Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste in Roman North Africa, to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica. Trained in rhetoric, he taught in Carthage, Rome and Milan, and for nine years followed the Manichaeans. In Milan he read “the books of the Platonists”, translations of Plotinus and Porphyry, and heard the sermons of Bishop Ambrose; in 386, after a long struggle he describes in the Confessions, he was converted, and he was baptized the following year.

Shortly before Monica’s death at Ostia in 387, mother and son shared an experience of ascent that the Confessions describe as touching eternal Wisdom for a moment. Augustine returned to Africa, was ordained a priest at Hippo Regius, and in 395 or 396 became its bishop. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged the city.

His vast body of work includes the Confessions, the City of God, On the Trinity and hundreds of sermons and letters. In the Latin West he became the most influential theologian after Paul, shaping doctrines of grace, sin and the Church, and his account of the inward turn to God, who is more inward than one’s inmost self, became a foundation of Western spirituality.