Saint Augustine was born in Thagaste, the site of
modern Souk Ahras, Algeria. His father, Patricius,
was a pagan who died while Augustine was still in
his teens. His mother Monica was a devout Christian
who profoundly influenced Augustine’s way of
thinking in his later years.
Much of what we know about Augustine’s life
comes directly from his Confessions. He was educated
in Thagaste and Madaura and then sent to
Carthage to study rhetoric. There, abandoning the
Christian Church and its teachings, he took a mistress
with whom he had a son, Adeodatus, and
began to dabble in Manichaeism, a Persian religious
philosophy that held a dualistic view of good
and evil.
Augustine taught rhetoric in Carthage, Rome,
and finally Milan, where he fell under the influence
of Bishop Ambrose, whose sermons inspired him
to read the Epistles of Saint Paul. In 386,Augustine
converted to Christianity and devoted himself to
scholarly and literary pursuits.He was ordained as
a priest in 391 and established a new monastery
near Hippo in northwest Africa. He was consecrated
assistant bishop there by the ailing Valerius
in 396 and spent the remainder of his life caring
for the diocese. He died while Hippo was under
siege from the invading Vandals.
Augustine’s literary output was phenomenal.
He produced tracts against heretics and enemies of
the church, including the Manichaeans; philosophical
and literary essays in a dialogue form inspired
by the works of PLATO; scriptural exegeses;
religious instruction and pastoral works; and a
prodigious quantity of personal correspondence.
Among his most important earlier works are Contra
academicos (Against the Skeptics), which counters
the academic skepticism of the followers of
CICERO; De beata vita (On the Happy Life), in
which he argues that enduring happiness is to be
found only in the love of God; De ordine (On
Order), an attempt to explain how evil can exist
when God is both omnipotent and completely
good; De immortalitate animae (On the Immortality
of the Soul, 386/387); and De animae quantitate
(On the Greatness of the Soul, 387/388), inquiries
into the nature of the soul and its aspects. He also
wrote De musica (On Music, 387/391), in which he
addresses time and number in the abstract and
treats music as a matter of rhythm;De libero arbitrio
(On Free Will, 388–395), in which he argues that
“willing” in the appropriate way will bring about
happiness; and De magistro (The Teacher, 389), a
dialogue between Augustine and Adeodatus on
how knowledge is obtained and transferred.
City of God, written between 413 and 426 and
composed of 22 books, is Augustine’s most wellknown
work besides Confessions. Following the
sack of Rome by the Goths in 410, the Christian
Church was widely blamed for the loss of faith in
the pagan gods and the subsequent fall of the
Roman Empire. Augustine answered these charges
with City of God, a refutation of the idea that in
order to flourish people must appease a diverse
and sundry assortment of gods, as well as an interpretation
of the development of contemporary
society and Western thought in the context of the
struggle between good and evil.
Critical Analysis
Confessions, written in 397–398, is both a memoir
and a testament of faith. Even as a child, Augustine
constantly faced temptation in an environment
characterized by powerful pagan influences,
as was typical of the time and place of his youth.
He disobeys his parents and teachers, participates
in sporting events or attends theatrical productions
when he is supposed to be studying, and resists
Monica’s attempts to expose him to the
teachings of the Christian Church. “I was a great
sinner for so small a boy,” he writes.
As an adolescent, he finds that he derives genuine
pleasure from doing things that are forbidden
simply because they are forbidden, and when he
goes to Carthage to study rhetoric, he lands “in the
midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.” In this hedonistic
environment, he soon finds a suitable object
of his affection, although his joy is tempered by
“the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy and suspicion,
fear, anger, and quarrels.” Nevertheless, Augustine
joins the other sensualists of Carthage in their endless
pursuit of pleasure.“Give me chastity and continence,”
he prays, “but not yet.”
