I'm currently 26% thru a kindle copy of the Complete Writings of St. Augustine...

I'm currently 26% thru a kindle copy of the Complete Writings of St. Augustine, Christianity's most productive writer ever.
What precisely is the value of studying every single work that a prolific author has written, rather than reading a couple of their most important works and skipping the rest?

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What are your thoughts on St. Augustine's writings so far? How much background reading is necessary before reading him?

Also, in response to your question, I guess you'd have better knowledge of and appreciation for that author, and in many cases the less important works would still have value to them that makes them worth reading.

What have you learned so far from your reading of his work?

Read the Confessions first.

>Christianity's most productive writer ever
Wrong, that's Aquinas.

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Of you want to be an Augustinian of course you have to read everything, if you simply want to know basically what was happening then, Confessions, City if God, and Free Will.

Plato on the otherhand is non-negotiable.

>reading the brainlet who contradicts himself in his own arguments

You don't have to read all of someone's writings in one go. You can read Confessions and City of God, then read others, and eventually come back for more Augustine.

Maybe you could've posed that question before you embarked on your project.

I feel like it would be inadvisable to read so much of one person's writings like that. Shouldn't you give yourself time to rest and reflect upon what you've read?

ive read all of city of god, started confessions, and am interested in one or two of his pamphlets. reading an author's entire corpus is usually retarded unless it's Plato.

>What precisely is the value of studying every single work that a prolific author has written?
If you want to understand the author, you have two options. You read all of his works, or you rely on the summaries of his work written by other people. The latter is OK, but in doing it you're placing trust and your basis for knowledge in a secondary source. Maybe this is fine. But you have to be careful of errors and misunderstandings.

If you are looking to learn and say the Truth, you have to ensure you are building it on True foundations.

Don't you think not every piece of an author's work is significant to understanding them? I don't think anything would misunderstand Dostoyevsky because they'd only read everything but Netochka Nezvanova, for example.

How can we know what work is significant to understanding them? I've never read Netochka Nezvanova, so I am reliant on you to assure me that it's unimportant to understanding Dostoevsky. How do I know that the book is not merely unimportant for your personal understanding of Dostoevsky? Maybe in the unfinished novel we find something of Dostoevsky that more polished works don't reveal?

Modern academia - and just the convenience of the internet itself - have trained many of us to be too reliant on what other people find definitive and irrelevant in authors and ideas. It's not wrong to trust the opinions of others; but it's wrong to do so unconsciously.

Fair enough

St Augustine is singlehandedly responsible for all the failings of the western church in history so-far
OrthodoxGang

?
dont you mean aquinas

>How much background reading is necessary before reading him?
Besides Plato, it's good to have also read the Greeks in general (philosophers and playwrights alike), Virgil, etc., but mostly Plato.
I've read Confessions and City of God and by now I'm going through Augustine's letters, which are incredibly numerous. Some of them are theoretical, some are instructive notes to young Christian men and women he knows who are growing up, all are passionate and consistent. His letters to Jerome are particularly interesting, the 2 of them strongly disagree on some things yet remain great friends, even at a distance.

No, I don't.

I don't know Latin and I don't know Saint Augustine, so forgive these questions, but what do the books under his feet signify? I can make out "Pelagius", whom Augustine seems to have feuded with, but who are the others? Iullanus? Caelestn?

I think they're other heretics/apostates that he dealt with, like Pelagius. Tbqh the names all start running together after a while, I probably ought to read an Augustine bio after finishing his works and return to the letters.