ABSTRACT
St Augustine belongs to the world. His teaching on free will and predestination, on original sin and the operation of God's grace—largely inspired by his attack on the heresy of the Welsh monk Pelagius, who believed that Christians could earn salvation by virtuous living—was enshrined in countless pamphlets and, above all, in The City of God. This book, which he began to write at the age of fifty-eight and finished in his seventies, rapidly became one of the most influential of all theological works. It helped to turn the talents of the most gifted men of his own and succeeding generations away from secular affairs and towards monasticism and the organization of the Church; even a millennium later, it served to inspire the most extreme heretics of the Reformation. It earned St Augustine the title of one of the Four Doctors of the Church. Yet during his life much of his energy was absorbed in combating the comparatively unimportant provincial heresy of Donatism at home in Africa.
