Augustine of Hippo

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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.

The making of a self

Aurelius Augustinus was born in the small inland town of Thagaste, in the Roman province of Numidia, to a pagan municipal official named Patricius and to Monica, a Christian whose patience and tears he would later cast as one of the instruments of his conversion. He was clever and was sent to study at Madaura and then at Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa, to be trained in rhetoric — the prestige discipline of the empire, the road by which a provincial of talent might rise. At Carthage he took a concubine, a woman whose name he never records, who bore him a son named Adeodatus, “given by God,” and to whom he remained faithful for some fourteen years. He read, at nineteen, the Hortensius of Cicero, a now-lost exhortation to philosophy that fixed in him a lifelong hunger for wisdom rather than for any particular doctrine — a hunger he would spend decades trying to satisfy and then to discipline.

For roughly nine years he was a Manichaean hearer. Manichaeism, the universal religion of light founded by Mani in third-century Mesopotamia, offered the young rhetor what seemed an intellectually honest answer to the problem that gripped him above all others: the origin of evil. Its answer was dualist. Two co-eternal principles, light and darkness, good and evil, were locked in a cosmic struggle; evil was a positive substance, a kingdom of its own, and the soul’s suffering was the fragment of light caught in matter. This let Augustine hold himself blameless — sin was the dark substance working in him, not his own will — and it let him scorn the crude anthropomorphisms he found in the Latin Bible. But the system’s astronomy failed against the science of the day, its celebrated teacher Faustus could not answer his hard questions, and Augustine drifted toward the skepticism of the New Academy. Out of these nine years would come, decades later, a whole anti-Manichaean corpus — the Confessions themselves are in part a long argument against the man he had been.

The break came in Italy. Augustine left Carthage for Rome and then secured, in 384, the public chair of rhetoric at Milan, the western imperial capital — a post that put him near the court and near the most formidable churchman of the age. There two things converged. He heard the preaching of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, whose allegorical reading of the Old Testament dissolved the literalist objections the Manichaeans had taught him to make; “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” became a key that opened the scriptures he had despised. And he read the libri Platonicorum, Latin renderings (made by the convert and translator Marius Victorinus) of treatises by Plotinus and Porphyry. From them he received what he could not have received from the preaching alone: a metaphysics in which God is wholly immaterial, changeless, and the source of all being, and in which evil has no substance of its own at all. This last point was the hinge. If everything that exists is good insofar as it exists, because a good God made it, then evil is not a thing but a defect — a privation of the good, a corruption or turning of the will away from the higher toward the lower. The Manichaean problem dissolved. Augustine had found the Plotinian answer that the Enneads set out in the tractate on the nature and source of evil, and he carried it permanently into Christian theology.

What remained was the will. Augustine could now see the good and could not hold to it; he describes in the Confessions a will divided against itself, commanding and disobeying in the same breath. The crisis broke in a garden in Milan in the summer of 386. Weeping under a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice from a neighboring house chanting tolle, lege — take up and read. He opened the letters of Paul at random and fell on a passage of Romans bidding him put off the works of darkness; the divided will was made whole, not by his striving but, as he tells it, by grace. He resigned his chair, withdrew to the country estate of Cassiciacum to write philosophical dialogues, and at the Easter Vigil between 24 and 25 April 387 was baptized by Ambrose, together with Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. Monica died soon after at Ostia, as the party waited to sail home; the account of their last conversation, a shared contemplative ascent toward eternal Wisdom, is among the most quoted passages he wrote. Adeodatus died young. Augustine returned to Africa, was seized almost against his will by the congregation at Hippo Regius and ordained priest in 391, and became the city’s bishop around 395, a working pastor of a busy port for the thirty-five remaining years of his life.

The two cities

When the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome in 410 — the first fall of the city in eight hundred years — the shock ran through the empire, and with it a charge: that Rome had been strong while she honored her old gods and had grown weak since she abandoned them for Christ. The City of God, written across some fourteen years between roughly 413 and 426 or 427, is Augustine’s answer, and it grew under his hand into the largest and most ambitious work of Latin Christian antiquity. Twenty-two books fall into two movements. The first ten dismantle the pagan case: the Roman gods, Augustine argues, never delivered either earthly safety — Rome had suffered catastrophe under their watch for centuries — or the felicity of the soul after death, and the philosophers who saw furthest, the Platonists, saw the immaterial God but stumbled at the mediator who could bring fallen humanity to him.

