Augustine of Hippo

• 1. Introduction

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  Augustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa that today is Souk Ahras, Algeria. He died on the 28th of August 430 as the Vandals were laying siege to his city. In the seventy-five years between those dates, he moved from petty theft and hedonism in Carthage to the most visible academic post in the Latin world, then gave it all up at the sound of a child's voice. His writings on grace, original sin, free will, and just war still shape the debates of theologians and philosophers nearly sixteen centuries after his death. He became the most cited author in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. Both Catholic and Protestant traditions claim him as a founding figure, yet they dispute what he actually believed. His Confessions became the first Western autobiography and a classic of Christian theology at once. The questions his life raises are still live ones: what does a person owe to grace? Can coercion serve love? And how does a man who once prayed "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet" become the Bishop of Hippo and one of the four Great Latin Church Fathers?

• 2. A Berber in Roman Clothes

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  Thagaste sat in the Roman province of Numidia, and Augustine's family was Berber by ethnic origin but spoke only Latin at home as a matter of pride. His family name, Aurelius, points toward ancestors who had been freedmen of the gens Aurelia, granted full Roman citizenship by the Edict of Caracalla in 212. By the time Augustine was born, his family had held Roman legal status for at least a century. His mother Monica was a devout Christian; his father Patricius was a pagan who converted only on his deathbed. The household sat in a respectable middle tier: his family were honestiores, the class of honorable citizens. At eleven, Augustine was sent to school in Madaurus, a Numidian city about nineteen miles south of Thagaste, where he absorbed Latin literature alongside pagan beliefs. His first recorded moral crisis happened there when he and a group of friends stole pears from a neighbour's garden. He later spent chapters of the Confessions agonising over what that theft revealed: the pears were attractive neither in colour nor flavour, he was neither hungry nor poor, and he had better fruit at home. What he concluded was that the pleasure came from the companionship of his accomplices, not from the pears themselves, and that sin works by drawing people toward lesser goods at the expense of greater ones. That early self-interrogation planted the seed of what would become one of the most elaborate theologies of human nature ever written.

• 3. The Long Road to Conversion

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  At seventeen, the generosity of a fellow citizen named Romanianus sent Augustine to Carthage to study rhetoric, a city whose education was beyond his family's financial means. There he fell into what he called a hedonistic lifestyle, sought acceptance among young men who boasted of sexual exploits, and also read Cicero's dialogue Hortensius, a work now lost, which he described as enkindling in his heart "the love of wisdom and a great thirst for truth." That encounter with Cicero started his interest in philosophy, even as he simultaneously became a Manichaean, a move that distressed his mother deeply. Around the same age, he began a relationship with a woman in Carthage that lasted more than fifteen years. She gave birth to his son Adeodatus, whose name means "Gift from God," and contemporaries considered the boy extremely intelligent. Augustine spent roughly nine years as a Manichaean "auditor," the lowest level of that religion's hierarchy, and a disappointing meeting with the Manichaean bishop Faustus of Mileve began his scepticism of the faith. After teaching rhetoric in Carthage from 373 to 374, he moved to Rome, hoping to find more disciplined students, but discovered that Roman students simply left without paying their fees at the end of term. The prefect of Rome, Symmachus, then secured Augustine the chair of rhetoric at Milan in late 384. At thirty years old, he held the most visible academic position in the Latin world. In Milan, his mother Monica joined him, arranged a respectable marriage, and his friend Simplicianus, along with the bishop Ambrose, pulled him steadily toward Christianity. His written account of first meeting Ambrose captures the movement of the relationship: "I began to love him, of course, not at the first as a teacher of the truth... but as a friendly man." In late August of 386, having heard of Ponticianus's account of the life of Anthony of the Desert, Augustine converted to Christianity at the age of 31. The conversion moment, as he told it, came from hearing a child's voice say "take up and read." He opened a book of Paul's writings at random and read Romans 13:13-14. Ambrose baptized Augustine and his son Adeodatus in Milan on Easter Vigil, the 24th-the 25th of April 387. His mother Monica died at Ostia, Italy, shortly after, as they were preparing to return to Africa. Back in Africa, Adeodatus also died, and Augustine sold his patrimony and gave the proceeds to the poor, keeping only the family house, which he converted into a monastic foundation.

• 4. The Preacher of Hippo

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  In 391, Augustine was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius, the city now called Annaba in Algeria. He became a famous preacher: more than 350 of his sermons are believed authentic, and estimates of his lifetime output run between six thousand and ten thousand. Stenographers recorded his sermons as he delivered them, some lasting over an hour, and he preached multiple times in a given week. He stood on an elevated platform but walked toward his audience during the sermon, and drew on analogies, word pictures, similes, metaphors, repetition, and antithesis to explain scripture. A 412 sermon has survived that used questions and rhymes to describe the differences between earthly life and Heaven. In 395, he became coadjutor Bishop of Hippo and full bishop shortly afterward, a position he held until his death. As bishop, he chose the passages the church read each week and saw his primary task as interpreting the Bible for his congregation. He wrote his autobiographical Confessions in 397-398. In 410, the Visigoths sacked Rome, and Augustine wrote The City of God to console Christians shaken by the event. He imagined the Church as a spiritual city ruled by love, distinct from the earthly city ruled by pride, against the backdrop of the crumbling Western Roman Empire. His friend and fellow bishop Possidius of Calama later recorded that Augustine ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned temptations of the flesh, and exercised careful stewardship of his see's finances.

