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When you're too busy being a bishop to think up a book title.
Also known as: when you're trying to be the bishop of Hippo but your people in Thagaste keep after you with every question they ever thought of about the Bible.
On 83 Different Questions is a great little Augustine book, though. Since he's responding to actual questions, it lets you know what the 4th-century Christians of Algeria were thinking about. (The Trinity, the soul, faith, lots of numerology.)
A favorite: 43, "Why did the Son appear as a man but the Spirit as a dove?" It's a short, sharp answer, but you can see that Augustine's got his whole theology of visible & invisible mission of the Trinity up & running already.
Another interesting one is 37, which asks about the Son's eternal generation by considering whether it is about being "forever in the process of birth" or "forever born." Augustine argues for latter, on the grounds that the former fails to confess perfection/completeness.
Augustine seems to have written the Q&A essays from 389-391, but collected/published them in 396. In his retrospective Retractationes, he had to revisit several of them. But it's remarkable how fully-formed his key ideas are in these lively responses to African questions.
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