The last twelve books raise the structure he is remembered for. Two cities, Augustine writes, have been built by two loves: the earthly city by love of self carried to contempt of God, the heavenly city by love of God carried to contempt of self. They are not two institutions and not two nations; they run intermingled through all of history, from the fall of the angels to the last judgment, their citizens not yet sorted, the wheat and the tares growing in the one field until the harvest. No empire is the City of God, and Rome’s collapse is therefore not a theological catastrophe; the eternal city is built of those whom God’s grace gathers, and it has no walls that Goths can breach. With this move Augustine cut the deep tie between Christian hope and the fortunes of the Roman state that had grown up since Constantine, and handed the Latin West a philosophy of history — providential, end-directed, and indifferent to the survival of any earthly order — that would shape political theology for a thousand years.

Grace, sin, and the divided will

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.

The Pelagian controversy, opening after 410, was the great labor of his last two decades. Pelagius — an ascetic teacher, traditionally said to be a Briton — and his sharper disciple Caelestius taught that the will is free and intact, that human beings can keep God’s commands by their own choice, and that grace is the gift of nature, of the law, and of Christ’s example rather than an interior force that alone makes the good will possible. To Augustine this emptied the cross of its necessity. Against it he raised the architecture for which he is most fiercely loved and most fiercely resented: that the sin of Adam wounded the whole race descended from him, so that humanity is born not merely able to sin but unable not to sin; that the will, though genuinely free, is in bondage until grace heals it; and that God, from before the foundation of the world, has chosen — predestined — those whom that healing grace will reach. The will is not abolished by grace, in his account, but liberated by it: grace does not coerce the self from outside but restores its power to want the good. Rome and the African councils sided with him. A synod at Carthage in 418 condemned Pelagian teaching in a series of canons; the Council of Ephesus in 431, the year after his death, ratified the condemnation for the East. But his unbending later predestinarianism troubled even his admirers — the monks of southern Gaul who pressed him for a milder reading were not heretics, and the Church that canonized him never simply adopted his hardest formulations. Julian of Eclanum, the last and most relentless of his Pelagian opponents, fought him to the end of his life over whether the doctrine of inherited sin did not make God the author of evil after all — the very charge Augustine had spent his youth escaping among the Manichaeans.

There was an earlier and more local fight. The Donatists, a rigorist African church born of the persecutions, held that the sacraments of bishops who had lapsed under pressure were void, that the true Church was the unstained communion of the pure, and that they alone were it. Against them Augustine worked out a doctrine of the Church that would prove as durable as anything he wrote: that the validity of a sacrament rests not on the holiness of the minister but on Christ, who is its true agent; that the Church on earth is a mixed body of saints and sinners, not a society of the already-perfect; and that unity and charity, not ritual purity, mark the body of Christ. At the Conference of Carthage in 411, convened and decided by the imperial tribune Marcellinus, the Catholic side prevailed and the Donatists were proscribed. Augustine had by then made the hard turn for which he is also indicted: he came to defend the use of imperial coercion to bring schismatics back, reading the parable’s compel them to come in as warrant for a disciplinary force he had once opposed — the first sustained Christian theory of religious compulsion, and a text later ages would quote to darker ends than he intended.

The inward turn: memory, time, and the ascent

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.

The later books of the Confessions leave narrative behind and turn to analysis, and they are where Augustine the philosopher does his most enduring work. Book X is a vast exploration of memory — the “fields and spacious palaces” within, where the images of all things seen, the truths of number and measure never sensed, and the very expectation of happiness are stored, and where, searching for God, he finds that he must search beyond memory itself because God is the unchanging light by which memory is even possible. Book XI turns to the question of time. If God created all things, what was he doing before? The question is malformed, Augustine answers, because time itself is part of creation: there is no “before” the world, for there was no time in which a “before” could fall. And what, then, is time? Augustine presses the puzzle to its edge — the past is not, for it has gone; the future is not, for it has not come; the present has no duration, for the moment it endures it becomes past. Time, he concludes, is a distentio animi, a stretching of the soul: there is a present of things past, which is memory; a present of things present, which is attention; and a present of things future, which is expectation. The mind measures time within itself. Set against this is the nunc stans, the standing now of God’s eternity, in which there is no was and will-be but only an undivided present — the changeless against which all change is read. The analysis has occupied philosophers from his own age to the phenomenologists of the twentieth century, who returned to Book XI as a founding text on the inner consciousness of time.

