Christianity · Christian mysticism · Catholicism · Neoplatonism
Augustine of Hippo
354 – 430Historically documented person
North African rhetorician, philosopher and bishop (354–430). After years of Manichaeism and scepticism, reading the Platonists and hearing Ambrose led him to conversion in Milan in 386. Bishop of Hippo for thirty-four years, he wrote more than ninety works (the Confessions, The City of God, On the Trinity) as well as hundreds of letters and sermons, and fought Manichaeans, Donatists and Pelagians. His teaching on grace, time, inwardness and the two cities shaped Western theology and philosophy.
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El retrato más antiguo de Agustín (fresco de Letrán, s. VI) · Public domain
In their words
«You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.»Confesiones I,1,1
Their central idea
Inwardness (redi in te ipsum): The Augustinian road to truth runs through the interior: 'do not go outside, return into yourself; truth dwells in the inner man' (De vera religione 39.72).
See in context
Biography
5 min read
An African from Thagaste
Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste, a municipality of the Roman province of Numidia that is today Souk Ahras, in Algeria. His father, Patricius, belonged to the local curial class without being rich and remained a pagan until shortly before his death; his mother, Monica, was a Christian of intense faith whose figure dominates the Confessions. The family made sacrifices so that their gifted son could study grammar at Madauros and rhetoric at Carthage, with help from Romanianus, a wealthy fellow citizen. Almost everything we know of those years comes from Augustine himself, who narrated them two decades later with a confessional and theological purpose that demands careful reading.
At Carthage, around 371, he entered a stable union with a woman whose name he never wrote down; their son Adeodatus was born around 372. At nineteen, reading Cicero's Hortensius, now lost, set him on fire with the love of wisdom; the Latin Bible, by contrast, struck him as crude. For nine years he was a hearer among the Manichaeans, a dualist religion that promised a rational explanation of evil without demanding faith.
Carthage, Rome, Milan
He taught rhetoric at Thagaste and Carthage, where he wrote his first book, De pulchro et apto, already lost in his own lifetime. Disappointment with Faustus of Milevis, the Manichaean bishop who could not answer his questions, cooled his allegiance. In 383 he left for Rome and in 384, with the backing of the prefect Symmachus, obtained the official chair of rhetoric at Milan, then the seat of the imperial court.
In Milan he heard Bishop Ambrose, whose allegorical exegesis showed him that the Old Testament could be read without the Manichaean objections, and he read, in Marius Victorinus's translation, the 'books of the Platonists': treatises of Plotinus and probably of Porphyry. That reading gave him what he had sought for years: the idea of a spiritual and unchangeable reality, and of evil as the privation of good rather than a substance. His mother, who had followed him, arranged a suitable marriage, and his companion of fifteen years was sent back to Africa; Augustine describes it as a wound that never closed.
Conversion and Cassiciacum
In August 386, in a garden in Milan, he heard, by his own account, a child's voice repeating 'take up and read'; he opened Paul's letters and read Romans 13:13–14. Pierre Courcelle showed that the scene has a deliberate literary shaping; that there was a decisive crisis and a renunciation of career and marriage nobody disputes. Augustine withdrew with his mother, his son, his brother Navigius and a few pupils to the estate of Cassiciacum, in the Brianza north of Milan, where he wrote philosophical dialogues (Against the Academics, On the Happy Life, On Order, the Soliloquies) that show a Christian Neoplatonist still very confident in the power of reason.
Ambrose baptised him together with Adeodatus and his friend Alypius at the Easter vigil of 387. On the journey back to Africa, Monica died at Ostia a few days after a conversation with her son at a window which the Confessions turn into one of the summits of Western mysticism.
Hippo
Back at Thagaste in 388, he founded with his friends a community of ascetic life. Adeodatus died shortly afterwards. In 391, passing through Hippo Regius, a busy port on the Numidian coast, he was seized by the faithful and the aged bishop Valerius ordained him priest almost by force. In 395 or 396 he was consecrated coadjutor bishop and soon succeeded Valerius. For thirty-four years he was pastor of a middling city: he preached several times a week, judged lawsuits in the episcopal court, administered church property, ransomed slaves and travelled to the councils of Carthage. Around 397 he began the Confessions, in which a newly consecrated bishop sets out before God and his readers what he had been and what he was.
Three controversies
Much of his work is polemical. Against the Manichaeans, whom he had known from the inside, he defended the goodness of creation and free will. Against the Donatists (the majority church in large parts of Africa, which saw itself as the church of the pure martyrs) he held that the validity of the sacraments does not depend on the holiness of the minister, and after the conference of Carthage in 411 he accepted, with arguments posterity has contested, that imperial power should coerce dissenters. Against Pelagius and later Julian of Eclanum he argued that human beings, wounded by original sin, cannot will the good without grace, and pressed this thesis into a doctrine of predestination that already in his lifetime troubled the monks of Hadrumetum and Provence.
The City of God and the Trinity
The sack of Rome by Alaric's Goths in 410 shook the Empire and revived the pagan charge that abandoning the gods had brought ruin. Augustine answered between 413 and 426 with the twenty-two books of The City of God: a critique of Roman religion and history and a theology of history as the coexistence of two cities founded on two loves. In parallel he wrote the fifteen books On the Trinity, which seek in the human mind (memory, understanding and will) an image of the triune God, and the twelve books of the literal commentary on Genesis.
Revising his own work
Around 426–427, at seventy-two, he designated the priest Eraclius as his successor and undertook a task without precedent: to reread and correct his books in chronological order. The Retractationes review ninety-three works in two hundred and thirty-two books; the letters and sermons were left out. Possidius of Calama, his disciple and first biographer, added to the Life an Indiculum listing also the treatises, letters and sermons kept in the library of Hippo. No ancient author has left us so complete a catalogue of himself.
