Thagaste and Carthage
Born in Thagaste in Roman Numidia, he studied rhetoric in Carthage, where Cicero’s Hortensius turned him toward philosophy.
Latin patristics · Christian Platonism · 354–430
Augustine of Hippo
Seek truth by turning inward, then beyond.
Thagaste · Carthage · Milan · Hippo
Biography
The thread of a life.
Augustine of Hippo, a North African teacher of rhetoric who became bishop of Hippo Regius, joined classical philosophy, above all Platonist thought, to Christian scripture. His writings on memory, time, the will, grace and the two cities shaped Latin theology and Western philosophy, while his views on sin, sexuality and religious coercion remain strongly contested.
Manichaean years
For about nine years he followed the Manichaeans as a hearer while teaching rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage.
Milan and conversion
As professor of rhetoric in Milan he heard Ambrose and read Platonist books; he converted in 386 and was baptized at Easter 387.
Priest and bishop
Ordained priest at Hippo Regius in 391, he was consecrated bishop around 395 and soon succeeded the aged Valerius.
Confessions and City of God
He wrote the Confessions around 397–401 and, after the sack of Rome in 410, began The City of God.
Controversies and death
After the conference of Carthage against the Donatists in 411 and long disputes with the Pelagians, he died in 430 during the Vandal siege of Hippo.
Understanding a life in depth
01A North African education
Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste, a small town of Roman Numidia, to Patricius, a modest landowner who was baptized late in life, and Monica, a devout Christian. His family made sacrifices so that he could study grammar and rhetoric at Madauros and then Carthage, where he lived for some fifteen years with a woman whose name he never gives and with whom he had a son, Adeodatus. At nineteen, Cicero’s Hortensius awakened his love of wisdom. Disappointed by the plain style of the Bible, he joined the Manichaeans as a hearer, drawn by their rational claims and their dualist answer to the problem of evil.
02Milan, the Platonists and the garden
After teaching in Thagaste and Carthage, Augustine left for Rome in 383 and in 384 obtained the official chair of rhetoric in Milan, then an imperial residence. The sermons of Bishop Ambrose showed him that scripture could be read figuratively, and the books of the Platonists, probably Plotinus and Porphyry in Latin translation, taught him to conceive of immaterial being and of evil as a lack of good. In 386, after a crisis he narrates in the Milan garden scene, he gave up his career and his planned marriage. Retreating to Cassiciacum with friends, he wrote philosophical dialogues, and he was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387; Monica died at Ostia shortly afterwards.
03Bishop of Hippo
Back in Africa in 388, Augustine formed a community of prayer and study at Thagaste, where his son Adeodatus died young. On a visit to Hippo Regius in 391 the congregation pressed him into ordination as a priest, and around 395 he became bishop of this port city, an office he held for some thirty-five years. Preaching, judging disputes, writing letters and travelling to councils filled his days. He wrote the Confessions early in this period and long opposed the Donatists, a rival African church; after first favouring persuasion alone, he came to defend imperial coercion against them, a position that later justifications of religious constraint invoked and that remains sharply criticized.
04The fall of Rome, grace and the last years
When the Goths sacked Rome in 410, refugees reached Africa and pagan critics blamed the abandonment of the old gods; Augustine answered with The City of God, written from 413 to about 426. From 411 he also opposed Pelagius and his followers, insisting that human beings cannot will the good without divine grace and developing doctrines of original sin and predestination that became central and disputed in Western theology. Near the end of his life he reviewed his writings in the Reconsiderations. He died at Hippo in 430 while the Vandals besieged the city; his biographer Possidius compiled a catalogue of his works.
Augustine’s influence runs through medieval theology, the Reformation quarrels over grace, later comparisons between his “if I am mistaken, I exist” and Descartes’ cogito, Arendt’s dissertation on love and the opening of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. His teaching on original sin, his suspicion of sexual desire and his defence of coercing the Donatists belong to that legacy too and draw lasting criticism.
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