In the autumn of 393, all the bishops from the province of Africa assembled in council at Hippo. In a sign of his growing intellectual reputation the recently ordained Augustine was asked to address the council and offered a discourse on the creed that reveals significant shifts in his Trinitarian theology.1 In this discourse, the De fide et symbolo, Augustine does not articulate his Trinitarian theology in a primarily anti- Manichaean context, and he far more openly and extensively invokes terminologies and themes typical of Latin pro-Nicene theology. He speaks in terms he thought his Episcopal audience would recognize, and reveals a significant amount of preparatory re-reading in his Latin sources. It should, however, be no surprise that Augustine's account is also very much his own and in a number of cases we see him starting down paths of interpretation that will result in the development of some of his most distinctive mature themes.

One of the most important aspects of the De fide is the debt that Augustine reveals to Latin anti-Monarchian and anti-Sabellian traditions of Trinitarian definition that are barely mentioned in traditional characterizations of Latin theology. Latin Trinitarian theology was born in the anti-Monarchian conflicts of the late second and third centuries and Latin theologians of the fourth century continued to write in a theological dialect shaped by those conflicts. This ‘theological dialect’ is apparent in particular exegetical concerns, and in a broad field of terminologies for asserting the irreducibility of the divine three.