The siege
In 429 Genseric's Vandals crossed from Hispania to Africa and in the spring of 430 they laid siege to Hippo. Augustine fell ill with fever in the third month of the siege. According to Possidius, he had the penitential psalms copied, had them hung on the wall facing his bed and read them weeping; ten days before his death he asked that nobody come in except the doctors and whoever brought his food. He died on 28 August 430. He made no will because, a poor man of God, he had nothing to leave; he did ask that the church library and all his books be carefully preserved.
The legacy
Few authors have shaped a civilisation so deeply. Medieval Latin theology, the Protestant Reformation and Jansenism all recognised themselves as Augustinian; Descartes's readers saw in 'if I am mistaken, I exist' a precedent of the cogito; Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux with the Confessions in his pocket; Wittgenstein opened the Philosophical Investigations with a passage of his and Hannah Arendt devoted her doctoral thesis to him. His Rule still governs religious orders. That he was also the theorist of religious coercion and of a sombre anthropology of sexuality belongs to the same legacy, and explains why he remains an interlocutor rather than a statue.
Sources: Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Londres: Faber & Faber, 1967; nueva edición con epílogo, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Trad. esp.: Agustín de Hipona. Madrid: Acento, 2001. · Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. · Posidio de Calama. Vita Augustini y Operum S. Augustini elenchus (Indiculum). Ed. A. Wilmart, «Operum S. Augustini Elenchus a Possidio eiusdem discipulo Calamensi episcopo digestus», en Miscellanea Agostiniana II. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1931, pp. 149–233; Vita ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino. Milán: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, 1975. · Agustín de Hipona. Retractationum libri II. Ed. Almut Mutzenbecher. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 57. Turnhout: Brepols, 1984. · Fitzgerald, Allan D. (dir.). Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999 (trad. esp.: Diccionario de San Agustín. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2001).
Timeline
A life, year by year
Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.
November 13, 354age 0Tagaste (Numidia)
Birth
Aurelius Augustinus is born, son of Patricius, a member of the local curia, and of Monica, a Christian. He gives the date himself in De beata vita 1.6.
DocumentedPosidio de Calama. Vita Augustini y Operum S. Augustini elenchus (Indiculum). Ed. A. Wilmart, «Operum S. Augustini Elenchus a Possidio eiusdem discipulo Calamensi episcopo digestus», en Miscellanea Agostiniana II. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1931, pp. 149–233; Vita ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino. Milán: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, 1975.
After their death
- 1298Doctor of the Church
- 1981The Divjak letters
- c. 1990 – 1996The Dolbeau sermons
November 13, 354 · age 0
Birth
Aurelius Augustinus is born, son of Patricius, a member of the local curia, and of Monica, a Christian. He gives the date himself in De beata vita 1.6.
Documented
c. 370 – 371 · age 16
Studies of rhetoric at Carthage
After an idle year at Thagaste, he goes to Carthage with Romanianus's support. There he begins his union with the mother of his son.
Documented
c. 372 · age 18
Adeodatus is born
His only son, Adeodatus, is born of a companion whose name Augustine never wrote.
Probable
c. 373 · age 19
The Hortensius and the Manichaeans
Reading Cicero's Hortensius awakens his philosophical vocation; soon after he becomes a Manichaean hearer, which he will remain for nine years (Conf. 3.4.7; 4.1.1).
Documented
383 · age 29
Faustus of Milevis and the journey to Rome
His conversation with the Manichaean bishop Faustus disappoints him. He sails for Rome without his mother's knowledge.
Documented
384 · age 30
Chair of rhetoric at Milan
On the recommendation of the prefect Symmachus he obtains the official chair of rhetoric at Milan. He hears Ambrose preach.
Documented
386 · age 31
The books of the Platonists
He reads Neoplatonic treatises (Plotinus, probably Porphyry) in Marius Victorinus's translation, which transform his idea of God and of evil (Conf. 7.9.13).
Documented
August 386 · age 31
The garden scene: 'take up and read'
Conversion crisis narrated in Confessions 8.12.29. He gives up his chair and the planned marriage.
Documented
c. 386 – 387 · age 32
Retreat at Cassiciacum
Philosophical retreat with his mother, son and pupils; he writes Contra Academicos, De beata vita, De ordine and the Soliloquia.
Documented
April 387 · age 32
Baptised by Ambrose
He is baptised at the Easter vigil, together with Adeodatus and Alypius.
Documented
387 · age 33
The vision at Ostia and Monica's death
Contemplative conversation with his mother at a window (Conf. 9.10) and Monica's death a few days later.
Documented
388 · age 34
Community at Thagaste
After a stay in Rome he returns to Africa and organises with his friends an ascetic common life in his family home.
Documented
391 · age 37
Ordained priest
The faithful of Hippo present him to Bishop Valerius, who ordains him priest against his will (Possidius, Life 4).
Documented
c. 395 – 396 · age 41
Bishop of Hippo
Consecrated coadjutor bishop to Valerius, whom he soon succeeds.
Documented
c. 397 – 401 · age 43
The Confessions
Writing of the thirteen books of the Confessions (date debated between 397 and 401).
Probable
June 411 · age 56
Conference of Carthage against the Donatists
Great debate between Catholic and Donatist bishops presided over by the tribune Marcellinus; Augustine is the main Catholic spokesman and summarises its acts in the Breviculus collationis.
Documented
c. 413 – 426 · age 59
The City of God
After the sack of Rome in 410 he begins the twenty-two books of The City of God, completed around 426.
Documented
May 418 · age 63
Condemnation of Pelagius
The general council of Carthage condemns Pelagian theses, which Augustine had been refuting since 411–412.
Documented
September 26, 426 · age 71
Names his successor and begins the Retractationes
Before the people he designates the priest Eraclius as successor (Letter 213) and devotes himself to revising his works: the Retractationes record ninety-three works in two hundred and thirty-two books.
