Three Free E-books on Augustine

Rummaging through the internet, I’ve discovered a few gems in various archives.

The first and oldest e-book is The Life and Labors of Augustine by Philip Schaff. Schaff was one of the great church historians of the 19th century. His editions of the church fathers and works on Christian creeds are still used today. Here, in less than 100 pages, he has crafted a powerful portrait of Augustine, with all the polish one adores in a 19th-century man of letters.

The second e-book is Augustine & The Pelagian Controversy by B. B. Warfield. Warfield was the last great old-school Presbyterian at Princeton. Writing at the inception of the 20th-century, he somehow defied the fragmentation of the theological encyclopedia. History, systematics, exegesis, and polemics all hang together in his corpus, and exquisitely so. This book, though, is remarkably free from polemics. The staunch Calvinist writing on Augustine’s theology of grace makes not one explicit reference to Roman Catholicism or Arminianism.

Finally, there is one modern book that should be of special interest to scholars: Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind by Gerard O’Daly. O’Daly is a classicist who has written extensively on cognition, self, and argumentative method in late antique authors. The present work is the only significant modern monograph that seeks to present holistically Augustine’s conception of the nature and activities of “mind” or “soul” (not merely the human soul). This topic is immensely important to understand Augustine as a philosopher. Thus, O’Daly’s work is not one scholars can afford to ignore.