Augustine of Hippo, August 28 (354 – 430)
Augustine of Hippo, August 28 (354 – 430)
After St Paul, who was the most influential Christian writer ever?
St Augustine of Hippo, lived and wrote in a time of social and spiritual chaos. The Roman Empire was collapsing, the world was about to slide into the dark ages and the Church was under serious threat from both heresies within and paganism without.
What St Augustine wrote helped the Church both to avoid perversions of Christianity, and to stand strong and unafraid amongst the violent tumult of the times. His writings held sway over Christianity for the next 15 centuries or so, and still influence us heavily today.
Augustine was born at Tagaste, in modern Algeria. His father was a pagan, but his mother, Monica, was a Christian. After studying rhetoric at Carthage to become a lawyer, he instead became a scholar-philosopher. He abandoned Christianity for Manichaeism, and lived with a mistress for 15 years. He moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric, but slowly grew disenchanted with Manichaeism.
After a long interior conflict, vividly described in his ‘Confessions’, Augustine was converted and baptised a Christian in 386-7. He returned to Africa in 388, and joined some friends in establishing a quasi-monastic life. He was ordained priest in 391, and four years later became coadjutor-bishop of Hippo. From 396 until his death in 430 he ruled the diocese alone.
Augustine had a brilliant mind, an ardent temperament and a gift for mystical insights. Soon his understanding of the Christian Revelation was pouring forth in his many voluminous writings.
So what did he write? Most famous is ‘The Confessions’, the sermons on the Gospel and Epistle of John, the De Trinitate and the De Civitate Dei. This last, ‘The City of God’, tackles the opposition between Christianity and the ‘world’ and represents the first Christian philosophy of history.
Many other works were undertaken in his efforts to tackle various heresies: Manichaeism, Pelagianism, or Donatism, and led to the development of his thought on Creation, Grace, the Sacraments and the Church.
Augustine’s massive influence on Christianity has mainly been for the good. Few others have written with such depth on love, the Holy Trinity and the Psalms. (The preamble to the marriage service in the BCP is closely based on Augustine.) But his views on Predestination and some of his views on sex (that it is the channel for the transmission of Original Sin) have since been mainly ignored by the Church.
As bishop, Augustine fearlessly upheld order as the Roman Empire disintegrated around him. At the time of his death, the Vandals were at the very gates of Hippo.