St. Augustine

1. Who Augustine Was

Augustine was born at Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia, in what is now Souk Ahras in Algeria. His father Patricius was a pagan town councillor of modest means who was baptised shortly before his death. His mother Monica was a Christian who spent much of her adult life praying for her eldest son's conversion. The family scraped together the money to educate him because he was obviously gifted.

He trained in rhetoric, which in the fourth century was the road into the imperial civil service, and taught it at Thagaste, Carthage, Rome and finally Milan, where he held the city's public chair and delivered official panegyrics at court. He was on the way to a governorship when he stopped.

After his baptism he returned to Africa, sold his inheritance, and lived in a small community with friends. He was ordained priest at Hippo in 391 after the congregation seized on him during a sermon, and became bishop there around 395. He stayed for the rest of his life, preaching several times a week, hearing legal cases as bishops were required to do, writing constantly, and dying with a Vandal army outside the walls.

2. The Wild Youth

Augustine was vivid, brilliant and self-indulgent. He famously prayed, in his own account, for chastity and continence, and asked God not to grant it yet. He chased fame, women and the fashionable philosophies of the day, and his mother wept and prayed over him for years.

The Confessions is severe about his own conduct, and modern readers often find the severity out of proportion. The episode he examines at greatest length is the theft of some pears from a neighbour's tree when he was sixteen, which he and his friends threw to the pigs. He dwells on it because nothing about it was tempting: the pears were poor, he was not hungry, and he wanted the transgression itself. That is what he is trying to understand.

At Carthage he took a woman as his partner and lived with her for about fifteen years. Their son, Adeodatus, was born around 372, when Augustine was seventeen or eighteen. He speaks of her with real affection and never gives her name. The relationship ended when a respectable marriage was arranged for him at Milan and she was sent back to Africa. Augustine records her grief and his own, and offers no defence of what was done. Their son died a few years later, in adolescence, shortly after his own baptism.

3. Carthage, Manichaeism and the Long Search

The intellectual road took about thirteen years. At nineteen, reading Cicero's lost dialogue Hortensius as a set text, he was turned toward philosophy and the pursuit of wisdom. He went to the Bible next and put it down again, offended by the plain style and the crude stories of the Old Testament, judging it beneath the Latin he had been trained on.

Then he joined the Manichees and stayed for about nine years as a hearer, the outer grade of the movement. Manichaeism was a dualist religion that taught two eternal principles, light and darkness, held matter and the body to be the work of the evil principle, and explained sin as an alien substance at work in a person rather than as anything he had chosen. It also promised that faith could be replaced by knowledge, which was exactly what a clever young man wanted to hear.

He lost confidence in it slowly, and finally when he met Faustus, the movement's most celebrated teacher, and found that the man could not answer his questions about astronomy and contradiction. He moved to Rome, then to Milan, and drifted for a time toward the sceptics.

Two things broke the deadlock at Milan. He read what he calls the books of the Platonists, which gave him a way of conceiving God and the soul as immaterial, and undercut the whole Manichaean picture of evil as a substance. And he heard Ambrose preach. He went for the rhetoric, and Ambrose's way of reading the Old Testament showed him that the texts he had dismissed could be read at a level he had never suspected.

4. The Conversion

By the summer of 386 Augustine was intellectually convinced and could not move. He describes the state precisely: he wanted to want it, and could not, and was held by habit. The crisis broke in a garden in Milan, in front of his friend Alypius, in a fit of weeping.

He heard a child's voice from a neighbouring house chanting tolle, lege, take and read, over and over, in a sing-song he did not recognise from any children's game. He took it as a command, went back to the bench where he had left a codex of Paul's letters, and read the first passage his eye fell on: Romans 13:13 to 14, which tells its readers to live honourably as in the day, to make no provision for the flesh and its desires, and to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. He writes that he had no wish to read further, because a light of certainty flooded in and every shadow of doubt went.

He resigned his chair at the end of the teaching term, withdrew with his mother, his son and his friends to a country house at Cassiciacum, and was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387, with Adeodatus and Alypius. Monica died at Ostia a few months later, on the way home, saying that she had nothing left to want in this life.

5. Priest and Bishop of Hippo

Augustine went back to Africa, sold what he had inherited, and set up a household of friends living in common at Thagaste, intending to spend his life in study. It lasted about three years.

Visiting Hippo Regius, a busy port with a Greek-speaking congregation and a bishop looking for help, he was recognised in church and the people demanded his ordination on the spot. He wept, and was ordained. Around 395 he became bishop of the same town.