The same inward movement governs his theory of knowledge. Augustine held that the mind does not generate the eternal truths it grasps — the necessities of number, the standards of justice and beauty — but receives them, lit from above by a divine light: the doctrine of divine illumination in which Christ, the inner teacher, the eternal Word, makes truth visible within the soul. Here the Platonic structure is unmistakable, and it is the bridge by which a Platonic epistemology entered Christian thought and held it for the better part of a millennium, until the Aristotelian recovery of the thirteenth century offered a rival account.

Afterlife

Augustine wrote without stopping — letters, sermons preached to his African congregation, the long meditation on the De Trinitate, the De Doctrina Christiana on how to read scripture, the Enchiridion, the anti-heretical treatises — and near the end he reviewed and corrected his own output in the Retractationes, an old man auditing a lifetime’s books. He died on 28 August 430 while the Vandals, the Arian Germanic people who had crossed from Spain, besieged Hippo; within a year the city fell, and the Roman Africa that had formed him was gone within a generation. His library survived, and through it the Latin West received him whole.

No other Latin writer of antiquity was read so continuously or claimed by so many. The medieval schoolmen built on him; Thomas Aquinas cited him constantly even while shifting the philosophical ground beneath him toward Aristotle. The monastic and mystical traditions drew on the inwardness of the Confessions: Bernard of Clairvaux and the later affective mystics, the school of contemplatives who took the descent into the self as the road to God. The Reformers read him as their own — Luther was an Augustinian friar, Calvin quoted him more than any other Father — and built their doctrines of grace and predestination on his foundation, while the Catholic Church that canonized him as a Doctor read the same texts toward sacrament and free cooperation with grace. Both could do so because the man held more than one emphasis in tension and never resolved them all.

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.

Texts and scholarship

The two works that carry his name to general readers are freely available in the public-domain English versions that long served as the standard scholarly texts. The Confessions are hosted in the edition prepared by Albert C. Outler at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (https://ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions); the older verse-faithful translations of E. B. Pusey (1838) and J. G. Pilkington (in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1886) remain widely cited. The City of God is available in the translation by Marcus Dods from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 2 (1887), hosted at New Advent (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1201.htm), the same series in which the anti-Donatist and anti-Pelagian treatises and the anti-Manichaean works translated by Richard Stothert and Albert H. Newman were published and entered the public domain. The Plotinian source that reshaped Augustine’s account of evil can be read in Stephen MacKenna’s translation of the Enneads (1926); the tractate on the nature and source of evil is the relevant text.

The indispensable modern life is Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (University of California Press, 1967), reissued in 2000 with a long epilogue that takes account of the Divjak letters and the Dolbeau sermons — two caches of genuine Augustinian texts recovered in the late twentieth century that reopened the first and last decades of his episcopate (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/augustine-of-hippo/paper). Henry Chadwick’s Augustine (Oxford, 1986) is the compact philosophical introduction, and his 1991 translation of the Confessions is a standard. The fullest current survey of his philosophy is the entry “Saint Augustine” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published in 2019 and substantively revised in 2024 (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/), which sets out his Neoplatonism, his account of evil as privation, the will and grace, and the analysis of time in Confessions XI. For the place of Augustine in the fifth-century world that ended with him, the wider frame is Brown’s own The World of Late Antiquity (1971) and the scholarship on the African church that followed it.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) · Plotinus — On the Nature and Source of Evil (Enneads I.8, MacKenna)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Thomas Aquinas · Clement Of Alexandria · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Manichaeism Religion Of Light · Christianity · Ambrose · Grace In Christianity · Augustinian Divine Illumination