The anthropology and soteriology of western Christianity were radically reinterpreted in the fifth century CE by Augustine of Hippo, who constructed a fictional ‘Pelagianism’ to delegitimise opposition to his new theology of original sin, an absolutist account of prevenient grace, and predestination interpreted as preordainment. This chapter gives an outline of the issues involved in this attempt to relocate orthodoxy, the course of events relating to Pelagius and his defence of eastern ascetic Christianity, and the afterlife of controversy over this new account of the anthropology and soteriology of Christianity.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was astonishingly prolific, writing sermons, letters, dialogues, a monastic rule, treatises on a variety of subjects, and works of scriptural exegesis, with Genesis and the Psalms being his special interests. Among his best-known works is the Confessions, which is sui generis in ancient literature: an autobiography laced with plaintive prayer, philosophical speculation, and raw self-examination. It relates a journey both spiritual and geographical, one that follows a path of lust and ambition toward conversion and baptism and from the North African countryside where Augustine was born to Carthage, Rome, and Milan, great cities of the western Roman Empire. Written in a gorgeous, protean Latin into which are woven myriad references to classical and biblical texts, the Confessions is a literary masterwork.

Augustine was plunged into the Donatist controversy upon becoming bishop of Hippo in 395. In the wake of the Diocletianic persecutions in the early fourth century, the Donatists had split from the group whom Augustine called and considered “catholics” (i.e., “worldwide Christians”), creating a schism in the North African church that lasted for well over a century. The very nature of the church was in dispute: Donatists believed that the church must retain its purity and holiness, separating itself from sinners, whereas catholics maintained that the church could tolerate the presence of sinners as long as consent was not given to their sin. Donatists believed that catholics were implicated in the sin of those who lapsed in the Diocletianic persecutions by handing over the scriptures to imperial authorities; they believed that only by retaining its purity in this way could the church guard against catholic contagion. Furthermore, they regarded any sacrament administered by a cleric in a state of sin as invalid, and accordingly former catholics entering their communion had to be baptized (for the first time, in their view).

Among his many duties as bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine (354–430) oversaw the reception of converts into the church. When newcomers to Christianity were ready to prepare for baptism, they were designated as catechumens. The catechumenate was a period of training, often lasting several years, in which newcomers learned how to live as Christians. At the beginning of each Lent, those catechumens who wished to be baptized at the upcoming Easter would submit their names and thereby formally become “petitioners” (competentes). During Lent the petitioners engaged in a number of ascetical and ritual practices designed to complete their initiation into the Christian way of life. These included fasting, undergoing periodic exorcisms, and receiving special instruction from the bishop by listening to sermons that covered a broad range of Christian doctrine and practice. Two weeks before Easter, petitioners participated in a ceremony known as the traditio symboli, the “handing over” of the creed. At this ceremony the bishop formally recited the creed, with the expectation that afterward the petitioners would memorize it. There was a similar ceremony that “handed over” the Lord’s prayer (traditio orationis). At the Easter Vigil, the petitioners would “hand back” the creed (redditio symboli) and the Lord’s prayer (redditio orationis) by reciting them before the congregation and fully participate in the Eucharistic liturgy for the first time, in the course of which they received the sacraments of initiation: baptism, chrismation, and Eucharist. During the Easter octave – the eight days from Easter Sunday to the following Sunday, counting inclusively – the newly baptized, whom Augustine called “newborns,” would attend sermons that unpacked the meaning of the sacraments they had just experienced and received at the Easter Vigil.

In his autobiographical Confessions, Augustine (354–430) recounted his own circuitous path to Christianity. When he later became bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine oversaw the reception of converts into the church. So Augustine was intimately aware of dynamics of conversion and the many forms it could take from both personal and pastoral experience. In Sermon 279, which was preached in Carthage on Sunday, June 23, 401, Augustine touches upon several facets of conversion to Christianity.