Documented
August 28, 430 · age 75
Death during the Vandal siege
He dies in the third month of the Vandal siege of Hippo, according to Possidius's testimony (Life 28–31).
Documented
1298
Doctor of the Church
Boniface VIII recognises Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Gregory the Great as Doctors of the Church.
Documented
1981
The Divjak letters
Johannes Divjak publishes in CSEL 88 twenty-nine unknown letters found in manuscripts at Marseille and Paris.
Documented
c. 1990 – 1996
The Dolbeau sermons
François Dolbeau identifies in a codex of the Mainz city library twenty-six sermons unknown or complete for the first time, edited between 1991 and 1996.
Documented
Works
Essential works
The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.
Written work · c. 397
Confessions
Confessionum libri XIII
Thirteen books addressed to God in the second person. The first nine narrate Augustine's life from infancy to his conversion in 386, his baptism and Monica's death at Ostia: the theft of the pears, the death of his friend, Manichaeism, Ambrose, the books of the Platonists, the garden in Milan. Book X examines memory and the temptations of the bishop who is writing; book XI is a meditation on time as the distension of the soul; books XII and XIII interpret the first chapter of Genesis. Confessio means both acknowledgement of guilt and praise; the unity of the book, much debated by critics, lies in that double confession. It is the first great introspective autobiography of the West and one of the most read books of late antiquity.
11 editions · amazon.com
Written work · c. 413
The City of God
De civitate Dei contra paganos libri XXII
A monumental answer, in twenty-two books written between 413 and 426, to the pagans who blamed Christianity for the sack of Rome in 410. The first ten books dismantle Roman civic religion, Varro's theology and the Platonists' cult of demons; the remaining twelve narrate the origin, course and ends of two cities (the earthly, founded on love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly, founded on love of God to the contempt of self) which are intermingled in history until the judgement. Book XIX, on peace and order, founded medieval Christian political theory. It is the West's first great philosophy of history.
5 editions · amazon.com
Written work · c. 400
On the Trinity
De Trinitate libri XV
Fifteen books composed over some twenty years (c. 399–c. 420), published after an unfinished copy had circulated without permission. The first seven expound Trinitarian doctrine from Scripture and discuss the missions of the Son and the Spirit and the language of relations; the last eight seek in the human being, God's image, analogies of the Trinity: lover, beloved and love; mind, knowledge and love; and above all memory, understanding and will. The work is at once a dogmatic treatise and an exercise in inward ascent, and its so-called psychological analogy dominated Latin Trinitarian theology up to Thomas Aquinas and beyond.
4 editions · amazon.com
Written work · c. 396
On Christian Teaching
De doctrina christiana libri IV
A manual for interpreting and preaching Scripture. Begun around 396–397 and left off at book III, 25.35, it was completed by Augustine in 426–427 while writing the Retractationes. Book I distinguishes between things to be enjoyed (frui) and things to be used (uti) and makes charity the key to all reading; books II and III set out a theory of signs and rules for resolving ambiguities, with the appropriation of pagan learning as 'the gold of Egypt'; book IV adapts Ciceronian rhetoric to Christian preaching. It was the programme of Christian school culture throughout the Middle Ages.
2 editions · amazon.com
Written work · c. 421
Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Charity
Enchiridion ad Laurentium de fide et spe et caritate
A short compendium of the Christian faith written around 421–422 at the request of one Laurentius, who wanted a handbook. Organised according to the three theological virtues, it comments on the Creed (faith), the Lord's Prayer (hope) and charity as the end of the commandment. It summarises concisely Augustine's mature positions on creation, evil as privation, original sin, grace, predestination, purgation and resurrection, and was for centuries the most read synthesis of his theology.
0 editions · amazon.com
Later compilation · c. 392
Expositions of the Psalms
Enarrationes in Psalmos
The largest of his biblical commentaries: expositions of the hundred and fifty psalms composed between c. 392 and c. 422, some dictated and others preached before the people and taken down by stenographers, including thirty-two sermons on Psalm 118. Augustine reads the psalms as the voice of the whole Christ, head and body, singing and groaning in the pilgrim Church. It is the work in which the preacher is best heard and his spirituality of desire and praise is expressed most freely. The title Enarrationes is Erasmus's.
1 edition · amazon.es
Later compilation · c. 406
Tractates on the Gospel of John
In Iohannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV
One hundred and twenty-four homilies on the fourth Gospel, the first preached at Hippo around 406–407 and the later ones dictated for reading at subsequent dates, perhaps until 419–420. They combine verse-by-verse exegesis with anti-Donatist and anti-Arian polemic and with a theology of the Word and of inwardness that has shaped the Latin reading of John. They contain famous formulas on the sacrament as 'visible word' and on the Church as Christ's body.
0 editions · amazon.com
Correspondence · c. 386
Letters
Epistulae
A corpus of about three hundred surviving letters (the Maurist series numbers 270, including letters from his correspondents), to which were added in 1981 the twenty-nine letters discovered by Johannes Divjak. Written between 386 and 430, they include the correspondence with Jerome on biblical translation and the useful lie, with Paulinus of Nola, with imperial officials such as Marcellinus, Macedonius or Boniface, letter-treatises such as Letter 147 on seeing God or 187 on God's presence, and pastoral matters: slaves sold by traffickers, unruly bishops, widows and virgins. They are the most direct source for the bishop's daily life.
1 edition · amazon.es
Later compilation · c. 391
Sermons
Sermones ad populum
About five hundred authentic sermons preached between 391 and 430 at Hippo, Carthage and other African cities and taken down by stenographers (Possidius reckons he preached several thousand). The Maurist series (1683) numbers 396, to which have been added the finds of Morin, Lambot, Étaix, the twenty-six Dolbeau sermons from Mainz (1990) and the six from Erfurt (2008). Arranged by tradition into sermons on the Old and New Testaments, for the liturgical seasons, on saints and on various topics, they show the oral Augustine: dialogical, playful with words and attentive to his audience's reactions.
