Augustine in His Own Words
Introduction xiii
starting point. To seek the complete Augustine, we will have to venture into his complete works, his sprawling opera omnia. To do so much in so few pages requires balancing breadth and brevity.
What is that breadth? Well, in 426, near the end of his career, Augustine catalogued his lifetime's work in a treatise entitled Reconsiderations (Retractationes). In it, he lists a staggering 93 books! (And before he died in 430, he authored a few more). Some of these are what we would now call essays, but many others are books of enormous length. The City of God (De civitate Dei) alone stretches out, in standard English translations, to nearly 1500 pages. His final book, Against Julian, an Unfinished Work (Contra Julianum opus imperfectum), is over 800 pages and, as the title indicates, was left incomplete. Augustine never got around to cataloguing his nearly 300 letters (published recently in four volumes). Nor did he catalogue his nearly 600 Sermons to the People (Sermones ad populum, published recently in eleven volumes), his 124 sermons on John's Gospel (In Johannis evangelium tractatus, published in five volumes), nor his sermons on each of the 150 Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos, published in six volumes). All told, his surviving corpus is the largest of any ancient author.
Augustine's eloquent long-windedness overwhelms not only newcomers, but even experts, both ancient and modern. Possidius of Calama, Augustine's good friend and earliest biographer, knew how daunting the task could be. Soon after Augustine's death, Possidius put together his own comprehensive catalogue of Augustine's works, what he called the Indiculum, "the little index."7 Possidius too felt overwhelmed and solemnly pronounced on the impossibility of mastering Augustine's output: "So many articles were dictated and published by Augustine, and so many topics discussed in church, written down and amended, either against various heretics or expounded from the canonical books for the edification of the Church's holy sons and daughters, that scarcely any student could read and know them all."8 A few centuries later, Isidore of Seville put it more bluntly: that anyone who claimed to have read the entire corpus of Augustine was a liar.9
It is a daunting prospect, therefore, to try and survey so much and to do it so briefly. This book assembles a modest but wide-ranging harvest of Augustinian texts and collects them into ten chapters. Older anthologies used to
7. For the text of the Indiculum, see Wilhelm Geerlings, ed., Possidius: Vita Augustini, AOW (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005), 114–37. For a discussion, see François Dolbeau, "La survie des œuvres d'Augustin: Remarques sur l'Indiculum attribué à Possidius et sur la bibliothèque d'Anségise," Augustin et la prédication en Afrique: Recherches sur divers sermons authentiques, apocryphes ou anonymes, CEASA 179 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 2005), 475–94.
8. Possidius, Vita s. Augustini 18 (Geerlings, 62); trans. Muller, FOTC 15:95–96. 9. Isidore of Seville, Versus [in Bibliotheca] VII (CCL 113A:219).