Anyone who’s read much of this Web site will realize that, in the first centuries of Christianity’s existence, it was overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the eastern Greco-Roman world, and a majority of its ideas were originally expressed in the Greek language.
In the subject of this article, we have something else; a Christian from the central Empire whose only language was Latin. He also happens to be one of the most important Christian thinkers in the religion’s history.
Augustine was born in 354 CE in Numidia, a Roman province just west of Carthage (the northeast of modern Algeria). Much of what we know of him and his life comes from his own pen. In addition to writing extensively on Christian doctrine, dogma, and theology, he happened also to have left an autobiography, called Confessions.
It’s an illuminating work in which Augustine interprets events in his own life in terms of theological principles. What he says about himself isn’t always flattering, so there’s little reason to question his self-reports. We also have reports about his life, including from a fellow bishop, Possidius of Calama.
Among the things Augustine relates is that he was an ethnic Berber (or to use his own word, “African”). At the same time, he also appears to have descended (on his father’s side) from a Roman plebeian family originally from Italy.
He was educated, and in all likelihood, had some exposure to the Greek language in addition to his native Latin, but doesn’t appear to have seriously studied or employed it. He became a teacher of rhetoric, first near his home town but later in Carthage, the largest city near his own home district. He subsequently moved to Rome and taught there.
As a young man, and during most of his career as a teacher, Augustine was a committed Manichaean, in contrast to his mother, who’d been a Christian. I covered that particular religion in another article. He never took vows as one of the Manichaean “Elect,” remaining only a “Hearer,” but had been an ardent adherent of that faith.
But all of that was while he was still in Africa. Moving to Rome exposed him to a wider range of academia and also exposed him to some other Manichaeans who proved disappointing to Augustine.
During his years as a teacher in Africa, Augustine lived with a mistress whom he never married, and who bore him a son named Adeodatus (meaning, literally, “God’s gift”). It’s fair to say he ended up not doing right by her.
Not only did he never marry her despite having lived with her for many years, once he’d arrived in Italy, he set her aside so that he could arrange to marry a very-young heiress (that marriage ultimately never came about). What’s more, he had another mistress but likewise had to dismiss her due to the proposed marriage.
Augustine’s move to Rome was prompted by better prospects for rhetoric teachers there, and so that he might further study Neoplatonism, among other subjects that interested him. But it turned out that the grass (as they say) wasn’t actually greener. He heard of opportunities to teach in Milan, the western Roman imperial capital at the time, and went there.
He arrived in Milan at an inauspicious time for Manichaeans. Emperor Theodosius I had issued a series of decrees hamstringing religions other than Christianity starting in the early 380s. Augustine also met St Ambrose, a Christian bishop and associate of the Emperor who, outside of the Church and the imperial court, also had a reputation as a skilled rhetorician.
Although he’d been no stranger to Christianity over the years, in Milan, Augustine was exposed to the religion to a degree he hadn’t been previously. He was influenced to convert to the religion not only by Ambrose, but by some other Christian academics, as well as his reading of a biography of St Anthony the Great (about whom I’ve also written).
After his conversion and baptism in 387, almost immediately, Augustine scaled back as a rhetoric teacher and turned toward the priesthood. He returned to his native Numidia where he was ordained a priest in 391.
Note that this was quite a change of direction for him; he’d taken vows as a Christian cleric but (as noted) had never taken vows as a Manichaean to be one of that religion’s “Elect.”
His previous life as a rhetorician made him a natural preacher. He targeted Manichaeanism, having turned on his former faith rather starkly. He was famous for delivering sermons, likely thousands of them during his life, in the name of promoting and bolstering Christianity. Many of those sermons were recorded, and have survived for us to read. He also wrote extensively on many theological and ecclesiastical topics.
Augustine was widely respected in the Christian community, having been ordained only four years after his baptism. That respect showed, again, when he was made a hierarch only five years after his ordination, becoming Bishop of the city of Hippo Regius (usually just called Hippo).
Upon his return to Numidia after his conversion to Christianity, having inherited his family’s estate, Augustine liquidated most of the estate and donated the proceeds to the poor. He kept only the original family home and converted it to something of a monastic residence for him and some associates. He later came up with some guidelines for monks and nuns to follow, which are now known as “the Rule of Augustine.”
