Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born on November 13, 354 CE in Thagaste, a modest inland town in the Roman province of Numidia, in what is now Souk Ahras, Algeria ^[1]. His father Patricius was a town councillor of limited means and a pagan until late in life. His mother Monica was a devout Christian whose persistence in praying for her son became one of the most famous maternal stories in Christian literature ^[2]. The family was Romanized African, Latin-speaking, and ambitious for their gifted boy despite thin resources.

He received his first schooling in Thagaste and nearby Madauros, where he learned the Latin classics and developed a lifelong love of Virgil alongside a frank distaste for Greek lessons ^[1]. Money ran short when he was sixteen, and he spent an idle year at home, a period he later examined with unusual severity in the Confessions, including the famous episode in which he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor's tree for the sheer pleasure of transgression ^[2].

A wealthy patron named Romanianus funded further study, and around 371 Augustine went to Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa, to train in rhetoric. There he took a concubine whose name he never recorded, and in 372 she bore him a son, Adeodatus ^[3]. Reading Cicero's lost dialogue Hortensius at nineteen turned him, by his own account, toward philosophy and the search for wisdom, a pursuit that would occupy the rest of his life ^[2].

For roughly nine years Augustine adhered to Manichaeism, a dualist religion of Persian origin that explained evil as a cosmic substance at war with the light ^[1]. The system appealed to his intellectual pride and seemed to answer the problem of evil, but doubts accumulated. A much-anticipated meeting with the Manichaean bishop Faustus around 383 disappointed him: the celebrated teacher proved eloquent but could not resolve Augustine's astronomical and philosophical objections ^[3].

He taught rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage, then sailed for Rome in 383, reportedly slipping away from his grieving mother at the docks. Roman students cheated him of fees, so when the pagan prefect Symmachus offered him the imperial chair of rhetoric in Milan in 384, he seized the post ^[1]. Milan was then the seat of the Western emperor, and the appointment placed the young African within reach of the highest offices of the state.

In Milan two influences remade him. The sermons of Bishop Ambrose showed him that Christian scripture could be read allegorically and defended intellectually, dissolving objections he had held since childhood ^[4]. At the same time, Latin translations of Platonist philosophers, probably Plotinus and Porphyry, gave him a way to conceive of God and evil without Manichaean materialism ^[3]. In late August 386, in a garden in Milan, he underwent the conversion he describes in Book VIII of the Confessions: hearing a child's voice chanting 'take up and read', he opened Paul's letter to the Romans and resolved on the spot to abandon his career and ambitions ^[2]. Ambrose baptized him, together with Adeodatus, at the Easter vigil of 387 ^[4].

Any account of Augustine of Hippo achievements begins with the Confessions, written around 397 to 401. Cast as a prayer addressed directly to God, it traces his life from infancy through conversion and then turns to philosophical meditations on memory, time, and creation. Nothing quite like it existed before: it is generally regarded as the first sustained introspective autobiography in Western literature ^[2].

His second monument is The City of God, begun after the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410 and completed around 426. Pagans blamed the disaster on the abandonment of the old gods; Augustine answered with twenty-two books contrasting the earthly city, built on self-love, with the city of God, built on love of God. The work laid foundations for Western thinking about history, political authority, and the relation of church and state for the following millennium ^[5].

His theology was forged in controversy. Against the Donatists, a rigorist African church that rejected clergy who had lapsed under persecution, he argued that the validity of sacraments does not depend on the personal worthiness of the minister ^[1]. Against Pelagius, who taught that humans could achieve righteousness by their own effort, Augustine developed his doctrines of original sin and the absolute necessity of divine grace, positions that decisively shaped later Catholic and Protestant thought alike ^[6]. He also wrote On Christian Doctrine, a manual of biblical interpretation, On the Trinity, and an early treatise On Music, which earned him a minor place among ancient music theorists ^[3]. Roughly one hundred books, hundreds of letters, and more than five hundred surviving sermons make him the most prolific Latin author of antiquity whose works survive ^[1].

Augustine lived with his unnamed concubine for about fourteen years in a stable, monogamous union. When Monica arranged a socially advantageous marriage for him in Milan around 385, the woman was sent back to Africa, a separation Augustine describes as tearing his heart, and the betrothal itself was later abandoned after his conversion ^[2]. He never married. Adeodatus, the son he called a child of his sin but a gift of God, showed remarkable intellectual promise and appears as an interlocutor in Augustine's dialogue The Teacher before dying around 389, still in his teens ^[3].

Monica died at Ostia in 387 as mother and son waited for a ship back to Africa, shortly after they shared a contemplative vision that Augustine recounts in one of the most admired passages of the Confessions ^[2]. Her feast is still kept in the Catholic calendar, and the city of Santa Monica in California carries her name.

Friendship structured Augustine's entire life. From his student days he gathered circles of companions, and after returning to Thagaste in 388 he converted the family property into a small community devoted to study and prayer. As bishop he required his clergy to live communally without private property, and the rule of life associated with him later guided the Augustinian orders, including, many centuries on, the friar Martin Luther ^[1].

Visiting the port city of Hippo Regius in 391, Augustine was seized by the congregation and pressed into ordination as a priest, a common if alarming custom of the age. Around 395 he became coadjutor bishop and soon sole bishop of Hippo, an office he held until his death ^[1]. He had hoped for a quiet philosophical retirement; instead he spent thirty-five years preaching several times a week, arbitrating lawsuits in the bishop's court, answering correspondents across the Mediterranean, and administering church property.

The final decade brought both consolidation and catastrophe. He compiled the Retractationes, a critical review of his own books in which he corrected earlier statements, an exercise in intellectual honesty with few ancient parallels ^[3]. Meanwhile the Roman order in Africa collapsed. In 429 the Vandals under Geiseric crossed from Spain into Mauretania and swept eastward, burning towns and scattering congregations ^[5].

By the summer of 430 the Vandals were besieging Hippo itself, its population swollen with refugees. Augustine fell ill with fever during the third month of the siege and died on August 28, 430 CE, at the age of seventy-five ^[1]. His biographer Possidius, a fellow bishop who was present, records that he had the penitential psalms fixed to the wall by his bed and wept as he read them ^[7]. The library he left behind survived the city's fall, preserving his works for posterity.

Few thinkers have cast a longer shadow. Medieval theology in the Latin West was in large measure a series of engagements with Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas cited him constantly even while building a different system ^[6]. At the Reformation both sides claimed him: Luther and Calvin drew their doctrines of grace and predestination from his anti-Pelagian works, while Catholic theologians appealed to his teaching on the church and sacraments ^[6]. The Catholic Church venerates him as a saint and, since 1298, as a Doctor of the Church; his feast falls on August 28 ^[4].

His philosophical influence runs just as deep. His analysis of time in Confessions Book XI remains a live topic in philosophy, his account of the inner self anticipated Descartes, and his argument that even a doubter must exist in order to doubt prefigured the cogito by twelve centuries ^[3]. Political theorists still return to The City of God for its realism about power, and his theory of just war informed centuries of debate on the ethics of conflict ^[5].

His relics rest in the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, Italy, moved there in the eighth century after journeys from Hippo to Sardinia ^[4]. Modern scholarship, notably Peter Brown's landmark 1967 biography, has recovered Augustine the African, the working bishop, and the restless stylist behind the doctrinal monument ^[1]. Readers of any Augustine of Hippo biography meet a figure who felt startlingly close to his own age and remains startlingly close to ours: the basic Augustine of Hippo facts, a provincial boy who became the architect of Western Christian thought, hardly capture how much of our vocabulary for the self begins with him.