Augustine's On the Trinity in Modern English
The newest book on the Puritan Rewrites page is not a Puritan one. It is much older: Augustine's On the Trinity, written in Latin around the year 400.
It belongs with the others all the same. Calvin quotes Augustine more than any other writer, and the Puritans learned their doctrine of God standing on his shoulders. When Owen writes about communion with the Father, the Son and the Spirit, Augustine is somewhere in the background.
What the book is about
Augustine sets himself one question: who is the God Christians worship, and how can he be one and yet Father, Son and Holy Spirit? He answers it in fifteen books, and they fall into three parts.
In Books 1 to 4 he proves the doctrine from Scripture and answers the objections, especially the claim that the Son must be less than the Father because the Father sent him. In Books 5 to 8 he looks at the words we use about God. This is where he faces the question everyone eventually asks: if there are three, then three what? His answer is honest. We say "three persons" because we need some word, so that we are not left altogether silent. Then he turns to love, and finds the first trace of the Trinity there:
"There is the One who loves the One who is from him. There is the One who loves the One he is from. And there is Love itself."
In Books 9 to 15 he goes looking for the image of God in the human mind, and finds a kind of trinity there in memory, understanding and will. But he never claims that the mind explains God. The image is real, it is broken, and it is being mended, and it can only point to the God who made it. The book ends in a prayer:
"O Lord my God, my one hope, hear me. Do not let me, through weariness, be unwilling to seek you."
How this edition was made
This rewrite is made from the public-domain English translation by Haddan and Shedd. Augustine wrote in long, winding sentences, and they have been broken up into plain modern English. Every argument is his, in his order, and nothing he says has been softened. His technical words, such as substance, essence and person, are kept, because they are what the book is about. All Scripture is quoted from the ESV. Where Augustine's old Latin Bible read differently and it matters to his argument, a short editor's note says so.
It is a rewrite for readers, not a scholarly translation. If you are studying a particular phrase closely, check it against Haddan and Shedd.
Reading it and listening to it
It is a long book, about 195,000 words, second only to Calvin's Institutes in the series. So the page also has a Summary tab, which gives Augustine's whole argument in a few paragraphs. It is worth reading first.
There is also a full audiobook, about eighteen hours long, with a chapter list so you can jump to any of the fifteen books. As it plays, the text follows along on the page, so you can read and listen at the same time. The voice is computer-generated, but it reads clearly.