The Letters of St. Augustine
Description:... Excerpt from The Letters of St. Augustine
He changed his opinion also on the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Whereas in the early part of his career he always ascribes it to S.Paul (cf. De Div. Q. lxxxiii., lxxv. I; written in A.D. 389), after the year 409 he ceases to make that ascription. Thus he says in one place simply "scriptum est ad Hebræos." (Letter 187, § 34, A.D. 417.)
The letters fall quite easily into certain main divisions:
1. It is natural to group together the letters of the early period written while he was a layman, and as a priest: all in fact written before the date of his consecration to the episcopate.
2. Next to this may be placed the letters on Paganism. These form a suitable introduction to his great reply to Paganism, The City of God.
It would be very natural to suggest that the next group should be those concerned with Manichæism; that form of Oriental Dualism to which Augustine was an adherent for some nine years, and from which he escaped with so much difficulty. But it is a singular fact that nothing survives of Augustine's correspondence with Manichæans. There are of course allusions to the controversy, and cases noted of its intrusion into the Church, even among the Church's teachers (cf. Letter 236 and Letter 64, § 3).But there is no direct correspondence with the sect or with its leaders. This is all the more remarkable because controversy with the Manichæans occupied a very important place in Augustine's early literary labours. There are his five works against them which a correspondent called the Pentateuch against the Manichæans. There is, above all, the great treatise in reply to Faustus. But there is no separate letter to Faustus, nor indeed to any Manichæan leader.
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