1 edition · amazon.es
Complete works (139)
Homilies on the First Epistle of John
407
Augustine of Hippo
Retractations
The Conscious LibraryRetractations
426
Augustine of Hippo
On the Beautiful and the Fitting
The Conscious LibraryOn the Beautiful and the Fitting
380
Against the Academics
386
On the Happy Life
386
On Order
386
Augustine of Hippo
Soliloquies
The Conscious LibrarySoliloquies
387
On the Immortality of the Soul
387
Augustine of Hippo
On Grammar
The Conscious LibraryOn Grammar
387
On Dialectic
387
Augustine of Hippo
On Music
The Conscious LibraryOn Music
388
Augustine of Hippo
On the Morals of the Catholic Church and of the Manichaeans
The Conscious LibraryOn the Morals of the Catholic Church and of the Manichaeans
388
Augustine of Hippo
On the Greatness of the Soul
The Conscious LibraryOn the Greatness of the Soul
388
On Free Choice of the Will
388
Augustine of Hippo
On Genesis against the Manichaeans
The Conscious LibraryOn Genesis against the Manichaeans
388
Augustine of Hippo
On the Teacher
The Conscious LibraryOn the Teacher
389
On True Religion
390
On the Advantage of Believing
391
Augustine of Hippo
On the Two Souls
The Conscious LibraryOn the Two Souls
391
Augustine of Hippo
Debate with Fortunatus the Manichaean
The Conscious LibraryDebate with Fortunatus the Manichaean
392
On Faith and the Creed
393
Augustine of Hippo
Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis
The Conscious LibraryUnfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis
393
On the Lord's Sermon on the Mount
394
Augustine of Hippo
Psalm against the Party of Donatus
The Conscious LibraryPsalm against the Party of Donatus
393
Quotations
Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.
You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
VerifiedConfesiones I,1,1
Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (3)
«In essentials, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.»
It appears in no work of Augustine. The formula 'in necessariis unitas, in non necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas' comes from the irenic treatise Paraenesis votiva pro pace ecclesiae (1626) by the Lutheran theologian Peter Meiderlin (Rupertus Meldenius), and has been attributed to Augustine since the nineteenth century.
«He who sings prays twice.»
The proverbial form ('qui cantat, bis orat') is not found in his works. It is usually linked to Enarrationes in Psalmos 72.1, where Augustine says that whoever sings praise not only praises but praises joyfully, and to his reflection on singing in Confessions X.33.49–50; the abbreviated formula is later.
«The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.»
A modern attribution with no basis in the Augustinian corpus or the manuscript tradition; it circulates in quotation anthologies and travel advertising without reference to any work.
Last words
There are no verifiable records of their last words.
No last words survive. Possidius of Calama, witness of his last illness during the Vandal siege of Hippo, relates that Augustine had the four penitential psalms 'of David' copied, had them fixed to the wall facing his bed and read them weeping; that during the ten days before his death he asked not to be visited except by the doctors and whoever brought his food, so as to devote himself to prayer; and that he died on 28 August 430 with his limbs sound and his sight and hearing intact, in the presence of his own, who were praying (Life 31). He transmits no final sentence.
Source: Posidio de Calama. Vita Augustini y Operum S. Augustini elenchus (Indiculum). Ed. A. Wilmart, «Operum S. Augustini Elenchus a Possidio eiusdem discipulo Calamensi episcopo digestus», en Miscellanea Agostiniana II. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1931, pp. 149–233; Vita ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino. Milán: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, 1975.
Ask
What their work answers
Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.
What is the Absolute? Does God exist?
God is immutable, triune Being, more inward than one's inmost self
A personal GodStated explicitly
Augustine reaches God by a double path: that of Platonist philosophy, which teaches him to think of God as immutable, incorporeal being and eternal truth (Confessions VII), and that of Scripture, which reveals him as creator, Father and Trinity. This Being is also someone: the Confessions are written entirely in the second person and open by declaring that the heart is restless until it rests in him. God is more inward than the soul's inmost part and higher than its highest. In On the Trinity he seeks in the human mind —memory, understanding and will— an image of the three Persons. And he warns that a God who is comprehended is no longer God: the Absolute is personal, yet exceeds every concept.
Compare this question with other teachersWho am I? Is there a true self?
I am a riddle to myself; I know myself by turning inward
A created, immortal soulStated explicitly
Augustine made the self a philosophical problem: in the Confessions he says he had become a great question to himself. His answer is the soul: a spiritual substance, created, distinct from the body and destined for immortality, to which he devoted early works such as On the Immortality of the Soul. Against the sceptics he formulates a certainty prior to Descartes: if I am mistaken, I exist. In On the Trinity he analyses the mind that remembers, understands and loves itself, an image of the three Persons. But the self is not self-sufficient: the God it seeks is more inward than its inmost part. To know oneself is to discover a creature made for God and restless without him.
Compare this question with other teachersWhy do we suffer?
Evil is privation of good; we suffer from disordered love
Separation from GodStated explicitly
Augustine spent nine years among the Manichaeans, who explained evil as a substance opposed to good. His mature answer, in the Confessions and On the Nature of the Good, is that everything that exists is good and that evil is not a thing, but a privation of good. Moral evil arises from the will that turns away from the immutable Good toward lesser goods: it is disordered love. Human suffering —mortality, ignorance, concupiscence— is for him a consequence of original sin, which humanity inherits from Adam. But the restless heart is also a sign of its origin: it suffers because it is made for God.
Compare this question with other teachersWhat happens after death?
