As others have noted, the surviving corpus of Augustine of Hippo is larger than that of any other ancient author. In addition, the body of modern scholarship on his life and thought is 1 correspondingly vast. So anyone who endeavors to write a dissertation on Augustine must at 2 some point feel acutely the comedy (and tragedy) of his undertaking. Why me? What could I possibly say? With just this sense of confronting insurmountable objections, I offer the following introductory remarks. I am the swordsman with his back against the wall. These are my defensive parries.