I’ve posted dedicated reviews of a couple of the more significant treatises from this book already. The eight treatises contained in this book are all taken from the period between Augustine’s conversion to his ascension to the post of a Bishop; this was a bit under ten years so, there’s a large spread here and you can actually see Augustine evolve as a writer over this decade and they also show off his ability to tailor to his audience. Some of the treatises are short and simple, originally written to be delivered as sermons. Others, like Of True Religion, which is both the best and the most head-spinningly confounding, are more esoteric. The Teacher is very different from anything I’ve read of Augustine before, being structured as a Socratic dialogue between Augustine and his son, Adeodatus; Augustine would later claim, after Adeodatus’ tragic death, that The Teacher had essentially been a product of both of them acting as co-writers. As it is, it starts off as an exploration of a passage in Matthew that states, “You have one teacher, that is Christ,” but it VERY quickly goes off into a discussion of how we convey meaning and use symbols and definitions and it ends up being downright epistemological with fairly little explicitly Christian content outside the first couple of pages. It’s fascinating to see Augustine dealing in a more explicitly philosophical vein like that. Burleigh’s translations are . . . fine. The last collection of Augustine’s treatises that I read had more than one translator and they leaned in the direction of a very conversational tone. Burleigh is more consciously aiming for beautiful prose, I think and it occasionally gets a little florid, but then Augustine is writing in a self-consciously academic tone here in some of these works whereas some of his later treatises were written initially as personal letters and so would be more conversational. So, I can’t really speak to all of the nuances of that. On the whole, I really enjoyed this. It’s got a couple that I would call absolutely essential Augustine and some others that are interesting in context of the rest of his work and, sure, there are a couple of weak ones, but, on the whole, this is good collection. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – collection of treatises from the first decade of Augustine’s Christian life shows off the variety of styles and tones at his disposal and features at least two absolute essentials. 3 ½ stars.