The end without end: we shall see, love and praise
Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly
Augustine awaits the resurrection of the flesh and eternal life. The City of God ends, in its book XXII, by describing that rest: there we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise, in the end that has no end. He upholds the resurrection of bodies against the Platonists who despised the flesh, and also the eternal damnation of those not saved, which he defends harshly in book XXI. Book IX of the Confessions recounts the vision shared with his mother at Ostia, days before her death, as a foretaste of that life. On the Care of the Dead justifies prayer for the departed.
Compare this question with other teachersHow is liberation or salvation attained?
Give what you command and command what you will
Through grace and loveStated explicitly
Augustine is the doctor of grace. His own conversion, narrated in book VIII of the Confessions, shows a divided will that cannot wholly will what it wills until a reading of Paul in the garden at Milan sets it free. Hence the prayer of book X: give what you command and command what you will, which scandalised Pelagius. In the Pelagian controversy he maintains that, after original sin, the human will cannot do the saving good without the grace of Christ, which precedes it, heals it and sustains it to the end; in his last works he speaks of predestination and of the gift of perseverance. The human being cooperates, but because he has first been moved.
Compare this question with other teachersIs a teacher necessary?
The only Teacher is Christ, who teaches in the inner man
The teacher is withinStated explicitly
In On the Teacher, a dialogue with his son Adeodatus, Augustine reaches a radical conclusion: human words teach nothing by themselves; at most they prompt and refer. The one who truly teaches is the Truth that dwells in the inner man, Christ, whom each person consults within. Hence, in On True Religion, the watchword is not to go outside, but to return to oneself, for truth dwells in the inner man. Yet Augustine is no individualist: he himself was a teacher and bishop, and upheld the Church's authority, to the point of writing that he would not believe the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved him to do so.
Compare this question with other teachersIs the world real?
Everything that exists is good, because God made it from nothing
A good and real creationStated explicitly
Against the Manichaeans, who saw matter as the work of an evil principle, Augustine defends the goodness of all creation: in the Confessions he concludes that all things that exist are good, and On the Nature of the Good develops the view that every nature, as nature, is good. God created the world from nothing, not from his own substance: hence the world is real, distinct from God and changeable. Augustine also meditates on time, created with the world, in book XI of the Confessions. Creatures, when questioned, answer that they are not God, but that he made them; their beauty is a voice pointing to their author.
Compare this question with other teachersWhat is love?
My weight is my love: it carries me wherever I go
Longing and unionStated explicitly
Augustine thinks of love as a force that moves the soul toward its place, as weight moves bodies: my weight is my love, he writes in the Confessions. Every human being loves; the question is what one loves and in what order. Charity is ordered love, which loves God for his own sake and everything else in God; cupidity is love that stops at creatures. Hence two loves found two cities: love of self to the contempt of God and love of God to the contempt of self. And hence too his boldest formula: love and do what you will, because from the root of love nothing but good can come.
Compare this question with other teachersAre we free, or is everything determined?
The will is free, but only grace frees it for the good
Real free willStated explicitly
Augustine wrote On Free Choice of the Will against the Manichaeans, to show that evil comes from free will and not from an evil substance: God gave the human being free will as a good, and sin is its misuse. Years later, in the controversy with Pelagius, he stressed that after the fall that will, though it still chooses, cannot effectively will the saving good without grace, which sets it free. In On Grace and Free Will he holds that both exist and do not cancel each other out. In his last works he radicalises the doctrine of predestination. Freedom is real, but full freedom is that of one who can no longer sin.
Compare this question with other teachersWhy meditate or pray?
Return to yourself, and then transcend yourself
Returning to the source of the IStated explicitly
Augustine describes the path to God as a movement inward. In On True Religion he puts it thus: do not go outside, return to yourself, truth dwells in the inner man; and if you find your nature changeable, transcend yourself as well. Book X of the Confessions roams the «vast palaces of memory» looking for where God is, and discovers that he was within while Augustine sought him outside. Prayer, moreover, is desire: in the Expositions of the Psalms he writes that desire itself is prayer, and that if desire is continuous, prayer is continuous. In the letter to Proba he teaches above all to ask for the happy life.
Compare this question with other teachersCan reason know the ultimate?
Believe in order to understand, understand in order to believe
Faith and reason help each otherStated explicitly
Augustine came to faith after passing through academic scepticism and Neoplatonism, and never stopped thinking. His formula, in sermon 43, unites the two movements: understand in order to believe, my word; believe in order to understand, the word of God. Reason prepares faith, showing that it is reasonable to believe; faith, in turn, purifies the mind and enables it to understand what it previously only accepted. Against the Academics he refutes the claim that nothing can be known with certainty. But Augustine also knows there is a limit: if you comprehend it, it is not God. On the Trinity ends by acknowledging that he has said much without reaching what he seeks.
Compare this question with other teachersWithdraw from the world or transform it?
Never so idle as to neglect others, nor so busy as to forget God
Contemplation in actionStated explicitly
Augustine dreamed of a retired life of study and prayer —he lived it at Cassiciacum and Thagaste— but was ordained priest against his will and spent more than thirty years as bishop of Hippo, preaching, judging lawsuits and engaging in controversy. In book XIX of the City of God he formulates the balance: no one should be so idle that in his leisure he does not think of his neighbour's benefit, nor so busy that he does not seek the contemplation of God; love of truth seeks holy leisure, and the necessity of charity accepts righteous work. The city of God coexists with the earthly city and makes use of its peace, though it is a pilgrim toward another homeland.
Compare this question with other teachers
Affinities & tensions
Affinities and tensions
Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.
Thinks most like
Teresa of Ávila
They agree on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · Why do we suffer?
Francis of Assisi
They agree on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · Why do we suffer?
Hildegard of Bingen
They agree on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · What happens after death?
John of the Cross
They agree on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · Why do we suffer?
Thinks most unlike
Patañjali
They clash on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · What happens after death?
Pema Chödrön
They clash on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · What happens after death?
Nāgārjuna
They clash on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · What happens after death?
Dōgen
They clash on: What is the Absolute? Does God exist? · Who am I? Is there a true self? · What happens after death?
