Augustine of Hippo

Early Life

Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus) was born on November 13, 354 CE in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), a small town in Roman North Africa. His father Patricius was a pagan (who converted late in life); his mother Monica was a devout Christian whose persistent prayers for her son's conversion became legendary. Augustine received a classical rhetorical education in Thagaste, Madauros, and Carthage, becoming a brilliant student of rhetoric.

In Carthage, the young Augustine lived a life he later described as dissolute — he took a concubine (who remained his companion for fifteen years and bore him a son, Adeodatus), and he was drawn to the theater, astrology, and eventually Manichaeism, a dualist religion originating in Persia that explained evil through a cosmic struggle between forces of light and darkness.

The Intellectual Journey

Augustine adhered to Manichaeism for about nine years but grew increasingly dissatisfied with its intellectual failings, especially after a disappointing encounter with the Manichaean bishop Faustus. Moving to Rome and then Milan (where he held a prestigious chair of rhetoric), Augustine encountered two transformative influences:

1. Neoplatonism: Reading Latin translations of Plotinus and Porphyry (the 'books of the Platonists') resolved his key intellectual difficulty — how to conceive of God as immaterial substance. Neoplatonism gave him the conceptual framework for understanding evil as privation (absence of good) rather than a positive cosmic force, liberating him from Manichaean dualism.

2. Ambrose of Milan: The bishop's allegorical interpretation of Scripture showed Augustine that the Bible could be read intellectually, not just literally — resolving his embarrassment at its apparent crudities.

Conversion and the Confessions

The famous scene of Augustine's conversion (386 CE) is described in Confessions VIII: tormented by his inability to commit to the Christian life despite intellectual conviction, he heard a child's voice chanting 'Tolle, lege' ('Take up and read'). He opened Paul's Epistle to the Romans at random and read: 'Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ.' The passage resolved his crisis. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387.

The Confessions (written around 397–400 CE) is far more than autobiography. Its thirteen books move from personal narrative (Books I–IX) through a philosophical analysis of memory (Book X) and time (Book XI) to an allegorical interpretation of Genesis (Books XI–XIII). Book XI contains the most profound philosophical analysis of time in antiquity: time exists in the soul as memory (present of past), attention (present of present), and expectation (present of future).

Bishop of Hippo

Augustine returned to North Africa, was ordained as priest in 391, and became bishop of Hippo Regius in 395 — a position he held until his death. As bishop, he was embroiled in three major theological controversies:

• Against the Manichaeans: Defending the goodness of creation and the nature of evil as privation
• Against the Donatists: Defending the unity of the Church and the validity of sacraments independent of the minister's moral state
• Against the Pelagians: Defending the doctrine of original sin and the necessity of divine grace. Pelagius argued that human beings have the natural capacity to live without sin; Augustine insisted that after the Fall, humanity is so corrupted by original sin that salvation is impossible without gratuitous divine grace and predestination

City of God

The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 provoked pagan accusations that the Christian God had failed to protect the city. Augustine's response, De Civitate Dei (City of God, 413–426), grew into a massive twenty-two book work that is the first comprehensive Christian philosophy of history. It distinguishes two 'cities' — the earthly city (civitas terrena), founded on self-love, and the heavenly city (civitas Dei), founded on love of God — whose members are intermixed throughout human history and will be separated only at the Last Judgment.

Legacy

Augustine died on August 28, 430 CE, as the Vandals besieged Hippo. His influence on Western civilization is incalculable. He is the architect of Western Christian theology — the doctrines of original sin, grace, predestination, and just war all bear his stamp. Both Catholics and Protestants (especially Luther and Calvin) claim him as an authority. His philosophical reflections on time, memory, language acquisition (in Confessions I, discussed by Wittgenstein), and interiority ('In interiore homine habitat veritas' — truth dwells in the inner person) make him essential to philosophy as well as theology.