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The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford. These papers range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject. The sack of the'Eternal City'of Rome by the Visigoths led by the infamous Alaric on August 24, 410 caused great dismay throughout the Roman Empire. In addition to being a political and socio-economic disaster, it was mainly a symbolic shock - the 9/11 of Late Antiquity. Many wondered whether this tragic event heralded the end of an era. At the request of his dear friend Marcellinus, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) wrote his De civitate Dei, in which he offered an apologetic response to the external criticism that the Christian faith was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire. At the same time, he answered the internal Christian concern that the fall of Rome also threatened the future of the Church. Augustine's De civitate Dei is a comprehensive synthesis of theology, historiography, political philosophy, and so much more, which has been copied, read, consulted, quoted, interpreted and discussed by an extremely diverse audience: monks and politicians, historians and philologists, theologians and philosophers, Christians and non-Christians - past and present. This work is still food for thought, not only for the study of Late Antiquity in general and Augustine in particular, but also for the wider debates regarding religion, philosophy, history and politics. This volume offers a sample of the broad and diverse interest in this grandiose book that has undeniably influenced the culture and thinking of the West.

Mathijs Lamberigts'long and prolific research career started with the study of the controversy between Julian of Aeclanum and Augustine of Hippo on the issues of human free will and divine grace. This research interest rapidly came to include all aspects of the turbulent life, the massive oeuvre, and the complex ideas of the doctor gratiae, imbedded in the historical, political, socio-economic, religious, ecclesial, and intellectual context of the fourth and fifth centuries. Driven by a deep respect for the original sources, and always well informed about the established scholarship, Lamberigts deployed a rigorous historical-critical method in his publications. The first nineteen contributions of the present volume reflect this first love for Augustinian studies. As illustrated by the cover image, taken from the famous sixteenth-century Leuven edition of Augustine's collected writings, Lamberigts'historical-critical study of Augustine stands within a rich and enduring Leuven tradition. The same old print expresses the gradual expansion of Lamberigts'research interests, which came to embrace Augustine's legacy in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries. In fact at the end of the Middle Ages, Augustine and his doctrine of sin, grace, and free will found renewed interest, even becoming part of the ideological-religious foundations of Martin Luther - who was after all an Augustinian friar - and hence of the Reformation. All parties involved in the religious controversies of this period appealed to the doctor gratiae to justify their own position. Lamberigts has always shown a vivid interest in these developments, and especially in how Augustinian thinking became a doctrinal pillar of Leuven theology in the Early Modern Era. Consequently, part of Lamberigt's scholarly work has focused on figures such as Michael Baius and Cornelius Jansenius of Ypres, on movements such as Jansenism, as well as on the Jansenists'theological adversaries, the Jesuits. Eight essays of this volume evoke this particular period in church history. These twenty-seven papers are offered to Mathijs Lamberigts by former students and colleagues, out of gratitude for his generous personality, for his inspiring scholarship, and for his academic leadership.