Augustine of Hippo

Augustine of Hippo was a Roman North African bishop, theologian and philosopher who lived as the Western Roman Empire was breaking apart. His Confessions, the first great autobiography in Western literature, and The City of God, a vast reflection on history and faith, made him the most influential Christian thinker of the Latin West. His teachings on grace, sin, time and the will shaped medieval philosophy, the Protestant Reformation and much of modern thought.

Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia, today Souk Ahras in Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a minor landowner who was baptised only late in life; his mother, Monica, was a devout Christian whose prayers for her son are a recurring theme of the Confessions. Augustine studied in Madaura and then in Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa. In his late teens he took a concubine, whose name he never recorded, and with whom he lived for about fifteen years; their son, Adeodatus, was born around 372.

At about nineteen, reading Cicero's lost dialogue Hortensius, he was fired with a love of wisdom. The Bible, by comparison, struck him as crude, and he joined the Manichees, a religion that taught that the world was a battleground between two equal powers of good and evil. He remained a follower for about nine years while teaching rhetoric, but grew disillusioned when their leading teacher failed to answer his questions.

In 383 Augustine left Africa for Rome, and in 384 he won the post of official professor of rhetoric in Milan, then the seat of the imperial court of the Western Roman Empire. There he heard the sermons of the bishop Ambrose, who showed him that the Old Testament could be read figuratively, and he read Latin translations of the Neoplatonist philosophers, probably Plotinus and his pupil Porphyry. From them he learned to think of God and the soul as immaterial realities, and of evil not as a substance but as the absence of good.

What he lacked, he wrote, was the will to change his life. In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, in tears, he heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read", opened the letters of Paul at random and read a passage urging an end to indulgence. He resolved to live a celibate Christian life. He resigned his post, spent months in philosophical retreat at Cassiciacum near Milan, and was baptised by Ambrose at Easter 387, together with Adeodatus. On the journey home Monica died at Ostia, the port of Rome.

Back in Africa, Augustine set up a small religious community in Thagaste. In 391, on a visit to the port of Hippo Regius, today Annaba, the congregation pressed him to become a priest, and around 395 he became the city's bishop, a post he held for the rest of his life. He preached constantly, judged disputes, ran the church's affairs and wrote an enormous body of work: over a hundred books, hundreds of letters and more than five hundred surviving sermons.

Much of this writing came out of controversy. Against the Donatists, a rival African church that held that sacraments given by unworthy priests were invalid, he argued that their validity came from Christ, not from the priest, and he eventually supported the use of imperial force against them, a decision later used to justify religious coercion. Against the British monk Pelagius and his followers, who taught that humans could choose to live without sin by their own effort, he argued that since Adam's fall all humans inherit a corrupted nature, original sin, and can be saved only by God's grace, given freely to those God has chosen. These ideas on grace and predestination became central to Western Christianity.

The Confessions, written around 397–400, tells his life up to his mother's death as a long prayer addressed to God, and then turns to philosophical questions on memory, time and creation. Augustine asked what time is and concluded that past and future exist only in the mind, as memory and expectation, while God exists outside time altogether. He also argued that we can be certain of our own existence because even if we are deceived, we must exist to be deceived, an argument later compared with the famous reasoning of René Descartes.

Following Plato, he held that true knowledge concerns unchanging truths, such as those of mathematics, which the mind can grasp only because God illuminates it. He gave free will a central place in explaining evil: God created everything good, and evil arises when free creatures turn away from God toward lesser goods. In On the Trinity he used the structure of the human mind, its memory, understanding and will, as an image for the three persons of God.

In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome, a shock that echoed across the empire; pagans blamed the abandonment of the old gods, an event recalled on our fall of Rome page. Augustine replied with The City of God, written between about 413 and 426. In twenty-two books he argued that Rome's misfortunes were not caused by Christianity, and that all of human history is the story of two cities: an earthly city founded on love of self and a heavenly city founded on love of God, mixed together in this world and separated only at the end of time. No earthly state, not even a Christian empire, could be identified with the city of God. The work also developed ideas on when war could be just, later central to the just war tradition.

In 430 the Vandals, who had crossed from Spain into Africa, besieged Hippo. Augustine died during the siege, on 28 August 430. His library survived, and his works were copied throughout the Middle Ages.

Augustine was the most important bridge between ancient philosophy and medieval Christian philosophy. Thinkers such as Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas built on him, and Martin Luther, himself an Augustinian friar, and John Calvin drew heavily on his teaching on grace. His views on sexuality and original sin have been strongly criticised in modern times, but his reflections on time, memory and the inner self continue to be read by philosophers and theologians alike. He is venerated as a saint by Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant churches.