The job was relentless and mostly unglamorous. He preached several times a week, and several hundred of his sermons survive. He sat as a judge in the bishop's court, which under Roman law handled real civil disputes, and complained about the hours it took. He wrote letters across the Mediterranean, ran a monastery of clergy attached to his church, and produced the enormous body of work that came down to us. He also wrote a rule for his community, which remains in use by the Augustinian orders.

He died on 28 August 430, aged seventy-five, as the Vandals besieged Hippo. His biographer Possidius, who was with him, records that he had the penitential psalms copied out and hung on the wall by his bed so he could read them as he lay dying.

6. The Doctor of Grace

Augustine's title in the Church is Doctor of Grace, and it comes from the controversy of his last two decades. Pelagius, a British ascetic teaching at Rome, and his followers held that human beings can keep God's commandments by their natural powers, that grace is help rather than necessity, and that Adam's sin injured his descendants by bad example rather than by transmitted damage.

Augustine's answer was that the will is genuinely free and genuinely damaged, that it is bent inward on itself, and that it is healed by grace which is given before any merit and which produces the good actions rather than rewarding them. He held that even the first movement toward God is God's gift, and he read Paul closely to say so: what do you have that you did not receive (1 Corinthians 4:7), and it is God who works in you both to will and to work (Philippians 2:13).

The Church endorsed the core of this. Pelagianism was condemned at the Council of Carthage in 418 and again at Ephesus in 431, and the Second Council of Orange in 529 settled the remaining questions in Augustine's direction against the position that the first step toward faith could be a purely human initiative.

The Church did not endorse everything he wrote about it. Augustine's late writing on predestination presses further than the Church has ever defined, and Catholic teaching holds together the priority of grace and the reality of free consent without adopting his most severe formulations. Our page on free will and grace works through the distinction, and our page on original sin sets out what the Church actually teaches about the damage Augustine was describing.

The long-run consequence is that Augustine is claimed by everyone. Catholic theology is built on him. Luther was an Augustinian friar and read him as the authority against the theology of his own day, and Calvin quoted him constantly. Sixteenth-century arguments about salvation were largely arguments about how to read Augustine, which is set out further on our page on faith and works.

7. The Confessions and The City of God

The Confessions

Written around 397 to 400, when he was already a bishop, the Confessions is addressed to God throughout and is a prayer rather than a memoir. Its first nine books tell his life to his mother's death, and the last four turn to memory, time and the opening of Genesis. The word confession carries both senses at once, the admission of sin and the profession of praise.

It is the first book in western literature to treat a person's inner life as the subject worth examining, and it invented a great deal of the vocabulary later writers use for it. It is also short enough to read in a week.

The City of God

Rome was sacked by Alaric's Goths in 410, and pagan opinion blamed the disaster on the abandonment of the old gods. Augustine spent from 413 to 426 answering that charge, and the answer grew into twenty-two books.

The argument is that two cities run through all of history, built by two loves: the earthly city by love of self to the point of contempt for God, and the heavenly city by love of God to the point of contempt for self. They are mixed together in this world and are separated only at the end. The practical consequence is that no political order, including a Christian empire, can be identified with the kingdom of God, and no political catastrophe is the end of the Church. That claim has done a great deal of work in western political thought.

The rest

He also wrote On the Trinity, fifteen books developing the analogy between the Trinity and the structure of the human mind; On Christian Teaching, on how to read and preach the Scriptures; a long literal commentary on Genesis; and the Retractations, in which an old man went back through his own published works and listed what he now thought was wrong in them, which is a rarer document than it should be.

8. The Donatists, and the Part Not Celebrated

The Donatists were a rival African church, in schism since the persecution of Diocletian, who held that bishops who had handed over the Scriptures under persecution had forfeited their office, and that sacraments conferred by unworthy ministers were void. By Augustine's time they were the majority in parts of Numidia.

Against them Augustine worked out a doctrine the whole western Church still uses: that the validity of a sacrament depends on Christ, who is the true minister, rather than on the holiness of the man administering it. Baptism given by a sinner is real baptism. Without that principle no one could ever be sure of any sacrament, because no one can see into a priest's soul. Our page on baptism takes the point up in detail.

The part that is not celebrated is what he came to accept about enforcement. Augustine argued for years against using imperial power to coerce the Donatists, and then changed his mind, persuaded by reports that pressure was bringing people back and that they were grateful afterwards. He defended coercion using the phrase from the parable of the banquet, compel them to come in (Luke 14:23), against its plain sense. Imperial laws penalising the Donatists were applied, and his letters justify them.

