treated more fully on its own dedicated page; the goal here is honest summary.
The defence of coercion against the Donatists
Augustine's long quarrel with the Donatist schism in North Africa drove him, late in his career, to defend imperial coercion against the schismatics — citing Luke 14:23 ("compel them to come in") in support of using state force to bring Donatists back into the catholic communion. Modern Reformed Christians do not defend this position; we judge it by the same Scripture Augustine himself raised above all human authority, and recognise it as a failure of the patristic church's still-incomplete grasp of the proper limits of civil power in matters of conscience. The seventeenth-century recovery of evangelical convictions about religious liberty — Roger Williams, John Owen, the early English Baptists, and eventually the American constitutional settlement — is the long Protestant repentance for this Augustinian and later medieval mistake.
The drift toward an over-realised sacramental theology
Augustine's mature theology of the sacraments — that they are signs that effect what they signify, that baptism is the ordinary instrument by which God regenerates the elect, that the Lord's Supper truly conveys the body and blood of Christ to those who receive in faith — was nuanced and (in many places) carefully qualified. But two strands in his thought, later detached from their Augustinian qualifications, fed the medieval drift toward an ex opere operato sacramentalism the Reformation had to correct: the tight connection of baptism with the remission of original guilt (which, in the medieval extension, made baptism necessary for salvation in a way the Reformers would dispute), and the conviction that the Eucharistic elements truly bear the body and blood of Christ (the seeds, in late medieval hands, of the doctrine of transubstantiation). The Reformation did not invent these correctives out of nothing; it drew on the more carefully qualified strand of Augustine himself, against the medieval extensions. The Reformed sacramental theology of the Belgic Confession (Articles 33–35) and the Westminster Confession (Chapters 27–29) is recognisably Augustinian in structure while clear where Augustine himself was too brief.
The conflation of justification and sanctification
Augustine used the Latin iustificatio to cover both the imputation of righteousness to the believer (the Reformation's "justification" proper) and the actual moral renewal of the believer by the Spirit (the Reformation's "sanctification"). For Augustine the two were inseparable aspects of the one work of grace, and his usage was internally coherent. But the medieval reception of his vocabulary, especially through Peter Lombard and the schoolmen, increasingly read iustificatio as a process of moral renewal effected by infused habits of grace cooperating with the will — and lost the forensic and declarative character of justification that Paul presses in Romans 4 and Galatians 3. The Reformation, on Augustine's own ground (the supremacy of Scripture, the apostle Paul's exegesis), sharpened the distinction his vocabulary had blurred. Reformed justification — God's gracious imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer, received by faith alone, complete the moment faith is given — is not anti-Augustinian; it is Augustinian theology refined by stricter Pauline exegesis. See Soteriology.
Allegorical and Neoplatonic excesses
Augustine inherited from the Alexandrian school and from his early Neoplatonic formation a tendency to read certain biblical narratives (especially the early chapters of Genesis) in heavily allegorical or symbolic terms, and his philosophical vocabulary sometimes shows the marks of his pre-Christian Platonist training. His mature exegesis matured considerably; the late Literal Commentary on Genesis (401–415) is a far more disciplined work than the early On Genesis Against the Manichees (388–389). But the Reformation's stricter attention to the original languages, to authorial intent, to the historical and grammatical sense of the text, and to typology disciplined by the New Testament's own use of the Old, was a real correction of the patristic and medieval tendency to allegorise too freely — a tendency in which Augustine sometimes participated. See Hermeneutics.
The treatment of marriage, sexuality, and concupiscence
Augustine's views on marriage, sexuality, and concupiscence — partly shaped by his nine years as a Manichaean "hearer" and his long pre-Christian relationship with a concubine, partly shaped by the ascetic ideals of late-fourth-century Christianity, partly shaped by his anti-Pelagian polemic — are at points pastorally hard reading. He linked the transmission of original sin to the concupiscent element in sexual generation in ways the Reformed tradition has not in general followed. He elevated celibacy above marriage in a hierarchy of Christian callings the Reformation overturned by recovering vocation and the goodness of ordinary marriage and family life. The Reformed reading honours his moral seriousness about the disordering of human desire by sin, while reading him critically where his categories carry weight from his pre-Christian formation rather than from clear scriptural warrant.
