Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose full name
was Aurelius Augustinus, was born in a.d. 354,
in the city of Tagaste, in the Roman North African province of Numidia
(now Algeria). His moderately well-to-do family was religiously mixed.
His father, Patricius, was a pagan who still adhered to the old gods
of Rome, and his mother, Monica, was a devout Christian. Such families
were typical of this era, when paganism was in retreat and Christianity
was spreading. Despite his mother’s strong influence, Augustine
was not baptized a Christian until he was in his early thirties.
Augustine was an intellectually gifted child, and his
parents carefully schooled him so he could secure a good position
for himself in the Roman civil service. At the age of seventeen,
his parents sent him to Carthage to study. There, he quickly discovered
the joys of sex, and he soon fell deeply in love with a woman who
became the mother of his son, Adeodatus. Augustine never married
this woman, but she remained his mistress for many years, a common arrangement
in the fourth century.
Augustine’s mother still harbored her ambitions for Augustine, and
she persuaded him to get rid of his mistress and move to Italy, where
he could secure a good career for himself—the reason he’d been so
carefully schooled. Augustine listened to his mother and headed
to Italy with her and his son. The three of them settled in Milan,
the administrative capital of the Roman Empire at that time, and
Augustine took up teaching. His mother soon had him engaged to a
girl half his age who came from a wealthy and well-placed family.
Augustine never married this girl and instead took up with another
woman.
In Milan, Augustine fell under the influence of Bishop
Ambrose, and the two became good friends. In A.D. 386,
a momentous event occurred in Augustine’s life: he heard a voice
that told him to read the Bible. When he held the Bible, it fell
open to Romans 13:13, a passage in the New Testament, in which he
read that drunkenness and sexual indulgence should be abandoned.
This passage had a profound effect on him, and there and then he
decided to convert. Bishop Ambrose baptized both Augustine and his
son. Not long afterward, Augustine’s mother died suddenly, and he
went into deep depression. He emerged a changed man and decided
to give up sex, leave the woman he was living with, and move back
to North Africa with his son, where he would concentrate on being
spiritual and contemplative.
He settled near the town of Hippo Regius (now Annaba,
Algeria). The townsfolk liked the idea of having a learned man nearby, and
they suggested to Augustine that he become their bishop, since the
seat was currently vacant. Augustine refused. However, tragedy struck
again: his son died, and Augustine mourned greatly. The townsfolk
once again approached him about becoming the bishop, and this time
Augustine accepted, hoping that the rigorous demands of the position
might keep him from thinking about his son. He was ordained as a
priest in 391, and in 396 he became the bishop of Hippo, a position
he undertook with conviction and would hold until his death. He
ministered to his flock with great dedication, especially in the
ensuing years of troubling uncertainty when the Roman Empire crumbled
away, one province after another falling to the invading Germanic
tribes. One tribe, the Vandals, who were responsible for the sacking
of Rome in 410, sailed across the Mediterranean to North Africa
and quickly overran it. The story goes that Augustine died in the
year 430 in his bed, reading the Psalms, as the Vandals began to
attack Hippo. He was buried in the city’s cathedral. In the eighth
century, the Longobard king Liutprand removed Augustine’s remains
to Pavia, Italy, to save them from the Muslims who had overrun North
Africa. Augustine’s tomb is now in St. Peter’s Church in Pavia.
Augustine wrote all his life, and his work includes books
as well as letters and homilies, all written in Latin. His early
works are purely philosophical, whereas his later writings concentrate
solely on religious matters. After his conversion in 386, he wrote Against the
Academics, in which he critiqued skepticism; On
Free Choice of the Will, in which he dealt with the existence
and problem of evil; The Catholic and Manichean Ways of
Life, in which he explored the subject of ethics; and On
the Teacher, in which he examined concepts of knowledge
and language. These works formed the basis of his philosophy.
In 401, five years after he became the bishop of Hippo,
he published his Confessions, which is the first
work of autobiography in Western literature. The Confessions is
an account of his riotous early years of sensual living, but since
he wrote the work in his later years, many philosophical passages
appear as well. In the year 410, the unthinkable happened: the Vandals,
a relatively obscure Germanic tribe, conquered Rome, looting and
destroying much of the city and killing or raping many of its inhabitants.
This calamitous event shook the entire Roman Empire to its core.
In response to the anxiety and uncertainty felt by the Roman Christians,
Augustine wrote The City of God, in which he reminds
Christians that their true city was never Rome. Instead, their city
is heaven itself, which alone is eternal. This attempt to understand
a traumatic event gave Augustine the opportunity to elaborate his
political theory, and The City of God became his
most influential and widely read work.
Augustine shaped the medieval mind more than any other thinker.
He was concerned not only with philosophical inquiry but with the
construction of Christian wisdom itself. He stated that it was possible
to learn about the good, or God, by way of reason. Augustine established
the paradigms for a theology of history, which regarded history
in its totality and set forth a new view of human society, one that
was harmonious, whole, and in the image of heaven. This first description
of utopia would prove to be a rich vein in philosophy, influencing
such thinkers as Thomas More, Leibniz, Campanella, and Karl Marx.
