Saint Augustines ten homilies on the First Epistle of John are among his greatest and most influential works. John and Augustine both develop the same central theme love --and in these homilies Augustine uses Johns epistle as a point of departure for exploring the meaning and implications of love with his customary profundity, passion and analytic rigor. As with John, a context of dissension and conflict within the Christian community (the Donatist breakaway from Catholic unity), gives his preaching a tone of urgency and poignancy. Anyone who reads these homilies, universally viewed as...

Few ancient Christian authors attempted anything like a complete commentary on the Gospel of John, among them Origen, John Chrysostom and Augustine. Of these, Augustine's must count as the greatest. Unlike Origen's, it has come down to us in its entirety, and of the others that remain it is certainly the most theologically profound. John's gospel allows Augustine to range broadly over themes that were his life's work - the Trinity, the person of Christ, the nature of the Church and its sacraments, the fulfillment of the divine plan. The 124 homilies that constitute Augustine's commentary,...