Summary: Augustine is very important to the the history of Christian thought and often misappropriated by all sides.
Augustine is not my favorite Christian thinker. I know this is partially because he is not incredibly accessible. And partially because I have not read that much of him, and there is a lot to read.
I read his Confessions in grad school. And I have read bits and pieces since. Chadwick says that is part of the problem with Augustine. Because Augustine wrote a lot, more than virtually any other of the church fathers prior to middle ages (or at least we have more of his writing than anyone else), there is a lot of material to mine for Augustine’s support of your favorite theological point.
There are three main points that I got out of this introduction. One, I have heard frequently that Augustine was anti-women. There is a lot of evidence to marshal for that position, but Chadwick says that Augustine was not anti-women, he was anti-sex. And much of his anti-sex position was really about the fact that he was concerned about his own weaknesses rather than being against sex as a whole. Augustine for a while advocated that pastors live apart from their wives in celibate community. This was not all that popular among the pastors he supervised. (Although it was part of the movement toward celibate priest.)
