Augustine of Hippo

Aurelius Augustinus, known to later ages as Augustine of Hippo, was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, a municipium in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa (the site of present-day Souk Ahras, Algeria). His father Patricius belonged to the local curial class and remained a pagan until shortly before his death; his mother Monica was a committed Christian whose long intercession for her son became a central theme of Augustine’s own later narrative of conversion. He received a classical Latin education in Thagaste, Madauros, and Carthage, training above all in rhetoric. In Carthage he entered a lasting relationship with an unnamed concubine of lower social standing and, around 372, had a son, Adeodatus. For some nine years he adhered to Manichaeism, drawn by its dualist account of evil and its claim to offer a religion of reason rather than of unexamined authority. He taught rhetoric in Carthage, spent a brief and disappointing period in Rome, and in 384 obtained the municipal chair of rhetoric at Milan, then the imperial residence in the West.

In Milan, Augustine encountered the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, whose allegorical reading of Scripture and whose standing in a Neoplatonic intellectual milieu helped dissolve both Augustine’s Manichaean materialism and his earlier difficulties with the Old Testament. A prolonged moral and philosophical crisis ended in the garden conversion of 386, famously recounted in the Confessions, after which he resigned his chair, withdrew with friends to Cassiciacum, and was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387, together with Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. Monica died at Ostia as the party prepared to return to Africa. Back in Thagaste, Augustine established a lay monastic community devoted to prayer, study, and common life. Adeodatus died not long afterward, still in adolescence. In 391, while visiting Hippo Regius, Augustine was pressed into ordination as priest by Bishop Valerius and the local congregation. He later became coadjutor and, about 395 or 396, bishop of Hippo, an office he held until his death. He organized his clergy in a monastic household and composed a rule of common life that later communities would take as the Rule of Saint Augustine, though he himself belonged to no later religious order.

As bishop he combined pastoral care with an immense literary and controversial output. Against the Donatists, whose schism grew out of the aftermath of the Diocletianic persecution, he argued for the validity of sacraments independently of the personal holiness of the minister and, more controversially, for the legitimacy of imperial coercion against schism. Against the Pelagians, from the 410s onward, he developed his mature theology of original sin, the bondage of the will, the necessity of grace, and predestination. After Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 he wrote De civitate Dei (The City of God), a vast apologetic and theology of history contrasting the earthly and heavenly cities. Other major works include the Confessions, De Trinitate, De doctrina christiana, extensive enarrationes on the Psalms, tractates on the Gospel of John, and hundreds of letters and sermons. He died on 28 August 430 while Hippo was under siege by the Vandals. Possidius of Calama, a disciple, wrote an early Life that remains a principal source for his later years.

Augustine was buried at Hippo; in the early eighth century King Liutprand of the Lombards translated relics associated with him to the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, which has remained the principal Western shrine. He was venerated as a saint from antiquity, without a later formal process of canonization, and was numbered among the Doctors of the Church. His feast is kept on 28 August in the Latin West (with additional commemorations in some Eastern calendars). His thought shaped Latin patristic and medieval theology, the Protestant Reformers, and modern discussions of the self, time, memory, and political authority, making him one of the most influential Christian writers of late antiquity.