Augustine and the Arians: The Bishop of Hippo's Encounters with Ulfilan Arianism

William A. Sumruld

Jan 1994 · Associated University Presse

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"In his attempts to put the bishop of Hippo's contacts with Arians into a workable chronology, William A. Sumruld has raised some interesting questions about the dating of Augustine's De Trinitate. Recent scholarship has assumed that Augustine's most famous work on the Christian Trinity was completed very late in his career. The major reason usually cited for this conclusion has been the anti-Arian material included in the great work. Since Augustine's controversies with the Ulfilan Arians came so late in his life, then - it was assumed - so did the De Trinitate. Sumruld challenges this assumption because careful analysis of the text reveals that the type of Arianism discussed in De Trinitate is not Ulfilan, but a philosophically based anhomoian Eunomianism. After 418, the Arianism encountered in almost all Augustine's works is that homoian Arianism sponsored by Ulfila, the famous missionary to the Goths. This raises concerns about one of the key pieces of internal evidence used in the dating of the famous De Trinitate. In the course of the study, Sumruld also provides a compelling argument for the authorship and origins of the Sermo Arianorum.".