To introduce St. Augustine’s Christian Instruction we can hardly do better than translate the chapter of his own Retractations in which, while correcting certain errors, the author relates why and under what circumstances the former work was written:¹

When I became aware that the books on Christian Instruction were incomplete, I chose to finish them, rather than leave them in such a condition and pass on to the revision of other works. I therefore completed the third book, which had been written up to the point where a reference from the Gospel is made concerning the woman who hid leaven...

St. Augustine’s immediate purpose in writing Admonition and Grace was to effect a final settlement of a dispute that had risen among the monks in the famous monastery in Hadrumetum, a sea-coast town in the African province of Byzacene. The dispute arose when the monk Felix brought back to his monastery a copy of St. Augustine’s second Letter to Sixtus,¹ a Roman priest, later Pope. Felix had come across the Letter when he and his companion Florus were on a visit to the monastery in Uzale, of which St. Evodius, the bishop, was superior. In this Letter, St. Augustine argued...

The short work entitled The Christian Combat was written at Hippo during the first years of St. Augustine’s episcopate. In the Retractations, a critical, but incomplete, review of his writings, Augustine assigns this book to the third place among the works composed after he had become bishop. The earliest composition of this period, Various Question to Simplicianus, is a series of queries addressed by Bishop Simplicianus of Milan to Augustine, together with the latter’s replies. Since Simplicianus is referred to in the Retractations as Ambrose’s successor in the See of Milan,¹ it is evident that the subsequent work, The Christian...

The present work belongs to the period in which St. Augustine was Bishop of Hippo. In date it cannot be later than the treatise On the Eight Questions of Dulcitius, where it is quoted,¹ which belongs to the third decade of the fifth century and may be as early as A.D. 422.² On the other hand it cannot have been completed prior to the death of St. Jerome (which occurred on 30 September in either 419 or 420), since it mentions him as already dead.³ In view of these facts the Enchiridion is commonly dated ca. 421.⁴

As is made...