Augustine is where a lot of converts get confused, and the confusion runs both ways. Some arrive thinking he is basically a Protestant with incense. Others arrive having read some angry corner of the internet and think Orthodoxy rejects him.
Neither is right, and the truth is more interesting.
He is a saint
Start here, because people skip it. Augustine is a saint of the Church. He is commemorated. He is called Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox tradition, and "Blessed" there is a title of honour, not a demotion with a polite face on it.
His works sit in the corpus alongside the Greek Fathers. On this site you will find his Tractates on the Gospel of John, his Expositions on the Psalms, his Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount and The Harmony of the Gospels, all in the Fathers Library, and his commentary is attached to Scripture throughout the reader.
And the quotation I opened my catechism with is his. Oh beauty, ever ancient, ever new. That line does more work in my own thinking than almost anything else I have read.
What the East takes from him
Read his Homilies on the First Epistle of John and you will understand why he is loved. Nobody writes about the love of God like Augustine writes about the love of God.
Read the Confessions and you have the first real interior autobiography in Western literature, a man laying out the whole mechanism of his own restlessness and where it finally stopped. If you have ever grappled with God the way St. Seraphim Rose grappled with Him, pounding on the floor and screaming at a God he claimed was dead, you will find Augustine already there fifteen hundred years earlier.
Read his Expositions on the Psalms and you have one of the great sustained works of biblical prayer in the Church.
On Christ, on the Trinity in its main lines, on grace as absolutely necessary, on the reality of the Church, on the interior life, he is a Father of the Church and the East reads him as one.
Where the East does not follow
Now the honest part.
The Orthodox tradition does not follow Augustine everywhere, and the places where it does not are mostly the places where the later Latin West built its whole system on him.
On original sin, the East has generally not received the idea that we inherit Augustine's guilt itself. We inherit death, corruption, and a nature bent toward sin, which is quite bad enough, but the emphasis falls on inherited mortality rather than inherited guilt. That difference sounds technical and it is not. It changes what salvation is for.
On predestination, his later formulations pressed further than the East has followed.
On the Trinity, some of his framing fed developments in the Latin West that the East did not accept.
And underneath all of it there is a difference of temperature. The East frames salvation as healing and transformation, as theosis, participation in the divine grace by which we become the saints we are called to be. The Church is a hospital and the mysteries are medicine. Where Augustine is read juridically, and the later West often read him that way, the frame shifts toward the courtroom.
How to hold both
This is exactly the case I was describing in the article on Genesis 1. A Father is not the Church. The Church is not obliged to receive every opinion of every saint, and receiving a man as a saint is not the same as endorsing every sentence he wrote.
That is not a special exception invented to deal with Augustine. It is the ordinary rule, applied to everyone. Origen, Tertullian, and others all get the same treatment, and it is precisely because the Church tests by consensus rather than by celebrity.
What it means practically is this. Read him. Read him a lot. And read him inside the tradition rather than as a system on his own, which is what happened in the West and which is how one brilliant North African bishop ended up carrying more theological weight than any single man should have to carry.
The thing to avoid
Do not become the convert whose entire relationship to Augustine is a list of his errors.
I have met that person. He has never read the Confessions. He has read three blog posts about the filioque and he is ready to go. That is not discernment, it is borrowed opinion, and it is the same failure as proof-texting anyone else.
Read the man. Then, if you disagree with him somewhere, you will be disagreeing with someone you actually know.
- Start with Homilies on the First Epistle of John in the Fathers Library.
- Read his commentary attached to the Psalms in the reader and to John.
- Use the saint filter in the Church Fathers section to read him alone on a passage, then clear it and read him beside the Greek Fathers on the same verse.
Ever ancient, ever new. He gave us the words for it.