Augustine of Hippo

"Our heart is restless"

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." These words open the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, one of the most famous books ever written. It is a long prayer addressed to God, telling the story of Augustine's life up to his conversion. It is often called the first autobiography in Western literature. It is also a profound meditation on memory, time, desire and grace.

Augustine is, by almost any measure, the most influential Christian thinker after the apostle Paul. Medieval Catholics, Luther and Calvin, Jansenists and modern philosophers all claimed him. Shelley and MacCulloch both give him extended attention.

A restless young man

Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa (modern Algeria), to a pagan father, Patricius, and a devout Christian mother, Monica. He was brilliant and ambitious, and his parents sacrificed to give him a classical education. As a student in Carthage he found, in his words, a "cauldron of illicit loves." He took a mistress, whose name he never records, and lived with her faithfully for fifteen years. They had a son, Adeodatus ("given by God").

At nineteen, reading Cicero, he fell in love with philosophy and the search for truth. The Bible seemed crude by comparison. He joined the Manichees, followers of Mani (see Countries of the Sunrise). They taught that the world is a battleground between two equal powers, Light and Darkness, and that evil is a substance. This seemed to solve the problem of evil: if bad things happen, it is not God's fault. Augustine stayed with them for nine years, but gradually grew disillusioned when their leading teacher could not answer his questions.

Milan and the garden

Augustine's career took him to Rome and then, in 384, to Milan, then the imperial capital in the West, as official professor of rhetoric. It was a top position. Monica followed him there. Under pressure to make a respectable marriage, he sent his mistress back to Africa, a parting he describes with deep pain.

In Milan, two things changed him. First, he read the Platonists (Neoplatonism), who taught him that God is pure spirit and that evil is not a thing but an absence or corruption of good, as darkness is the absence of light. This freed him from Manichaeism. Second, he heard the sermons of the bishop, Ambrose of Milan, a cultured man who showed that the Bible could be read with intellectual depth, often allegorically.

Yet Augustine could not bring himself to commit, especially to give up sex and ambition. He famously prayed, "Give me chastity and self-control, but not yet." In August 386, in a garden in Milan, in an agony of indecision, he heard a child's voice chanting tolle lege, tolle lege ("take up and read"). He opened a copy of Paul's letters at random and read Romans 13:13–14: "...not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness... but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh." "Instantly," he writes, "a light of certainty flooded my heart."

He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387, together with his son and his friend Alypius. Monica died soon after at Ostia, as they prepared to sail home, rejoicing that her prayers had been answered.

Augustine's life

Bishop of Hippo

Augustine returned to Africa hoping for a quiet life of prayer and study with friends. But in 391, visiting the port town of Hippo Regius, he was seized by the congregation and ordained a priest more or less against his will. This was a common practice. In 396 he became bishop, and he remained in Hippo for 34 years. He preached thousands of sermons, judged lawsuits, cared for the poor, and wrote more than five million words, including over 100 books, 200 letters and 500 sermons that survive.

His theology was forged in controversy. Three great struggles shaped it.

1. Against the Manichees: the goodness of creation

Augustine turned on his former friends. He argued that there is one good God who made everything good. Evil has no independent existence. It is a twisting of good things, especially the misuse of free will. Sin is "disordered love," loving lesser goods more than God.

2. Against the Donatists: what makes a true church?

North Africa was split between the Catholics and the Donatists, named after their leader Donatus. The Donatists had broken away after Diocletian's persecution, refusing to accept bishops who had handed over the Scriptures (see Persecution and Martyrs). They saw themselves as the pure church of the martyrs. They argued that sacraments given by unworthy priests were invalid and that true Christians must be holy. In many African towns the Donatists were the majority.

Augustine replied that the church on earth is a "mixed body" of saints and sinners, like the wheat and weeds in Jesus' parable, which God alone will separate at the end. The sacraments belong to Christ, not the priest, so they are valid even if the minister is unworthy. This principle, later called ex opere operato ("by the work worked"), became fundamental to Catholic sacramental teaching.

More troublingly, after years of failed persuasion, Augustine came to support using imperial force against the Donatists. He quoted Jesus' parable: "Compel them to come in." The empire outlawed the Donatists in 411. Augustine's argument would later be used to justify religious coercion, including the Inquisition, a dark side of his legacy.

3. Against Pelagius: grace and free will

The third controversy was the most influential. Pelagius, a British monk and moral reformer in Rome, was shocked by lax Christians who excused their sins as human weakness. He taught that God gave humans free will and the ability to obey his commands. "If I ought, I can." Adam's sin set a bad example but did not damage human nature. People can, with effort and God's help through teaching and Christ's example, live without sin.

Augustine, who knew from experience how helpless the will can be, thought this a deadly error. He taught:

• Original sin: Adam's sin damaged all humanity. Everyone is born with a corrupted nature and a will bent toward self, sharing Adam's guilt. Even babies need baptism.
• Grace: Fallen humans cannot choose God by their own power. Only God's Grace, his free, undeserved gift, can heal the will and make faith and love possible.
• Predestination: If salvation depends entirely on grace, then God chooses whom to save. In his later writings Augustine taught that God, for reasons beyond our understanding, has predestined some to salvation, while leaving the rest to the just consequences of sin.

Pelagius was condemned by councils in Africa and by the pope (418), and again at Ephesus (431). Augustine's teaching on grace became central in the West. His harsher views on predestination were never fully accepted by the Catholic Church, but they inspired John Calvin in the 1500s. The Eastern Orthodox, who never fully absorbed Augustine, generally reject his idea of inherited guilt.

The City of God

In 410 the unthinkable happened: the Visigoths under Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself (see Rome Falls, the Papacy Rises). Pagans blamed the Christians. Rome had fallen because it had abandoned its ancient gods. Refugees poured into Africa.

Augustine answered in his masterpiece, The City of God, written over thirteen years (413–426). History, he said, is the story of two "cities," two communities defined by two loves:

• The earthly city, built on love of self to the point of contempt for God. It seeks power and glory, and like all human empires, Rome included, it rises and falls.
• The heavenly city, built on love of God to the point of contempt for self. It is on pilgrimage through this world toward its true home in eternity.

The two cities are mixed together in this life, even within the church. Christians should use the peace and order of earthly states, and pray for them. But they should never identify God's kingdom with any empire. Rome's fall was a tragedy, not a catastrophe for faith. This was a powerful correction to the triumphalism of Eusebius of Caesarea, who had almost equated the Christian empire with God's kingdom. The City of God shaped medieval political thought and Christian philosophy of history.

Death in a falling world

In 430, the Vandals, a Germanic people, swept across North Africa and besieged Hippo. Augustine, aged 75, lay dying inside the walls. He had the penitential Psalms copied and fixed to the wall beside his bed, and he read them, weeping. He died on 28 August 430. The Vandals took the city soon afterward, but his library survived. Through it his ideas passed to the medieval West and beyond.