A year ago I was assigned Augustine’s Confessions, Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo, and James O’Donnell’s Augustine: A New Biography for homework and, as you might expect, it was one of the more enjoyable homeworks with which I’ve ever been tasked. Brown’s biography, in my mind, is as almost required as Augustine’s Confessions themselves. I wholly disliked O’Donnell’s views on Augustine, although reading him in the context of the other two certainly did him no favors. After that assignment, I ordered the Loeb Classical Library text of Augustine’s letters. I’ve read a few letters here and there, but there are a couple of good quotations from Baxter’s introduction as well that highlight just how significant Augustine’s achievements against Pelagius are for us (emphasis mine):
Party deriving from those Christological heresies which regarded Jesus as a sinless man inhabited by the divine Logos and so promoted to the dignity of being God, and partly drawing upon the Stoic doctrine of human perfectibility and of virtue as the life according to nature, Pelagianism was an outbreak of paganism within the Church which threatened not only to blot out that condescension of God to man that makes all religion something more than mere ethics, but also to deny that fundamental doctrine of Christianity, the necessity and the power of the Atonement. (p. xxiii)
If his [Augustine's] views have not found universal acceptance in detail, those which he attacked have been with one accord rejected, though they are ever ready to return to favour as often as men lose their sense of the reality of sin and the Church fails to insist upon the cardinal need of redemption. (p. xxiv)
There’s nothing like looking at the Latin text of one of Augustine’s letters, though, to make you feel like you’ve done absolutely nothing in teaching yourself a language.
