Writings mostly from the period between Augustine's conversion and his ordination. This book has Augustine writing in a lot of varied styles, from very short, simple discourses to long, philosophically complex dialogues. There are a couple of lesser works here, of course, but it also features one of his absolute best, Of True Religion.

Haven't quite read everything here, but everything I've read has contained some intriguing thoughts and some fine turns of phrase.

De Magistro: February 3, 2014

In the first semester of 1981/82 I took a course on Augustine for which I read his entire corpus in translation in order to write a paper. The concept of the paper was to reconstruct how he imagined the history of philosophy, so the reading was done with an eye to every reference he made to philosophers, schools of philosophy and transmissions of teachings. Unlike we moderns, previous study of the patristics had led me to expect that he, like they, saw ideas more as data passed, sometimes secretly, from one person to another, often in the context of organizations, not as things such as texts that might be independently discovered by many persons with no prior contact. This hypothesis was confirmed by my reading, the rest was a matter of detailing what he saw the lines of transmission to be.

What I didn't speculate very much about there is why this difference might obtain. So, off the top of the head, here are some possible factors:
1. We moderns subscribe to a method of knowledge, science, which justifies itself in part precisely because all its observations are repeatable and which requires communication between researchers and multiple, independent investigations of all claims. The material successes of this methodology have led to it's gaining high prestige. Copyright, licensure and patent laws protect the interests of those who can substantiate priority.
2. The ancients had some sense of science, but they lacked (a) the means to easily and accurately communicate and (b) effective legal protections for inventors. Consequently, many discoveries were jealously guarded, passed from father to son or from teacher to trusted pupil, often within the private confines of an institution.
3. Lacking such a sense of aggregative progress as we moderns are allowed, being more generally tied to and conscious of the cycles of nature, the ancients did not favor scientific knowledge as we do, but instead gave priority to the mysteries protected by the aforementioned institutions. This perspective is represented in the Christian notion of the transmission of the spirit in, say, apostolic succession--i.e. in the chain of teacher/pupil relations extending from the godhead through the Christ Jesus through, in Augustine's Western Church, Peter through to the current occupant of the See of Rome and from him dispersed to his bishops and down to his priests. Such a belief in miraculous transmission was familiar enough to the masses to be accepted and, if perceived as bogus by many of those more directly involved, was certainly convenient for the elites. Much of mystery was mystification.

However, Augustine's earliest extant writings are less tied up with the institionalized mysteries of the Christian Church than those he produced after becoming a bishop of it. Having been raised in a mixed household, only his mother being a communicant, he grew up with considerable exposure to other traditions, other mysteries, particularly Manichaeism and Platonism. Even as an older man he still held there to be some value to the "natural illumination" possible to those outside the fold of the Church.

A little tedious: fairly philosophical instead of exegetical at times, and the first half is Socratic in organization. Seems to be somewhat influenced by Plato, and the Gnostic idea that matter is evil and spirit good.