Saint Augustine of Hippo

Aurelius Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 AD to a pagan father

and devout Christian mother. Gifted with a brilliant mind, he enjoyed academic
success and worldly pleasures at Carthage until he became restless for truth
and virtue. Successively disappointed by Platonic philosophy and Manichaen
theology, he found his rest in the God of Catholic Christianity at the age of 32.
Ten years later, Augustine reluctantly became Bishop of Hippo. A prolific
writer and original thinker, Augustine's treatises, sermons and letters number
into the hundreds. He put his gifted mind to work on subjects such as grace, the
Trinity, the soul, predestination, the sacraments, sexuality and free will.
Augustine's thought has had a profound impact on both Catholicism (primarily
in his doctrine of the church) and Protestantism (especially in his concept of
salvation).
The Life of Augustine of Hippo
Augustine is one of the precious few ancient figures who recorded a great
deal of information about their life and times. In fact, he is one of very few
historical figures to have written an autobiography, a genre that until recent
centuries was rarely seen. In his Confessions, a spiritual autobiography
chronicling his adventurous journey to salvation, Augustine offers historians a
detailed account of his life and experiences up to his conversion.
Although artistic license is certainly utilized, the Confessions nevertheless
provide theologians with valuable insight into the background and influences of
Augustine's thought, and historians with important information on life in the
Roman Empire at the close of the 4th century. Moreover, average readers are
often struck by how remarkably modern and relevant Augustine's story seems
to be.

Most of what follows is taken directly from Augustine's own account, with
supplemental information provided by his contemporaries, his other writings,
and modern scholarship.
Conversion to Catholic Christianity
Augustine's internal conflict came to a head in a garden in August of 386,
as he sat tormented by indecision and powerlessness. Finally, weeping with
despair and crying out to God, he thought he heard a child's voice chanting, as
if in a game, "Take and read! Take and read!" Understanding this to be a sign
from God, Augustine opened his copy of Paul's epistles and read the first thing
he saw. His eyes fell on Romans 13:13-14: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not
in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof."
Augustine later wrote of the moment, "I neither wished nor needed to read
further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief
from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were
dispelled." Following a quiet winter spent at Cassiacum with family and friends,
the newly-converted Augustine was baptized, along with his son and a friend,
on Easter 387.
Augustine as Bishop of Hippo
After a year in Rome, Augustine eagerly headed home to Thagaste, where
he set up a study-focused monastic community with several friends. Augustine
quickly gained a great reputation, but feeling called to the monastic life, he
carefully avoided being pressured into becoming a bishop by avoiding all
churches lacking such a leader. In 391, he visited Hippo Regius in hopes of
assisting a friend to conversion, and attended church services there. The
church did have a bishop by the name of Valerius, but unbeknownst to
Augustine, the bishop was looking for a presbyter. Coerced by the
congregation, Augustine reluctantly but obediently became priest of Hippo,
beginning his duties in 391. He spent his early clerical career in study,
contending against the Manichees, completing On Free Will, and battling with
the Donatists, a schismatic Christian group.
In 395 Bishop Valerius nominated Augustine as his successor. The bishop
died a year later, and despite his initial reluctance, Augustine devoted himself
to his role as Hippo's new bishop. He took on a remarkable amount of duties. In
addition to the regular tasks of administering the sacraments, visiting the
afflicted, preaching, judging disputes, and helping the needy, he wrote an
extraordinary amount and engaged in several heated controversies. Augustine
was intimately involved in three major controversies: Manichaeism, Donatism,
and Pelagianism. All three dealt, at least in part, with issues relating to our