While inspired by the life and career of St Anthony, his “rule” was not as strict as the manner in which Anthony and the other eastern hermits had lived. As bishop of the region, Augustine’s “rule” was expected to apply to all the monks and nuns in Numidia; it wasn’t until after his death that word of it reached Italy and other parts of the western Roman Empire.
Any astute reader of the Church Fathers will notice that most of their writings (that have survived) deal very strictly, and almost exclusively, with Christianity; with its theology, philosophy, and practices; and they focus on people and events within the Church. With Augustine, though, we see someone who was aware of, and interested in, events in the wider world outside of Christendom.
Not only is this evident in his Confessions, where (as noted) he relates events in his own life to Christian notions, but also in an arguably more famous work, The City of God. The sack of Rome by the Germanic Vandal people in 410, it goes without saying, was a major event, a catastrophe that shocked the Roman world and whose impact was felt even across the Mediterranean in Augustine’s Numidia.
Augustine was disturbed by that, and also by some of its cultural fallout. Particularly, he objected to the accusation by “traditional” (i.e. not Christian) Romans that Rome had fallen because much of the people, by then, had turned away from traditional Roman deities in favor of Christianity.
This work’s original title in Latin is De civitate Dei contra paganos which literally means “On the City of God Against Pagans,” and that’s exactly how Augustine begins, with an attack on paganism generally as well as the notion that Christianity had triggered Rome’s fall.
Augustine goes on to review history in terms of an ongoing cosmic contest between the divine and the profane; between a City of God and a City of Man (or Earthly City); between God and Satan. This work has not only influenced Christian thought, through the following centuries, but also occidental historiography, as many historical events have been interpreted, since, in terms of a struggle between good and evil, between virtue and vice.
In addition to opposing both Manichaeans and traditional Roman pagans, Augustine also was concerned about wayward Christians. He wanted to promote proper doctrine and practices, and many of his sermons focused on that issue.
Over the preceding few generations, large numbers of Romans had signed on to Christianity, and not all of them received a thorough grounding in the faith, at least not as Augustine saw it. This was especially true in the 390s as the edicts and ordinances of Emperor Theodosius to limit non-Christian religion forced many to adopt Christianity (often against their will). Augustine worked to steer northern African Christendom back toward accepted notions.
His most famous work in this regard is De doctrina Christiana or “On Christian Teaching” (or “Doctrine”). It’s not only a compendium of doctrinal points but it also outlines what Augustine believed is the proper way to read and interpret scripture. He also enjoins the rhetorically-skilled (such as himself) to use that skill for the betterment of humanity — which, of course, for him meant likewise promoting Christianity and in a proper manner following proper doctrine and dogma.
Augustine also wrote treatises on other topics, such as one which eventually became the basis for the Christian doctrine of original sin, as I explain in another article. He’d written in opposition to the teachings of another cleric, but in the process of arguing against those teachings, he inadvertently ended up establishing what proved to be a theological innovation.
The Vandals who’d sacked Rome in 410 roared into Augustine’s life in a big way, some twenty years later, when they besieged his adopted city of Hippo. He was elderly and ill at that time, and died while the siege was underway.
The Vandals ultimately sacked Hippo, and destroyed most of the city, in particular sparing its cathedral and library, which Augustine had built up and worked to preserve during the siege. A few years later the Vandals made Hippo their capital.
To say Augustine was a consequential Christian thinker is an understatement. I’ve written here about a number of Church Fathers, all of whom influenced the faith, but few had the impact of Augustine. Perhaps only St Jerome had a similar or greater effect, due to his translation of Christian scripture into readable and useable vernacular Latin.
Augustine established what effectively was a new doctrine, that of original sin, and came up with an intellectual framework for humanity’s relationship with God and the cosmos. Subsequent Christian thinkers leaned on him, and his ideas, more than almost any other Church Father.
It wasn’t until the rise of the Scholastics starting in the 12th century that we see intellectuals interpreting and analyzing the faith to the same degree Augustine had. He wasn’t surpassed until St Thomas Aquinas composed his Summa Theologica in the late 1260s and early 1270s.
Augustine had another effect on Christendom: During the 13th century, fearing they might be suppressed by the Pope, a collective of ad hoc hermits in western Europe declared themselves inheritors of an order they claimed had been founded by Augustine himself. He and his monastic “rule” had inspired them.
This was the origin of what would become a mendicant order known as the Augustinians. As it turns out, Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025, is a member of this order (the first of them to become Pope). The reformer Martin Luther also was an Augustinian.
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