Anecdotes and stories
Anecdotes and stories
Documentedc. 370
The stolen pears
Origin of the story: Told by Augustine himself in Confessions II.4.9–10.18. It is the only testimony of the event.
Source: Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Documented384–386
Ambrose reads in silence
Origin of the story: Confessions VI.3.3. The reading of the passage as evidence of the rarity of silent reading has been disputed, among others by B. M. W. Knox (1968).
Source: Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Testimonyagosto de 386
'Take up and read'
Origin of the story: Autobiographical account in Confessions VIII.8.19–12.30, written about eleven years later. Pierre Courcelle (1950) emphasised its literary construction (Nathanael's fig tree, the model of the Life of Antony); later scholarship accepts the real crisis and debates the degree of stylisation.
Source: Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Testimony387
The window at Ostia
Origin of the story: Confessions IX.10.23–11.28. Scholars (Courcelle, O'Donnell) have pointed out its Plotinian vocabulary; the account is the only testimony of the conversation.
Source: Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Documented391
Ordained by force
Origin of the story: Possidius, Life 4, and Augustine himself in Sermon 355.2 (preached in 425), where he recalls avoiding vacant sees.
Source: Posidio de Calama. Vita Augustini y Operum S. Augustini elenchus (Indiculum). Ed. A. Wilmart, «Operum S. Augustini Elenchus a Possidio eiusdem discipulo Calamensi episcopo digestus», en Miscellanea Agostiniana II. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1931, pp. 149–233; Vita ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino. Milán: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, 1975.
Unverifiablesin fecha
The child and the shell
Origin of the story: A medieval legend with no basis in the ancient sources. Scholars place it in late medieval preaching and exempla, where the protagonist was not always Augustine; its first written appearance could not be fixed here.
Source: Fitzgerald, Allan D. (dir.). Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999 (trad. esp.: Diccionario de San Agustín. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2001).
Testimonyagosto de 430
The psalms on the wall
Origin of the story: Possidius, Life 28–31, the eyewitness account of a disciple who lived through the siege inside Hippo.
Source: Posidio de Calama. Vita Augustini y Operum S. Augustini elenchus (Indiculum). Ed. A. Wilmart, «Operum S. Augustini Elenchus a Possidio eiusdem discipulo Calamensi episcopo digestus», en Miscellanea Agostiniana II. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1931, pp. 149–233; Vita ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino. Milán: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, 1975.
Teachings
Teachings
The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.
Inwardness (redi in te ipsum)interioridad
Christian reception of the Plotinian ascent (Enneads I.6; V.1), filtered through the reading of the 'books of the Platonists' in Milan.
Source: Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Grace and original singracia-y-pecado-original
The Pelagian controversy (411–430) and the reading of Paul (Romans, Galatians) from 394.
Source: Bonner, Gerald. St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies. Londres: SCM Press, 1963; 3.ª ed., Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2002.
The two citiesdos-ciudades
An answer to the crisis of 410 and to the Christian imperial theology of Eusebius of Caesarea and Orosius.
Source: Agustín de Hipona. De civitate Dei libri XXII. Ed. Bernhard Dombart y Alfons Kalb. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47–48. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955.
Divine illuminationiluminacion
Platonic inheritance (the Form of the Good as sun in the Republic) and an answer to Academic scepticism.
The psychological analogy of the Trinityanalogia-psicologica
Latin Trinitarian theology after Nicaea and Constantinople, in dialogue with Marius Victorinus and Plotinus.
Time as distension of the soultiempo-distensio-animi
An answer to Aristotle's physics of time as the number of motion and to Plotinus (Enneads III.7).
Evil as privation of goodmal-como-privacion
Anti-Manichaean polemic and reception of Plotinus (Enneads I.8).
Source: Lancel, Serge. Saint Augustin. París: Fayard, 1999. Trad. inglesa de Antonia Nevill, Saint Augustine. Londres: SCM Press, 2002.
Videos
Videos
Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.
05. St. Augustine's Confessions
Lecture· EN· 2012· 46 min
YaleCoursesOfficial channel
Why Study St Augustine of Hippo with John Milbank
Lecture· EN· 2016· 11 min
University of NottinghamOfficial channel
Augustine's Confessions and Language
Lecture· EN· 2017· 40 min
Villanova UniversityOfficial channel
St Augustine Lecture 2012 | 'A Tangle of Two Cities' Dr. James Wetzel
Lecture· EN· 2012· 94 min
Villanova UniversityOfficial channel
St. Augustine Lecture 2016 | Fr. Allan Fitzgerald, OSA 'Engaging the Gospel of John'
Lecture· EN· 2016· 70 min
Villanova UniversityOfficial channel
The City of God: The Philosophical Vision of St. Augustine of Hippo with Dr. Chad Pecknold
Lecture· EN· 2026· 79 min
Institute of Catholic CultureOfficial channel
Christians in Times of Catastrophe: Augustine's 'City of God'
Lecture· EN· 2020· 99 min
Lumen Christi InstituteOfficial channel
The Confessions (Pusey translation) by Saint AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO Part 1/2 | Full Audio Book
Third-party recording· EN· 2018· 624 min
LibriVox Audiobooks
Agustín de Hipona | Un Documental por Agustín Remesal | Completo
Documentary· ES· 2022· 61 min
Centro de Espiritualidad AgustinosOfficial channel
Conferencia - Conociendo más a San Agustín por Fray Enrique Eguiarte
Lecture· ES· 2018· 54 min
Recoletos TVOfficial channel
Conferencia 'La Espiritualidad de San Agustín', Fray Enrique Eguiarte
Lecture· ES· 2017· 65 min
Recoletos TVOfficial channel
7ª.-8ª.- San Agustín de Hipona
Lecture· ES· 2023· 161 min
Fundación Universitaria EspañolaOfficial channel
La Ciudad de Dios y la Ciudad de los Hombres en San Agustín
Lecture· ES· 2020· 52 min
Instituto de Ciencias Teológicas
Augustinus | Josef Schmidt
Lecture· DE· 2016· 10 min
uni auditorium – wissen online
Saint Augustin
Documentary· FR· 2012· 52 min
KTO TVOfficial channel
Gallery
Gallery
Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.
