A History of Christian Thought Volume II: From Augustine to the Eve of the Reformation (Justo Gonzalez, 1979)

Gonzalez left us at the end of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 at the end of his first volume in this series, then consciously resumes the story around 100 years earlier with Augustine. Although Gonzalez continues to cover the Eastern Church in this volume, the focus here is more firmly on the West and the theology of Augustine is so central to this that putting it in the first volume would have caused an unwelcome break in these connections.

Since reading the first volume, it just so happens I've done a little reading on Augustine, so using him as a starting point for this volume was indeed welcome. He is really the theologian par excellence of the West, which by the fourth century was becoming considerably more grounded in its theological discourse than the East, where single words ended up being the focus of prolonged diatribes. Maybe it had something to do with barbarian hordes pushing down hard on your domain. The four great heresies Augustine grappled with (Manichaeism, Pelagianism, Donatism, and Arianism...oh my!) and his responses to them would set the tone of theological discourse in the West during this period.

Since Gonzalez is attempting to handle the whole of Christian thought, there is a couple "meanwhile" breaks to cover what is going on in the East. As the Byzantine Empire faded away in the later part of the period covered here, the coverage gets more scrappy. I'm depending on Pelikan, who devotes an entire volume of his series to all of Eastern theology (minus the very beginning and end), to get a clearer picture. More on that later...

As with other volumes in this series, I borrowed them from my church's library. The series is common in academic libraries, but not so much public libraries. If interlibrary loan is not a feasible option where you live, the volumes are relatively inexpensive to purchase.