This article explores a possible tension in Augustine’s thought between his response to the misconduct of clergy, which stressed swift discipline, and his anti-Donatist theology of sacraments, which emphasized the efficacy of sacraments apart from the moral worthiness of the clergy. I identify five principles that Augustine followed in his handling of clerical misconduct: 1) Decisive action that usually resulted in removal of the offenders from ministry; 2) concern for the rights of the victim over clerical privilege; 3) a just hearing for the accused clergyman; 4) concern for transparency in all proceedings; 5) personal accountability of the bishop for the behavior of his clergy. I conclude by noting several aspects of Augustine’s anti-Donatist ecclesiology and sacramental theology that help to resolve the apparent tension.

Epistula 151 shows Augustine trying to exert pressure on a high-ranking imperial official from his position outside of the senatorial elite. The aristocrat Caecilianus had written a letter, now lost, chastising Augustine for his lack of correspondence. Augustine’s reply begins and ends according to typical epistolary conventions. The heart of the letter, however, narrates Augustine’s harrowing experience of the arrest and execution of the brothers Marcellinus and Apringius by the imperial commander Marinus. The profound spiritual contrast between villain and victims has the potential to damage Caecilianus’s reputation, forcing him into a corner. He can only agree with Augustine and act accordingly.

This paper explores changing attitudes toward novelty in early Christianity by focusing on a case study: Augustine of Hippo. It demonstrates that Augustine develops an unapologetically Christian version of the argument from antiquity, unapologetically Christian in that he redefines the very meaning of antiquity in terms of proximity to Christ and in that he relocates the argument from antiquity from the realm of apologetics, where it had become a stock weapon in the arsenal of his predecessors, to the realm of intramural Christian debate. In the process, Augustine relativized temporal measures of “novelty” and “antiquity” and recalibrated the meaning of these terms theologically, with reference to Christ.

In St. Augustine’s society, men’s tears were not considered a sign of weakness, but an expression of strong feeling. Tears might be occasional, prompted by incidents such as those Augustine described in the first books of his Confessiones. Or they might accompany a deep crisis, such as his experience of conversion. Possidius, Augustine’s contemporary biographer, reported that on his deathbed Augustine wept copiously and continuously. This essay endeavors to understand those tears, finding, primarily but not exclusively in Augustine’s later writings, descriptions of his practice of meditation suggesting that a profound and complex range of emotions from fear and repentance to gratitude, love, rest in beauty, and delight in praise richly informed Augustine’s last tears.

This article argues that Augustine’s understanding of the internal dynamics of number, order, and weight as they pertain to corporeal creatures supplies the basis for an analogy which characterizes the process of the soul’s reformation. In other words, Augustine understands the soul’s simplicity in an analogous manner to the simplicity of corporeal creatures, and the simplicity of corporeal creatures is determined by the relations between number, order, and weight. This analogy shows that Augustine conceives of the soul as a composite entity with different loves as its constituent parts. In the process of reformation, the soul acquires an ordered disposition as those loves become more like one another. By virtue of this ordered disposition, the soul also acquires a greater degree of integration or number because the likeness of weight among its constituent parts allows the soul to move as a unity toward God as its final end.

In this article, I build upon Jean-Albert Vinel’s account of Augustine’s “liturgical argument” against the Pelagians by exploring how and why Augustine uses both the givenness of the practice of infant baptism and its ritual components as evidence for his theological conclusions in opposition to those of the Pelagians. First, I explore infant baptism in the Roman North African Church before and during Augustine’s ministry. Second, I interpret Augustine’s rhetorical adaptation of the custom in his attempt to delineate the defining characteristics of Catholic Christianity in the early fifth century. I show how Augustine mobilizes his belief in the efficacy of the Church’s practice of infant baptism to make explicit a boundary marker of “Catholic” Christianity, which was long implicit in the practice itself. Perceiving the consequences of Pelagianism, Augustine organizes his anti-Pelagian soteriology around the central node of infant baptism, the most theologically and rhetorically strategic means by which he could refute the Pelagian heresy and underwrite what he understood to be the traditional vision of sin and salvation evident in the baptismal rite.

In this article, I explore how Augustine uses sermonic rhetoric to bring about the transfiguration of Babylon, the city of humankind, into Jerusalem, the city of God. Focusing on Enarratio in Psalmum 147, I show how Augustine situates his audience between two spectacles, the Roman theater and games and the eschatological vision of God. Augustine seeks to turn his hearers’ eyes and hearts from the one spectacle to the other, from the love of this world to love of the next. In the process, Augustine wages battle on two fronts: he criticizes pagan Roman culture, on the one hand, and Donatist Christian separatism and perfectionism, on the other. Through his preaching, Augustine stages yet another spectacle, the history of God’s mercy and love, whereby God affirmed the world’s goodness by using it as the means of healing and transfiguration. Indeed, Augustine does not simply depict the spectacle of salvation; he seeks to make his hearers into that spectacle by exhorting them to practice mercy, thereby inscribing them into the history of God’s love and helping gradually transfigure them into the heavenly Jerusalem.

This article argues that De trinitate advocates a process of “reading” God through metaphor. For Augustine, as for Plotinus, human beings understand God (to the degree that this is possible) not by analyzing him rationally but by seeing him through the metaphor of the human mind. But unlike Plotinus, Augustine claims that the imago dei, with its triadic structure of memory, understanding, and will, serves as metaphor only to the extent that it experiences Christ’s redemptive illumination. The act of metaphor is a kind of interior “reading” during which the mind reads the imago dei as a mental text, interprets this text through Christ’s aid, and is simultaneously transformed into a better image.