Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste in Roman North Africa, Souk Ahras, in modern Algeria. His father Patricius was a pagan town councillor of modest means, baptized only at the end of his life. His mother Monica was a Christian, and she prayed for her son for more than thirty years.

He was clever, and the family spent beyond its means to educate him. At Carthage he studied rhetoric, the fast track to a public career, and he also did what a bright, appetite-driven seventeen-year-old does in a port city. He took a mistress and stayed with her, faithfully, for some fifteen years. She bore him a son he named Adeodatus, given by God, and he loved the boy.

At nineteen a book turned him. Cicero's Hortensius, an exhortation to philosophy, lit in him a hunger for wisdom itself. He went to the Bible looking for it and put it down in disgust, the old Latin translation was crude and the patriarchs behaved badly. So he joined the Manichees, who offered a tidy account of evil: two eternal powers, light and dark, locked in war, and none of it your fault. He stayed nine years. When their celebrated teacher Faustus finally came to Carthage and turned out to be charming and empty, Augustine started to leave.

He taught rhetoric at Carthage, then slipped off to Rome, partly to escape his students, partly to escape his mother, who followed him anyway. In 384 he won the public chair of rhetoric at Milan, the imperial capital. It was the best job of its kind in the Western empire, and he was thirty.

Milan had Ambrose in it. Augustine went to hear the bishop preach as a professional, to study the technique, and stayed for the content. Ambrose read the Old Testament figuratively, and the objections that had made the Bible unreadable to Augustine fell away. At the same time he read Latin translations of the Platonists, made, as it happens, by Marius Victorinus, and stopped thinking of God as a kind of vast physical substance. Two walls came down. One remained.

He knew what he ought to do and could not make himself do it. He records the prayer of those years without flinching: give me chastity and self-control, but not yet. His mother, now in Milan, arranged a respectable marriage; he sent the mother of his son back to Africa and called it, later, a wound that did not heal.

The break came in a garden in Milan in the summer of 386. He was thirty-one, in pieces, weeping under a fig tree, when he heard a child's voice next door in a sing-song game: tolle lege, take up and read. He opened Paul's letters at random and read Romans 13: not in reveling and drunkenness, not in strife and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh. He wrote that it was as if light poured in and every shadow of doubt went out. He resigned his chair, and Ambrose baptized him at Easter 387.

Monica died at Ostia that autumn, waiting for the ship home. She told him she had nothing left to want in this world.

Back in Africa he meant to live quietly with friends. The church at Hippo Regius cornered him in a congregation in 391 and made him a priest by acclamation while he stood there crying. He became bishop about 395 and served that harbor town for thirty-five years, preaching several times a week to dockworkers and farmers, hearing lawsuits, ransoming captives, and writing more than any other man of the ancient world.

Three fights shaped what he wrote. Against the Donatists, a rigorist African church that held sacraments worthless if the minister had failed under persecution, he argued that the power in baptism is Christ's, not the minister's, the church is a field with wheat and weeds in it until harvest. Against Pelagius, a British monk teaching that a man can obey God by simple effort, he insisted that the will itself is damaged and that grace comes first, works the rescue, and holds a person to the end. He knew the argument from the inside; he had tried the other way for a decade.

The third fight was with despair. In 410 the Goths sacked Rome, and the pagan world said the disaster came from abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered over sixteen years with The City of God: two cities run through all of history, one built on love of self and one on love of God, and no empire is the kingdom.

His Confessions, written about 397, did something no book had done before, told the story of an interior life straight to God's face, in the second person, sin included. Sixteen centuries later it still reads like a man talking.

He died on 28 August 430, aged seventy-five, while a Vandal army besieged Hippo. His friend Possidius, who was there, says he had the penitential psalms copied out large and hung on the wall by his bed so he could read them and weep.

Sources: Augustine, Confessions; Augustine, The City of God; Possidius, Life of Saint Augustine; Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, vols. 1–2.