That argument was used for centuries afterwards to justify coercion in religion. The Catholic Church has repudiated it. The Second Vatican Council's declaration Dignitatis Humanae teaches that the human person has a right to religious liberty, that no one is to be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, and that the act of faith must be free by its very nature. The Catechism states that no one is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will (Catechism of the Catholic Church 160). Augustine was wrong about this, the Church has said so in substance, and a page that leaves it out is not telling the truth about him.

9. Feast Day, Relics and Patronage

Feast day

His memorial is 28 August, the day of his death, immediately after the memorial of his mother Monica on 27 August.

Doctor of the Church

Augustine is one of the four original Latin Doctors of the Church, named in 1298 together with Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory the Great, and he is known as the Doctor of Grace.

Relics

His body was taken from Africa to Sardinia and later, in the eighth century, to Pavia in northern Italy, where it rests in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in an elaborate fourteenth-century marble ark. Hippo itself is the modern Annaba in Algeria, where a basilica bearing his name stands above the ruins of the ancient city.

Patronage

Augustine is invoked as a patron of theologians, printers, and brewers, the last of these attached to him because of the life he described himself living before his conversion. He is also invoked by people struggling with lust and by those praying for a conversion in the family. The Augustinian orders follow the rule he wrote for his community at Hippo.

10. What to Take From St. Augustine

• Restlessness is information. The line at the start of the Confessions is a diagnosis. The dissatisfaction that follows every achievement is telling you what it is for.
• Knowing is not the same as willing. Augustine was convinced of Christianity for years before he could act on it, and he says so without excusing it. If that is your position, his book is written for you.
• Nobody starts on their own. The Doctor of Grace teaches that the first movement toward God is already God's work. That removes both the credit and the excuse.
• Go back over your own record. He wrote the Retractations to correct himself in public. Very few people do it, and it is the mark of a man serious about the truth.
• Do not say later. His prayer for chastity but not yet is the most quoted sentence he wrote because everyone recognises it. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). Take and read, today.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Augustine of Hippo?

Augustine was a North African bishop and theologian, born at Thagaste in Roman Numidia in 354 and died at Hippo Regius in 430. He taught rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan, spent about nine years as a follower of the Manichees, and was baptised by Ambrose in 387 after the conversion he describes in the Confessions. He served as bishop of Hippo for about thirty-five years and wrote the works that shaped western Christian theology more than those of any other figure after the apostles.

What happened at Augustine's conversion in the garden?

In the summer of 386, in a garden at Milan, Augustine broke down in a crisis he describes as wanting to want God and being held by habit. He heard a child's voice from a neighbouring house chanting the words take and read, went to a codex of Paul's letters, and read Romans 13:13 to 14, which calls its readers to live honourably, to make no provision for the flesh and to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. He writes that certainty flooded in and he had no wish to read further. He was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387.

Why is St. Augustine called the Doctor of Grace?

The title comes from his long controversy with Pelagius and his followers, who held that human beings can keep God's commandments by their natural powers. Augustine argued that the will is genuinely free and genuinely damaged, and that it is healed by grace given before any merit, so that even the first movement toward God is God's gift. Pelagianism was condemned at Carthage in 418 and at Ephesus in 431, and the Second Council of Orange in 529 settled the remaining questions in his direction.

What is The City of God about?

Augustine began it in 413, after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410, to answer the charge that the empire's disasters were caused by abandoning the old gods. It grew into twenty-two books arguing that two cities run through history, built by two loves: the earthly city by love of self to the point of contempt for God, and the heavenly city by love of God to the point of contempt for self. The two are mixed in this world and separated only at the end, so no political order can be identified with the kingdom of God.

Did St. Augustine support forcing people to convert?

He came to support the use of imperial pressure against the Donatist schismatics in Africa, having argued against it for years, and he defended the change using the phrase compel them to come in from the parable of the banquet. His argument was used for centuries to justify religious coercion. The Catholic Church has repudiated that position, most clearly in the Second Vatican Council's declaration Dignitatis Humanae, which teaches that no one is to be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters and that the act of faith must by its nature be free.

When is St. Augustine's feast day and where are his relics?

His memorial is 28 August, the day of his death in 430, immediately after his mother Monica's on 27 August. His body was carried from Africa to Sardinia and, in the eighth century, to Pavia in northern Italy, where it rests in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. He is one of the four original Latin Doctors of the Church and is invoked as a patron of theologians and printers, and by people praying for a conversion in the family.