Manuscripts
Manuscripts
Manuscript witnesses and ancient texts, with their custodian and conditions of access.
LA · Semiuncial · 397–401
Confessiones (códice Sessoriano)
- Surviving witness
- Testimonio más antiguo conocido de las Confesiones (s. VI), base de las ediciones críticas modernas
- Custodian
- Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Roma · Sessor. 55
LA · Minúscula · 386–430
Epistulae (cartas Divjak)
- Surviving witness
- Dos manuscritos medievales que transmiten, junto a cartas conocidas, veintinueve cartas inéditas identificadas por Johannes Divjak en 1975
- Custodian
- Bibliothèque municipale de Marseille; Bibliothèque nationale de France, París · Marseille, BM 209; Paris, BnF lat. 16861
LA · Minúscula gótica · 391–430
Sermones (códice de Maguncia, sermones Dolbeau)
- Surviving witness
- Códice del s. XV procedente de la cartuja de Maguncia que conserva una colección africana de sermones, entre ellos veintiséis desconocidos o incompletos, identificados por François Dolbeau en 1990
- Custodian
- Stadtbibliothek Mainz · I 9
LA · Minúscula · s. V (sermones)
Sermones (códice de Erfurt)
- Surviving witness
- Manuscrito medieval en el que Isabella Schiller, Dorothea Weber y Clemens Weidmann identificaron en 2007–2008 seis sermones desconocidos
- Custodian
- Universitätsbibliothek Erfurt
Connections
Connections
Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.
Influenced by
The 'books of the Platonists' Augustine read in Milan in 386 were, at least in part, treatises of Plotinus in Marius Victorinus's Latin translation (Confessions VII.9.13). He names him in The City of God (IX.10; X.14), and his inward ascent, his theory of evil as privation and his conception of time respond to the Enneads.
Documented relation
Influenced by
Augustine did not read Greek fluently and knew Plato mainly through Cicero and the Neoplatonists; even so, in The City of God VIII he considers the Platonists the philosophers closest to Christianity and discusses the Timaeus. His theory of ideas as divine thoughts (De diversis quaestionibus 83, q. 46) Christianises Platonic doctrine.
Documented relation
Influenced by
All Augustine's work is an interpretation of the figure of Christ, whom he calls the 'inner teacher' and the 'way'; his commentaries on the Gospels (the Sermon on the Mount, the Tractates on John, the harmony of the evangelists) form the largest part of his exegesis.
Documented relation
Influenced
Teresa read the Confessions in the Castilian translation just published, at the time of her conversion in 1554, and relates in the Book of Her Life (9.7–8) that on reaching the garden scene she felt herself addressed: 'it seemed to me the Lord said it to me'.
Documented relation
Influenced
Augustine is, with Dionysius, the authority Eckhart cites most, taking up his theme of the inner man, God's image in the soul and the Trinity of the mind; the trials of Cologne and Avignon debated precisely whether his readings of Augustine were orthodox.
Documented relation
Ideas akin to
Catherine's Dialogue organises the soul's life according to the Augustinian triad of memory, understanding and will, mediated by Dominican preaching; there is no evidence she read Augustine directly, since she did not know scholarly Latin.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
Julian reflects on sin, the fall and grace within an Augustinian horizon, but her vision of sin as 'behovely' and of a God who does not blame departs from the late Augustine's rigour. There is no documented reading.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
Both embody a radical conversion transforming a worldly life, but Francis is a preacher of poverty without theological pretension, and his spirituality of creation contrasts with Augustinian inwardness. No documented relation.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
Hildegard was formed in monastic theology of Augustinian tradition and, like Augustine, wrote a theology of salvation history; but her visionary and cosmological mode is foreign to Augustinian introspection. No specific documented reading.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
The Socratic 'know thyself', which Augustine knew through Cicero, reappears transformed in his search for God through self-knowledge.
Similarity identified by analysis
Ideas akin to
Al-Ghazali's spiritual memoir (The Deliverer from Error) narrates, like the Confessions, a sceptical crisis overcome by illumination and a conversion to the contemplative life. There is no historical relation.
Similarity identified by analysis
Sources
Sources
Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.
- Wikidata, Q8018 «Agustín de Hipona / Augustine of Hippo» (P31=Q5; 228 enlaces entre wikis; P569 354-11-13, P570 430-08-28).
- Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Londres: Faber & Faber, 1967; nueva edición con epílogo, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Trad. esp.: Agustín de Hipona. Madrid: Acento, 2001.
- Agustín de Hipona. Confessionum libri XIII. Ed. Lucas Verheijen. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 27. Turnhout: Brepols, 1981. Trad. inglesa de Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
- Posidio de Calama. Vita Augustini y Operum S. Augustini elenchus (Indiculum). Ed. A. Wilmart, «Operum S. Augustini Elenchus a Possidio eiusdem discipulo Calamensi episcopo digestus», en Miscellanea Agostiniana II. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1931, pp. 149–233; Vita ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino. Milán: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, 1975.
- Agustín de Hipona. Retractationum libri II. Ed. Almut Mutzenbecher. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 57. Turnhout: Brepols, 1984.
- Fitzgerald, Allan D. (dir.). Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999 (trad. esp.: Diccionario de San Agustín. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2001).
- Mendelson, Michael. «Saint Augustine». Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (primera publicación 2000; revisiones posteriores).
- Lancel, Serge. Saint Augustin. París: Fayard, 1999. Trad. inglesa de Antonia Nevill, Saint Augustine. Londres: SCM Press, 2002.