This chapter examines the role of the papacy in the history of marriage regulation in a long-term perspective. The core theme of corporeality is investigated between doctrine and practice. On the one hand, the body is a central good whose rights of use are mutually exchanged by the spouses within the framework of the marriage contract; on the other hand, it is a deadly burden, the place where the flesh manifests itself with its law that contradicts reason. In the light of this tension, the position of papal authority – in particular the power to bind and dissolve – is addressed by examining its pronouncements, especially the Decretales, conciliar legislation, and the publication of encyclicals and apostolic exhortations up to the most recent on the subject: Amoris laetitia, by Pope Francis I. Finally, some cases that have been dealt with by courts such as the Penitentiary, the Holy Office, and the Rota are examined.

The introduction looks at the different ways that the unique, but troublesome, injunction at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount for the followers of Jesus to ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt. 5.48) has been interpreted within Christian history. It looks specifically at the interpretations of John and Charles Wesley, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa and Tertullian and argues that Aquinas’ is the most sophisticated. It suggests how each reflects the influence of their particular social contexts and their radically different theological takes on humanity, while holding in common a clear distinction between human and divine perfection.

This introduction situates the book within the landscape of contemporary christology, arguing that a non-competitive christology or a “Chalcedonianism without reserve” best accounts for Christ’s human receptivity to the world. This book will develop such an account through the resources offered by Augustine of Hippo’s christology.

This essay offers an account of Thomas Aquinas’s very complex understanding of love (amor) and related concepts, such as delight (delectatio) and divinely infused charity. It acknowledges the many Platonic influences on Aquinas’s thought in these regards, influences that come to him especially through Augustine of Hippo and Pseudo-Dionysius – both of whom he occasionally criticizes, however, for adhering too closely to Platonic doctrines. Aquinas is intent upon tying all human love in some sense to nature, acknowledging that this entails that in many regards human love is necessitated. To the extent, however, that the rational appetite (the will) is involved, love is not necessitated. The divinely infused virtue of charity brings in further complications, for it is a love that is not natural but comes to a person from above: it is supernatural. And yet it too, according to Aquinas, is not wholly necessitating but affects man in a way that leaves his will free.

Chapter 1 considers Thomas’s definition of virtue as a good operative habit. To understand this definition, we must first consider how “habit” is a philosophical term that has no counterpart in ordinary English. Moreover, Thomas explains and defends this definition in light of the various authoritative definitions that are available to him, including especially definitions from Aristotle and Peter Lombard.

Chapter 5 is about the properties of virtue. These properties follow upon a virtue by the simple fact that it is a virtue. There are four such properties that seem rather loosely connected: the mean of virtue, the connection between the virtues, the order of the virtues, and the duration of virtue after this life. Despite this somewhat loose ordering, each of these properties must be studied if we are to understand Thomas’s account of virtue as a whole.

Shows how the timing of weeds’ appearance on earth preoccupied Carolingian writers, who relied on late antique authorities to make sense of it all.

That papal responses about Pelagianism belong to a specifically legal domain is a secondary conclusion of the chapter. The primary conclusion can be integrated with a central argument about the origins of the first papal jurisprudence, viz., that it was demand-driven, and that the demand was driven by uncertainty. We should not be surprised at uncertainty in late Antiquity about grace and free will when modern scholars write in such different terms about Augustine. Many modern people prefer Pelagius, but Augustine’s understanding of grace won the assent of intellectuals like Gottschalk in the ninth century, Bradwardine in the fourteenth, and Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth, and it continued to have adherents within Catholicism, even after the Council of Trent. Self-evident the solution to the argument was not. Given the violently opposed views, in this apparently purely Western controversy, it is not surprising that the apostolic see was asked for a response. Baffled by the paradox of divine omnipotence and human free will, it did what it would do in subsequent centuries: step back from acceptance of Augustine’s late views, without breathing a word of criticism against him.

Influence of the dualist ‘Encratite’ tradition helps account for the pessimistic colouring of Augustine’s view of human nature, but this is far from being the whole story, in which a turning point was his attempt to explain what it could mean to say that God hated Esau. The sacred books which both Augustine and Pelagius accepted without question could bear either of their probably honest interpretations of grace. Even modern scholars can react strongly in opposite directions to this fifth-century controversy, on a spectrum from barely concealed dislike of Augustine’s idea of grace to apparently heartfelt eloquence in presenting it. While twenty-first-century society is comfortable with pluralism, at least on these topics, fifth-century Christianity was not. Contradictory certainties must have generated both uncertainty and unease among those not committed to either side.

This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.