The later medieval use and misuse of his name
By the late Middle Ages "Augustine" had become a name invoked by every party in every theological dispute. The genuine Augustinian conviction that grace is sovereign was preserved by some (Bradwardine in fourteenth-century England, the Augustinian-friar tradition in which Luther was formed, the late-medieval Augustinian "school of grace"), while a more semi-Pelagian theology of cooperating works flourished elsewhere under the same patron's name. Luther, an Augustinian friar, read his own order's namesake with fresh attention and concluded that medieval scholasticism had drifted far from the Augustinian doctrine of grace. Luther's recovery of justification by faith alone was, in significant measure, a recovery of Augustine against medieval Augustinianism — and Calvin saw himself as continuing the same recovery. The line "Augustine is so wholly on my side that, if I wished to write a confession of my faith, I could draw it out abundantly and to my entire satisfaction from his writings" comes from Calvin's Treatise on the Eternal Predestination of God (1552), and is a fair index of the Reformation's conscious self-understanding as standing in the Augustinian tradition against its medieval distorters.
6. Augustine's influence on Protestant and Reformed theology
The lines of influence run forward from Augustine through nearly every Western theological development. The buckets below name what the Reformation and the Reformed tradition specifically inherited from him.
Luther — the Augustinian friar who recovered him
Luther entered the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine in 1505 and remained in it until 1521. His monastic formation was Augustinian, his early lectures (on the Psalms, Romans, Galatians, Hebrews) were saturated with Augustine, and his great breakthrough on Romans 1:17 — that the righteousness of God in the gospel is the righteousness God gives by grace, not the righteousness he demands of works — was driven by Augustinian categories of grace and bondage of the will applied with new exegetical precision. The Bondage of the Will (1525), Luther's reply to Erasmus, is in its theological substance a fresh statement of Augustine against Pelagius for a new generation. Luther's late departures from Augustine — his sharper forensic understanding of justification, his rejection of monasticism and clerical celibacy, his recovery of the goodness of marriage — are corrections he believed Augustine's own principle (Scripture as supreme rule) required. See The Reformation.
Calvin — the most thoroughgoing Augustinian of the Reformation
Calvin cited Augustine in the Institutes more than any other writer outside the New Testament. The doctrine of election in Institutes Book 3 chapters 21–24, the doctrine of effectual calling, the doctrine of perseverance, the architecture of the doctrine of God, the use of the psychological analogies for the Trinity, the two-cities framework for thinking about church and state, the rule of love for biblical interpretation — all are recognisably Augustinian, refined by Calvin's exegetical and pastoral judgement. Calvin's famous self-identification with Augustine in the Treatise on the Eternal Predestination of God (1552) — "Augustine is so wholly on my side..." — names a real and conscious continuity. Where Calvin departed from Augustine — on baptism's relation to regeneration, on the proper limits of civil coercion, on the precise mechanism of justification — he did so consciously and gave his reasons from Scripture.
The Reformed confessions and the synodical inheritance
The Augustinian doctrine of grace is the soteriological backbone of every major Reformed confession. The Belgic Confession (1561) Articles 15–17 (original sin, the recovery of fallen man, the gracious election of God), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) Lord's Days 2–7 (sin, misery, deliverance, faith, election implicit), the Canons of Dort (1619) on unconditional election, particular redemption, total depravity, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints, and the Westminster Confession (1646–48) chapters 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, and 17 (the eternal decree, providence, free will, effectual calling, justification, perseverance) — these are confessional Augustinianism re-articulated in Reformation vocabulary. The Synod of Dort against the Arminian Remonstrants (1610) is the most explicit Augustinian moment of the seventeenth century: the Reformed church, on Augustine's ground and using Augustine's categories, refusing the medieval semi-Pelagian drift that Arminius's followers had revived. See Creeds and Confessions.