- Agustín de Hipona. De civitate Dei libri XXII. Ed. Bernhard Dombart y Alfons Kalb. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47–48. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955.
- Dekkers, Eligius, y Aemilius Gaar. Clavis Patrum Latinorum. 3.ª ed. Turnhout: Brepols / Steenbrugge: Abbatia Sancti Petri, 1995, núms. 250–386 (Agustín).
- Divjak, Johannes (ed.). Sancti Aureli Augustini Opera: Epistolae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 88. Viena: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1981.
- Dolbeau, François. Augustin d'Hippone, Vingt-six sermons au peuple d'Afrique. París: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1996 (2.ª ed., 2009).
- Sant'Agostino – Augustinus Hipponensis. Opera omnia (texto latino de la Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana y traducción italiana, Città Nuova Editrice).
- New Advent, Fathers of the Church: textos de Agustín según Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vols. 1–8, ed. Philip Schaff. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886–1888; transcripción de Kevin Knight.
- Wikipedia en inglés, «Bibliography of Augustine of Hippo» (consultada para el cotejo de la lista de obras).
- O'Donnell, James J. Augustine: Confessions. Introduction, Text and Commentary. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 (versión electrónica en stoa.org).
- Courcelle, Pierre. Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin. París: De Boccard, 1950 (2.ª ed. ampliada, 1968).
- Bonner, Gerald. St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies. Londres: SCM Press, 1963; 3.ª ed., Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2002.
- Machielsen, John. Clavis Patristica Pseudepigraphorum Medii Aevi. Vol. I A–B: Opera homiletica; vol. II A–B: Theologica, exegetica… Turnhout: Brepols, 1990–1994 (pseudoagustinianos).
- Schiller, Isabella, Dorothea Weber y Clemens Weidmann. «Sechs neue Augustinuspredigten. Teil 1 mit Edition dreier Sermones». Wiener Studien 121 (2008), pp. 227–284; Teil 2, Wiener Studien 122 (2009), pp. 171–213.
- Verheijen, Luc. La Règle de saint Augustin. 2 vols. París: Études Augustiniennes, 1967.
- Project Gutenberg: The Confessions of St. Augustine (trad. E. B. Pusey, n.º 3296); The City of God, vols. I–II (trad. Marcus Dods, n.º 45304–45305); Confessiones (latín, n.º 33849); Writings in Connection with the Donatist Controversy (trad. J. R. King, n.º 45843).
- The Latin Library: Augustinus (Confessiones, De civitate Dei, De Trinitate y otros textos latinos).
- Open Library (Internet Archive), registros de edición consultados por ISBN para las ediciones listadas.
- Wikisource en español: Agustín de Hipona, La ciudad de Dios, trad. José Cayetano Díaz de Beyral (Madrid: Viuda de Hernando, Biblioteca Clásica, 1893).
- Rights holder
- Dominio público (obra del siglo V). Las ediciones críticas (Brepols/Corpus Christianorum, CSEL de la Academia de Viena), traducciones y aparatos modernos (BAC, New City Press, Oxford, Penguin, Cambridge, Città Nuova) están sujetos a los derechos de sus editores.
Pending confirmation
What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.
- Verificar en catálogo los ISBN de las ediciones del Corpus Christianorum y del CSEL (se citan sin ISBN) y localizar ISBN de ediciones españolas de De doctrina christiana, Enchiridion, De libero arbitrio y los diálogos de Casiciaco (BAC, Obras completas I–III): Open Library no los devuelve con título fiable.
- Confirmar el contenido exacto de los volúmenes de las Obras completas de la BAC registrados por ISBN (V: Trinidad; XIX: Enarraciones; XIb: Cartas; VII: Sermones): los títulos de Open Library mezclan el título de la serie («Escritos apologéticos») con el del volumen.
- Los ISBN 9788479144593 (La ciudad de Dios, BAC, 2000) y 9788430946495 (Tecnos, 2007) aparecen en Open Library sin traductor: completar traductor y colección.
- Localizar una traducción española de dominio público de las Confesiones con texto completo (Wikisource no la tiene transcrita; Gutenberg tampoco): candidata, la de Eugenio de Zeballos (1781) en escaneos de bibliotecas digitales; no se ha registrado porque los escaneos sin OCR no sirven a la sala de lectura.
- Verificar el tipo de escritura y la datación exacta del códice Sessoriano 55 de las Confesiones y la signatura del códice de Erfurt de los sermones nuevos (Universitätsbibliothek Erfurt, Dep. Erf. CA 2° 12, según la bibliografía consultada de memoria; se ha dejado sin signatura).
- Añadir el códice de Verona (Biblioteca Capitolare, XXVIII [26]), testimonio uncial del s. V de La ciudad de Dios, tras confirmar en CLA (Lowe) qué libros contiene.
- Los traductores de NPNF registrados en reading_texts son del siglo XIX; conviene comprobar uno a uno las fechas de muerte (en especial R. E. Wallis, C. C. Starbuck y R. G. MacMullen) para la regla española de ochenta años.
- New Advent agrupa en la página 1401 las dos partes del De moribus; la segunda (De moribus Manichaeorum) está en https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1402.htm: el importador debe tratarlas como una sola obra.
- Primera aparición escrita de la leyenda del niño y la concha: no se ha podido fijar con una fuente concreta (se marca como «unverifiable»).
- Las descripciones de obras perdidas (Contra Hilarum, Ad Emeritum, Probationum et testimoniorum, etc.) son breves porque solo las conocemos por una frase de las Retractationes; no se han alargado artificialmente.
- Programas de afiliación: ninguno verificado para las editoriales listadas; lista vacía.
- Vídeos: no se encontró una clase universitaria en italiano de canal institucional verificable; se dejan quince vídeos en inglés, español, alemán y francés.
Researched on 2026-10-25