Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo shaped Western Christianity more than anyone after Paul. Born at Thagaste in Roman North Africa in 354 to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica, he was educated in rhetoric at Carthage on a patron's money and taught it at Carthage, Rome and Milan. He lived with a woman for some fifteen years and had a son by her, and was a Manichaean for nine years before losing confidence in it. He then read the Neoplatonists, which gave him a way of thinking about evil as privation rather than substance, and heard Ambrose preach in Milan. His conversion in a garden in 386 — hearing a child's voice chanting take up and read, opening Paul at random — is described in the Confessions, published around 400. That book is the first sustained work of introspection in Western literature, addressed to God and unsparing about his own motives, including a famous passage on stealing pears purely for the pleasure of the theft. He became Bishop of Hippo in 395 and spent thirty-five years preaching, judging local disputes and writing. The City of God, begun after Alaric sacked Rome in 410, answers the charge that Christianity had caused it by separating the earthly city from the heavenly and denying that any state is permanent. His controversies with the Donatists produced a theory of the church as containing sinners, and with Pelagius a doctrine of original sin, grace and predestination that runs through Luther and Calvin. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged his city.
- Lived: 354 CE – 430 CE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: religious_leader, philosopher, writer, bishop
