The Works of St. Augustine - an English Translation for the 21st century.

Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, schoolman, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full.

Augustine was writing the Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian, published in this volume, when he died in August 430. The Unfinished Work is a rebuttal of Julian of Eclanum's To Florus, an eight-book text in defense of Pelagianism, which had by then been officially condemned by the Church. Augustine and Julian had previously written responses to excerpts of one another's work, though not in direct correspondence. In Unfinished Work, however, Augustine writes as though speaking to Julian directly, making for an engaging and clear read. He quotes each point of To Florus to which he responds, so the reader gains a comprehensive picture of his opponent's views. Once again, Augustine defends grace as a gift from God and Jesus as the savior of all humanity.

In Against Julian Augustine stresses in the first two books the traditional teachings of the Church found in the Fathers and contrasts their teaching with the rationalism of the Pelagians