Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born on 13 November 354 at Tagaste in the province of Numidia in Roman North Africa. His father Patricius was a pagan freeman of modest means, baptized only at the end of his life. His mother Monica was a Christian, and she prayed for her son through all those 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 thirteen years, as Schaff counts them. 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, because 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, and he was about 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.

He knew what he ought to do and could not make himself do it. He records the prayer of his youth without flinching, "Grant me chastity and continency, 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 the garden of his lodging in 386. He was thirty-one, in pieces, weeping under a fig tree, when he heard a child's voice from a neighbouring house repeating, take up and read. He opened Paul's letters and read the paragraph on which his eyes first fell, Romans 13:13 and 14. 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. In 391 the people of Hippo Regius chose him presbyter against his will. He became bishop in 395 and served that harbor town for thirty-five years. He often preached five days in succession, and he caused the church vessels to be melted to redeem prisoners.

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. He added that the church is a field with wheat and weeds in it until harvest. Pelagius was a British monk teaching that a man can obey God by simple effort. Against him Augustine insisted that the will itself is damaged and that grace comes first, works the rescue, and holds a person to the end.

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 with The City of God, written from 413 to 426. In it two cities run through all of history, one built on love of self and one on love of God.

He died on 28 August 430 while a Vandal army besieged Hippo. Possidius, his friend, was in the city through the siege, and he gives his age as seventy-six years. Schaff writes that Augustine had the penitential psalms written on the wall over his bed.

Read Monica and Augustine, the story of her prayers →