The first part of De Haeresibus contains an overview, as lucid as it is succinct, of known and unknown heretical factions. Augustine had been planning to address the question as to what makes someone a heretic in the second part of De Haeresibus but this part was never written. The fourth work to remain unfinished was De Haeresibus ad Quodvultdeum (428). The resulting book Contra Iulianum similarly remained an opus imperfectum. The Pelagian Julian of Aeclanum, who strongly emphasised the goodness of human nature, and God’s grace to a much lesser degree, demanded all his attention. 1 But the second book of the Speculum, announced in the praefatio, remained unwritten. A second unfinished work was his Speculum (427): an anthology of commandments and prohibitions from the Old and New Testaments intended to confront its readers-without engaging in too many hermeneutical feats-with the right way of living (Van Geest 2017, 2018). It was intended as a toolbox for the expansion and spread of Latin Christendom (Drecoll 2001: 330–334). One of these was his Retractationes (426–427): the catalogue of his works in chronological order, each accompanied by criticisms, corrections, and comments. But at the end of his life, Augustine had to leave four works unfinished. His examination of conscience and the self-analysis performed in his Confessiones, as well as his account of history and of the ideal social- and societal order in De ciuitate Dei, composed to prove the value of Christianity, have been most influential throughout the centuries. He also composed treatises in which he attempted to safeguard the unity of the church, for instance by accusing the Donatists of seriously wounding the church as the Body of Christ through their schism, as we shall see below. He wrote a great number of sermons, letters, biblical commentaries, and longer works in which he emphasised the primacy of grace, arguing that this preceded good will. After his baptism in Milan in 387 he developed into an extraordinarily prolific writer. As will be shown his definition offers more room for the diversity of expressions of Christian life and faith than can be deduced from the synthesis of his works by later interpreters.įew thinkers can rival Augustine’s (354–430) influence on Western anthropology, theology, and cosmology (Pollmann, Otten et al. In this contribution I am going to expound these attention for the multicultural pluriformity in the works of Augustine particularly by interpreting his definition of ‘heresia’. Little account was taken of 1) their attention for the multicultural pluriformity of Christian communities and their agents 2) the correlations and interference between their ‘theological’ expressions and the historical and philosophical mainstreams. It is true: the striving for a consensus partum (or consensus quinquesaecularis), already noticeable in the Decretum Gratiani (a synthesis of canon law which consist for about thirty percent of patristic texts), shows the need for certainty and convenient arrangement where matters of faith and church discipline are concerned in the Middle Ages. Being understood as a phenomenon, World Christianity implicitly has a long tradition.
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