Augustine

Aurelius Augustinus, known throughout the Christian tradition as Augustine of Hippo, was born in 354 at Thagaste in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa, on the site of present-day Souk Ahras in Algeria. His father Patricius was a member of the local curial class and a pagan until a late conversion; his mother Monica was a devout Christian whose prayers and persistence occupy a central place in Augustine's own later narrative of his life. He received a classical Latin education at Thagaste, Madauros, and Carthage and was trained for a career in rhetoric. In youth he adhered to Manichaeism for about nine years, taught rhetoric, and lived for a long period with an unnamed companion by whom he had a son, Adeodatus. Seeking advancement he moved from Carthage to Rome and then to Milan, then the principal imperial residence in the West, where he obtained a public chair of rhetoric.

At Milan, Augustine heard the preaching of Bishop Ambrose and read Neoplatonic works that together dissolved his remaining Manichaean convictions. After a prolonged intellectual and moral crisis, described in the Confessions, he accepted Catholic Christianity and was baptized by Ambrose at Easter in 387, together with Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. Monica died at Ostia as they prepared to return to Africa. Augustine then established a lay monastic household at Thagaste. In 391, while visiting Hippo Regius, he was ordained priest at the insistence of the Catholic congregation. He was consecrated bishop, at first as coadjutor to the aged Valerius, and from about 395 or 396 he governed the see of Hippo. As bishop he preached continually, arbitrated civil and ecclesiastical disputes, and led the Catholic church in Africa in its long conflict with Donatism.

His surviving writings form one of the largest corpora of any Latin author of late antiquity. The Confessions, written near the end of the fourth century, joined autobiography, prayer, and philosophical inquiry in a form that had no real precedent. After the Gothic sack of Rome in 410 he composed The City of God, a vast apology and theology of history directed against pagan complaints that Christianity had ruined the empire. Anti-Manichaean, anti-Donatist, and anti-Pelagian treatises defined Western teaching on the Church, the sacraments, original sin, and grace. De Trinitate, De Doctrina Christiana, the Enchiridion, scriptural commentaries, hundreds of sermons, and a large correspondence shaped medieval and later theology. He also left a brief monastic rule later adopted by communities of canons and friars who took his name, though he himself was a diocesan bishop living with his clergy and belonged to no later religious order.

Augustine died on 28 August 430 in Hippo Regius during the Vandal siege of the city under Genseric. His friend Possidius, bishop of Calama, wrote a contemporary Life and a catalogue of his works. Augustine's remains were later removed from Africa; by a well-attested medieval tradition they rest in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro at Pavia in northern Italy. He was venerated as a saint from late antiquity, without a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type, and was numbered among the Doctors of the Church. The Latin Church keeps his principal feast on 28 August; the Eastern Orthodox commemorate him on 15 June. He is invoked as patron of theologians, philosophers, printers, and brewers, of those afflicted with sore eyes, and of several cities and dioceses.