The Enchiridion

It is Augustine's compact handbook of the Christian faith, written for a friend named Laurentius who had asked for the essentials in brief. Augustine answers by way of the three theological virtues — faith, hope, and love — expounding the faith through the Creed, hope through the Lord's Prayer, and love as the end to which both are directed. The result is a short summary of Christian belief from the church's greatest Latin teacher.

It means a handbook or manual — literally something held in the hand. Augustine wrote it as a brief, portable statement of the faith for a reader who wanted the heart of Christian doctrine without a long treatise, and the title signals exactly that: a compact guide to be kept close and consulted.

Around faith, hope, and love. He treats what a Christian is to believe by expounding the Apostles' Creed, what a Christian is to hope for and pray by expounding the Lord's Prayer, and unites the whole under love, which he calls the greatest of the three and the goal of the commandment. It is a deliberately simple framework for the whole of the faith.

A bishop in North Africa in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and the most influential theologian of the Western church — author of the Confessions and The City of God. Converted after a long and restless search, he became the great teacher of grace, and the Enchiridion distills his mature thought into a brief compass.

Augustine gives his well-known account that evil is not a substance or thing in its own right but a privation — a corruption or absence of the good. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists; evil is the wounding or loss of that good. God brings good even out of evil, and Augustine uses this to uphold both God's goodness and his sovereignty over a fallen world.

A central one. As always in Augustine, salvation is the work of God's grace and not of human merit — faith itself is God's gift, and the love that fulfils the law is poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit. The Enchiridion carries his lifelong conviction that we are saved by grace through faith, working by love, all of it God's doing.

For any Christian who wants the essentials of the faith set out briefly and authoritatively — much as Laurentius did when he first asked for it. It has served for centuries as a concise doctrinal summary, valued precisely because so great a mind chose to be so short, and it rewards both the beginner and the well-read.

At the beginning, following Augustine's own order: the faith of the Creed, the hope of the Lord's Prayer, and the love that crowns them. Because it is brief and deliberately ordered as a summary, it can be read straight through, giving the reader a compact map of the whole Christian faith from one of its greatest teachers.