• 5. Grace, Sin, and the Will

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  Augustine is known as the Doctor of Grace, Doctor Gratiae, for the influence his views on salvation had across centuries of Christian thought. His position evolved over his lifetime. Before 396, he believed God's predestination was based on foreknowledge of who would choose to believe in Christ. After engaging the Pelagians, he concluded that grace causes the individual act of faith rather than rewarding it. Pelagius and his disciples, including Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum, held that human nature retained the full moral capacity for good after the Fall, and that immorality was exclusively a matter of bad choices. Augustine countered by pointing to the disobedience of the flesh to the spirit as a visible sign of original sin's lasting wound. He taught that Adam's guilt is inherited by all human beings and that humanity became, in his phrase, a massa damnata, a condemned crowd. This was a step beyond earlier Christian writers: although others had taught physical death, moral weakness, and a sin propensity as consequences of the Fall, Augustine was the first to add the concept of inherited guilt, the idea that an infant could be eternally damned at birth. Later councils and popes, while confirming his anti-Pelagian defence of original sin at Carthage in 418, Ephesus in 431, Orange in 529, and Trent in 1546, quietly dropped the inherited guilt of infants from their endorsements. After 412, Augustine taught that humanity has no free will to believe in Christ but only a free will to sin, a position he summarized in the Retractations: "I in fact strove on behalf of the free choice of the human will, but God's grace conquered." Patristics scholar Ken Wilson has argued that every early Christian author before Augustine who addressed the topic advanced human free choice rather than determinism, and that Augustine reverted to Manichaean and Stoic deterministic frameworks when he entered the controversy with the Pelagians. Both Luther and Calvin later embraced Augustine's deterministic teachings, and many Protestants trace the theological foundations of the Reformation to him, an interpretation the Catholic Church disputes.

• 6. Coercion, Violence, and the Donatists

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  Augustine became coadjutor Bishop of Hippo in 395, and for several years he tried to bring the Donatist schism to an end through popular propaganda, debate, personal appeal, general councils, and pressure on the emperor. The Donatists were North African Christians who refused to accept back clergy who had handed over sacred books to Roman soldiers during the Great Persecution, calling those people traditores, a word that had shifted from meaning someone who hands over a physical object to meaning traitor. For decades, the Donatist-allied Circumcellions fomented protests and street violence, accosting travellers and attacking Catholics without warning, beating people with clubs, cutting off hands and feet, and gouging out eyes. A letter Augustine wrote to bishop Novatus around 416, his Letter 28, describes the case of Bishop Rogatus, who had recently converted to Catholicism: Donatists attacked him, cut out his tongue, and cut off his hands. In the face of this, Augustine eventually changed his position. His primary theological case appears in Letter 93, written in 408 to bishop Vincentius of Cartenna in Mauretania. He confessed that he had changed his mind because of "the ineffectiveness of dialogue and the proven efficacy of laws." He had feared that forced conversion would produce false converts, but observed that many Donatists who came under imperial pressure had reflected and turned genuinely. He maintained that coercion could not directly convert anyone but could make a person ready to be reasoned with. He drew on the parable of the Great Feast in Luke 14:15-24 and its phrase "compel them to come in" as a biblical anchor for this position. He placed limits on what coercion could include, recommending fines, imprisonment, banishment, and moderate floggings, and explicitly opposing maiming and execution of heretics. Those limits were largely ignored by Roman authorities, but they represent Augustine's attempt to hold coercion within what he saw as a pastoral logic rather than a punitive one.

• 7. Legacy and the Wandering Bones

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  Augustine died on the 28th of August 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo. He spent his final days in prayer, requesting that the penitential Psalms of David be hung on his walls so he could read them, and he wept freely, according to Possidius's biography. He directed that the church library and all its books be carefully preserved. Shortly after his death, the Vandals lifted the siege, but they returned and burned the city, leaving only Augustine's cathedral and library untouched. He was canonized by popular acclaim and recognized as a Doctor of the Church in 1298 by Pope Boniface VIII. His feast day is the 28th of August. His relics traced a long path after his death: according to Bede's True Martyrology, his body was moved to Cagliari in Sardinia by Catholic bishops expelled from North Africa. Around 720, Peter, bishop of Pavia and uncle of the Lombard king Liutprand, transported the remains to the church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia to protect them from coastal raids by Saracens. In January 1327, Pope John XXII issued the papal bull Veneranda Santorum Patrum, appointing the Augustinians as guardians of the tomb. The ark housing his remains was remade in 1362 and carved with bas-reliefs of scenes from his life by Giovanni di Balduccio. In October 1695, workmen at San Pietro discovered a marble box containing human bones, including part of a skull, and a dispute arose between two Augustinian orders over whether these were his. Pope Benedict XIII, in office from 1724 to 1730, directed the Bishop of Pavia to make a determination; the bishop declared them genuine. In 1842, a portion of his right arm was returned from Pavia to Annaba, where it now rests inside a glass tube set into the arm of a life-size marble statue of Augustine in the Saint Augustin Basilica. Thomas Aquinas cited him more than any other author in the Summa Theologiae. His phrase "an unjust law is no law at all" entered centuries of natural law theory. And the single prayer he admitted to offering insincerely, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet," is still quoted as one of the most honest sentences any theologian ever wrote.