Western theology generally — the doctrinal grandfather of Latin Christianity
Outside the Reformed inheritance, Augustine's influence on Western Christianity is hard to overstate. Anselm of Canterbury's doctrine of God and his ontological argument are Augustinian in spirit. Bernard of Clairvaux's mysticism is Augustinian. Peter Lombard's Sentences, the medieval theological textbook, is built from Augustinian citations. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae quotes Augustine more than any other Christian writer. The Reformation's argument with Rome was, on the central doctrine of grace, an argument over who was the more faithful Augustinian. Even the doctrine of original sin as the Western church confesses it, the just-war tradition stemming from Augustine's reluctant acceptance of the legitimacy of defensive war, the Latin theology of time and creation, and the Christian theology of love (the ordo amoris, the right ordering of our loves) — all are unimaginable without him. To read the Western theological tradition is to read his footnotes for fifteen centuries. See Systematic Theology.
7. Where to start reading Augustine
Augustine's corpus is intimidatingly large. Beginners often try to start with City of God and bounce off it; the better path is below. Three principles govern the recommendations: start with the accessible, read modern translations, and keep a Reformed secondary guide nearby to help with the harder places.
A four-step reading path for beginners
- Start with the Confessions. Read it for the man, the prayer, and the conversion. Henry Chadwick's Oxford World's Classics translation is the standard accessible English version; Sarah Ruden's recent Modern Library translation is bolder and more readable for first-time readers. Plan to read it over a month, a book or two a week. Don't worry about the philosophical Books 10–13 on a first pass.
- Then sample the anti-Pelagian writings. Read On the Spirit and the Letter (412) first — it is short, biblical, and is where the Augustinian doctrine of grace gets its clearest early statement. Then On Nature and Grace (415). Both are freely available in the old Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series online; the modern New City Press Works of Saint Augustine series gives them in better translation.
- Then read parts of On Christian Doctrine. Books 1–3 on biblical interpretation are short, profound, and the foundation of Western hermeneutics. R. P. H. Green's Oxford World's Classics translation is the standard.
- Then tackle City of God selectively. Read Book 1 on the sack of Rome; Book 14 on the two loves; Books 19–22 on the goal of human life, the last judgement, and the eternal city. The whole twenty-two books are for later; these chapters give you the architecture.
Secondary literature a Reformed reader will find helpful
- Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967, revised edition 2000) — the standard scholarly biography, magisterial and humane. The single book to own if you read only one Augustine biography.
- Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (2001) — one hundred pages, by the translator of the standard English Confessions. The best short orientation.
- Gerald Bray, Augustine on the Christian Life (Crossway, 2015) — a sustained Reformed evangelical engagement with Augustine's spirituality and theology of the Christian life. Useful for the discriminating posture this page commends.
- B. B. Warfield, "Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy" (in Studies in Tertullian and Augustine, 1930) — the great Reformed historical-theological treatment of the controversy that shaped Western soteriology. Dense but rewarding.
- The Works of Saint Augustine series from New City Press (general editor John E. Rotelle, then Boniface Ramsey) — the modern English translation of the whole corpus, in progress since 1990. The reference set for serious engagement.
8. Conclusion: gratefully, and with discernment
Augustine is the doctrinal grandfather of every Reformed evangelical confession. His Confessions invented the Christian spiritual autobiography; his On the Trinity set the architecture of Latin trinitarian theology; his City of God gave the Western church its theology of history; his anti-Pelagian writings established the doctrine of grace on which the Reformation later built the recovery of sola gratia; his On Christian Doctrine framed the principles of biblical interpretation that faithful Reformed exposition still follows. To read Calvin without Augustine is to misread Calvin. To preach Reformed theology without Augustinian categories is to preach less than the Reformed confessions have always preached.
And he is not infallible. The defence of coercion against the Donatists, the over-realised baptismal theology, the conflation of justification with sanctification, the allegorical excesses, the unhelpfully harsh strand in his treatment of sexuality — these the Reformation corrected, sometimes by appeal to other strands of Augustine himself, always in the spirit of Augustine's own submission to the supreme rule of Scripture. The Reformed posture toward him is the posture he commended toward every theologian, including himself: receive him gratefully where he faithfully expounds the Word, weigh and correct him where he does not, and let him send you back to Scripture, where the truth on which both his work and ours must finally be tested is written.