On the Trinity (De Trinitate)
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- Marcus Dods
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~260,000 words · 1,229 passages
Cite this work
- APAAugustine. (n.d.). On the Trinity (De Trinitate). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/on-the-trinity-de-trinitate
- MLAAugustine. "On the Trinity (De Trinitate)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/on-the-trinity-de-trinitate.
- ChicagoAugustine. On the Trinity (De Trinitate). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/on-the-trinity-de-trinitate.
What it is about
Fifteen books on how God can be one and three, and on why the human soul is the best place to look for an image of it: memory, understanding and will as three things that are one.
Context and history
He was at it for more than twenty years, and not by choice. He relates himself that the half-finished books were stolen and put into circulation without his leave, which forced him both to finish the work and to correct the version already loose in the world. The early books deal with the biblical text and the later ones with the mind: it is the psychological part that had the longest posterity, and much of the Western way of talking about inwardness comes from it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
"While the last sheet of this volume was passing through the press, the labours of the accomplished translator were terminated by death. Mr. Haddan is mourned by all who knew him as an accurate and careful scholar, and an able and earnest man. TRANSLATOE'S PREFACE. THE history of St. Augustine's treatise on the Trinity, as gathered by Tillemont and others from his own allusions to it, may be briefly given. It is placed by him in his Retractations among the works written (w^hich in the present case, it appears, must mean begun) in a.d. 400. In letters of a.d. 410, 414, and the end of a.d. 415 (Ad Consentmm, Ep. 120, and two Ad JEvodmm, Epp. 162, 169), it is referred to as still unfinished and unpublished. But a letter of A.D. 412 (Ad Marcellinum, Ep. 143) intimates that -friends were at that time importuning him, although without success, to complete and publish it. And the letter to Aurelius, which was sent to that bishop with the treatise itself when actually completed, informs us that a portion of it, while it was still unrevised and incomplete, was in fact surreptitiously made public, — a proceeding which the letters above cited postpone apparently until at least after a.d. 415. It was certainly still in hand in A.D. 416, inasmuch as in Book XIII. a quotation occurs from the 12th Book of the De Civitate Dei; and a