In this collection of essays, Michel René Barnes offers a new reading of the character and development of Latin Trinitarian theology in the fourth and fifth centuries. Although Augustine is the principal focus, he is treated here as an inheritor of an earlier Latin tradition. Antecedent theologians, most notably including Marius Victorinus, are given a revised interpretation, and Augustine himself is explored from multiple angles.
At every turn, developments in Augustine's thought are shown to be a response to the anti-Nicene theologies of the period. Most significantly, this view decries the modern 'systematic' tendency to engage with Augustine only though a simplified version of late-nineteenth-century categories. This accusation invites the question of how far modern theology can actually engage with Patristic theology at all, but Barnes offers a way forward.