Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430) was a Roman African theologian, philosopher, and bishop whose writings became foundational for Western Christianity and for medieval and early modern philosophy. [1] His Confessions is generally regarded as the first sustained autobiography in the Western tradition, and The City of God offered a Christian interpretation of history written as the Roman Empire disintegrated in the West. [2] He is venerated as a saint and Doctor of the Church, and his account of grace, free will, and original sin shaped later Catholic and Protestant theology alike. [3]
Early life and education
Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia, in present-day Algeria. His mother Monica was a Christian and his father a pagan municipal official; the family secured him an education in rhetoric at Madauros and Carthage. [1]
Reading Cicero's Hortensius as a student turned him towards philosophy. For roughly nine years he adhered to Manichaeism, a dualist religion that explained evil as an independent principle, before growing dissatisfied with its teachings. He taught rhetoric in Carthage and Rome and obtained a public professorship in Milan in 384. [2]
Conversion
In Milan he encountered Neoplatonism, which gave him a way of conceiving God and evil without dualism, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, which offered a reading of scripture he could accept intellectually. The Confessions describes the crisis that followed and his conversion in a garden in 386; he was baptised by Ambrose at Easter the following year. Monica died shortly afterwards as he prepared to return to Africa. [1]
Back in North Africa he established a monastic community at Thagaste. He was ordained a priest at Hippo Regius in 391 and became its bishop about 395, remaining there for the rest of his life. [3]
Writings and controversies
The Confessions, written around 397 to 400, combines autobiography, prayer, and philosophical reflection, including an extended analysis of memory and of the nature of time. The City of God, begun after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, answered the charge that abandoning the old gods had caused the disaster, and set out a vision of two cities, earthly and heavenly, intermingled through history. On Christian Doctrine and On the Trinity are among his other major works, alongside hundreds of letters and sermons. [2]
Much of Augustine's thought took shape in dispute. Against the Manichaeans he argued that evil is a privation of good rather than a substance. Against the Donatists, who held that sacraments administered by unworthy clergy were invalid, he argued that their efficacy depends on Christ rather than the minister, a position that settled Catholic sacramental theology. Against Pelagius he maintained that human beings cannot achieve righteousness by will alone and depend on divine grace, developing the doctrine of original sin in its influential Western form. [4]
Death and influence
Augustine died at Hippo Regius on 28 August 430 while the city was under siege by the Vandals, who were then overrunning Roman North Africa. [1]
His works were preserved and copied throughout the Middle Ages, when he stood with Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great as one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church. Medieval theology drew on him continuously, and the Reformers, Luther among them an Augustinian friar, returned to his writings on grace and justification to argue their case. [3]
Beyond theology, his treatment of memory, time, language, and inner life has been taken up by philosophers from Descartes to Wittgenstein and by writers on autobiography.
