Augustine of Hippo

← Encyclopedia

Augustine of Hippo was a bishop and writer of Roman North Africa, born in 354 at Thagaste and dead in 430 at Hippo Regius, whose body of work became one of the foundations of Western Christian thought. He is read today as the author of two books that outlived their occasions — the Confessions, an account of his own life addressed to God, and The City of God, written as the Roman world came apart — and as the thinker whose positions on grace, sin, and the will set the terms of debate for the Latin Church for more than a thousand years.

The early life is unusually well documented because he documented it himself. He was trained as a teacher of rhetoric, took a concubine and had a son, and spent years among the Manichaeans, a dualist religion that explained evil as a rival substance to the good. He grew dissatisfied, moved to Italy, and there encountered what he called the books of the Platonists — Latin versions of Plotinus and his school. The encounter mattered. Neoplatonism gave him a way to conceive of God as wholly immaterial and of evil not as a thing but as a lack, a turning-away; it cleared the obstacle that had kept him from the Christianity of his mother, Monica. He was baptised by Ambrose of Milan in 387, returned to Africa, and was made bishop of Hippo, where he remained until the Vandals besieged the city in the year he died.

What he took from the Platonists he also turned against them. He held that the soul could not climb to God by contemplation alone, as the philosophers taught, because the will itself was disordered and could not be straightened by its own effort; only grace, unearned, could turn it. From this came his long quarrel with the monk Pelagius, who held that human beings could choose the good unaided — a dispute that produced Augustine’s hard doctrines of original sin and predestination. Both were contested inside the Church from the start; later Catholic and Protestant readers would each take him as their own, and read him in opposite directions.

His relation to the esoteric and mystical strands of later Western thought is oblique but real. The inward turn of the Confessions — the search for God not outward in the cosmos but downward into memory and the self — became a template for centuries of Christian interior practice. And because the structure he carried into Christianity was Neoplatonist, he served, without intending it, as one of the channels by which that pagan philosophy passed into the medieval West, where it would surface again in the mystics and, eventually, in the Renaissance recovery of the same sources he had read.

He distrusted curiosity about hidden things and warned against astrology and the magical arts, yet he never doubted that the visible world pointed beyond itself. Much of his enduring pull lies in that tension, held without resolution: a mind formed by the philosophers’ ascent who concluded that the ascent could not be made alone.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Thomas Aquinas · Clement Of Alexandria · Bernard Of Clairvaux