discussion - free will, baptism, and the meaning of grace, respectively - and all
served to develop Augustine's thought.
Augustine's Last Days
In May 429, the Vandal army began advancing across Africa, arriving at
Hippo Regius a year later. Augustine was devastated by these events, but his
trust in God bore him up and he refused to flee and abandon his flock. Hippo
was under siege for fourteen months, but after only three of these Augustine
fell ill with a fever. St. Augustine died on 28 August, 430, at the age of seventysix.
Works of Augustine
Augustine was a prolific author in several genres-theological treatises,
sermons, scripture commentaries, philosophical dialogues, and autobiography.
His Confessions is usually accorded the position of the first autobiography in
history; Augustine moves from his conception to his current (at about the age
of fifty) relationship with God, and ends with a long excursus on the book of
Genesis in which he demonstrates how to interpret scripture. The psychological
awareness and self-revelation of the work still impress readers.
At the end of his life (c.426-428) Augustine revisited his previous works in
chronological order and suggested what he would have said differently in a
work titled the Retractions, which gives us a remarkable picture of the
development of a writer and his final thoughts.
Thought and Legacy of Augustine
Augustine remains a central figure both in Christianity and in the history of
Western thought. Heavily influenced by Platonism and neo-Platonism,
particularly by Plotinus, Augustine was an important part of the "baptism" of
Greek thought and its entrance into the Christian, and subsequently the
European, intellectual tradition. Also important was his early and influential
writing on the human will, which is a central topic in psychology and ethics, and
one which became a focus for later philosophers such as Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche.
It is largely due to Augustine's influence that Western Christianity
subscribes to the doctrine of original sin, and the Roman Catholic Church holds
that baptisms and ordinations done outside of the Roman Catholic Church can
be valid (the Roman Catholic Church recognizes ordinations done in Eastern
Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, but not in Protestant churches, and
recognizes baptisms done in nearly all Christian churches). Catholic theologians
generally subscribe to Augustine's belief that God exists outside of time in the
"eternal present," with time existing only within the created universe.

Augustine's writings helped formulate the theory of just war. He also

advocated the use of force against the Donatists, asking "Why... should not the
Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons
compelled others to their destruction?" (The Correction of the Donatists, 2224)
St. Thomas Aquinas took much from Augustine while creating his own
unique synthesis of Greek and Christian thought. Two later theologians who
claimed special influence from Augustine were John Calvin and Cornelius
Jansen. Calvinism developed as a part of Reformation theology, while Jansenism
was a movement inside the Catholic Church; some Jansenists went into schism
and formed their own church.
Augustine was canonized by popular recognition and recognized as a
Doctor of the Church in 1303.. His feast day is August 28, the day on which he
is thought to have died. He is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians,
sore eyes, and a number of cities and dioceses.
St. Augustine is a fourth century philosopher whose groundbreaking
philosophy infused Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism. He is famous for
being an inimitable Catholic theologian and for his agnostic contributions to
Western philosophy. He argues that skeptics have no basis for claiming to know
that there is no knowledge. In a proof for existence similar to one later made
famous by Ren Descartes, Augustine says, [Even] If I am mistaken, I am. He
is the first Western philosopher to promote what has come to be called the
argument by analogy against solipsism: there are bodies external to mine that
behave as I behave and that appear to be nourished as mine is nourished; so,
by analogy, I am justified in believing that these bodies have a similar mental
life to mine. Augustine believes reason to be a uniquely human cognitive
capacity that comprehends deductive truths and logical necessity. Additionally,
Augustine adopts a subjective view of time and says that time is nothing in
reality but exists only in the human minds apprehension of reality. He believes
that time is not infinite because God created it.
Augustine tries to reconcile his beliefs about freewill, especially the belief
that humans are morally responsible for their actions, with his belief that ones
life is predestined. Though initially optimistic about the ability of humans to
behave morally, at the end he is pessimistic, and thinks that original sin makes
human moral behavior nearly impossible: if it were not for the rare appearance
of an accidental and undeserved Grace of God, humans could not be moral.
Augustines theological discussion of freewill is relevant to a non-religious
discussion regardless of the religious-specific language he uses; one can switch
Augustines omnipotent being and original sin explanation of predestination
for the present day biology explanation of predestination; the latter tendency
is apparent in modern slogans such as biology is destiny.