Augustine and the Crisis of the 380s in Christian Doctrinal Argumentation

Abstract

Tensions within Christianity over the form that doctrinal arguments should employ reached a point of crisis in the 380s. As educated men increasingly embraced Christianity, the resources of dialectic and metaphysical argument recommended themselves, but their use ran counter to Christianity’s sense of itself as an oppositional discourse and also to its inclusion of the uneducated. The Constantinopolitan Creed and the Theodosian decrees of that decade changed the nature of doctrinal argumentation, but to understand the intellectual forces driving argumentation to the citation-dependent form that dominated in the fifth century we can learn best from the earliest writings of Augustine.