At age 19, Augustine’s ambition is “to be a good
speaker, for the unhallowed and inane purpose of
gratifying human vanity.”As part of his studies, he
is assigned CICERO’s Hortensius, which arouses in
him a love of philosophy. “It altered my outlook on
life. . . .All my empty dreams suddenly lost their
charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering
passion for the eternal truth. . . . In Greek
the word ‘philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom,’ and
it was with this love that the Hortensius inflamed
me.” In his quest, he joins the Manichees, whose
dualistic and materialistic approach to good and
evil appeals to him: Blame for the sin is cast not
on the sinner, but elsewhere. For nine years, to his
mother’s great distress, Augustine is “led astray . . .
and [leads] others astray” by his affiliation with the
Manichees.
When Faustus, a bishop of the Manichees,
comes to Carthage, Augustine is disappointed that
the bishop cannot resolve the discrepancies between
the tenets of the Manichees and known scientific
facts.“The Manichaean books are full of the
most tedious fictions about the sky and the stars,
the sun and the moon,” he writes. “I badly wanted
Faustus to compare these with the mathematical
calculations which I had studied in other books . . .
but I now began to realize that he could not give
me a detailed explanation.”
Augustine’s final rejection of the Manichaean
doctrines would come in Milan when, listening to
the sermons of AMBROSE, he recognizes his prior
misconceptions about Christian doctrine. Scripture
may be understood metaphorically, not literally,
he realizes. Evil is not a material substance, as
the Manichees would have it, but a distortion of
free will. He also acknowledges the factors that are
preventing him from embracing Christianity
wholeheartedly. They include his worldly ambitions,
his reluctance to relinquish his mistress, and
his difficulty conceiving of God as a spiritual entity.
Nevertheless, he wishes with increasing agitation
and desperation to convert to the faith.
One day he is weeping bitter tears in the garden
of his house, asking for the grace to “make an end
of my ugly sins,” when he hears a child’s voice saying,
“‘Take it and read, take it and read.’” Taking
this as a divine message, Augustine opens Paul’s
Epistles and reads the first passage his eyes land
upon: “‘Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in
lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries.
Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ;
spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.’”
“I had no wish to read more and no need to do
so,”Augustine recalls. “For in an instant, as I came
to the end of the sentence, it was as though the
light of confidence flooded into my heart and all
the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”
He relates his conversion to Monica, who is
overjoyed, and the following year (387),Augustine
is baptized on Easter Sunday.
Thus concludes the autobiographical portion of
Confessions. In the remainder of the book, Augustine
variously examines his ability to master temptation
and expounds upon the first chapter of
Genesis, discussing the nature of time with respect
to God (i.e., there was no “time” as we know it before
God created the heavens and the Earth).
“The life of Augustine has a special appeal because
he was a great sinner who became a great
saint and greatness is all the more admirable if it
is achieved against odds,” writes the translator of
Confessions, R. S. Pine-Coffin. “He hinges on the
incidents of his life such considerations as tend
to elevate the mind and heart of the reader.”
Pine-Coffin adds, “The Confessions and the City
of God rightly belong to the great literature of the
world.”
Moreover, Augustine’s theories of sin, forgiveness,
and free will have provided the foundation
for basic Roman Catholic tenets as well as those
of Calvinism, Lutheranism, and other religions.
English Versions of Works by
Saint Augustine
City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York:
Random House, 2000.
Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.Middlesex,
U.K.: Penguin Books, 1961.
Monastic Rules. Commentaries by Gerald Bonner.
Foreword by George Lawless.New York: New City
Press, 2004.
Works about Saint Augustine
Barry, Sister M. St. Augustine, the Orator: A Study of
the Rhetorical Qualities of St. Augustine’s Sermons
Ad Populum (1924). Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger
Publishing, 2003.
Chadwick, Henry. Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.
Oxford, U.K. : Oxford University Press, 1986.
O’Meara, John Joseph. The Young Augustine: The
Growth of St. Augustine’s Mind up to His Conversion,
rev. ed. Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 2001.