Augustine of Hippo

Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, present-day Algeria, to a pagan father, Patricius, and a devout Christian mother, Monica, later canonised. The household spoke Latin; he never read Greek with ease.

In Carthage he studied rhetoric, took an unnamed concubine for fifteen years, and fathered Adeodatus (Given by God). He embraced Manichaean dualism for nearly a decade, then read Cicero's lost Hortensius and woke to philosophy. Through Neoplatonism he discovered an interiority Manichaeism lacked. In 384 he moved to Milan to teach rhetoric. Bishop Ambrose's preaching and his mother's prayers worked on him. In August 386, in a garden, a child's voice chanted tolle, lege — take and read; he opened Romans 13:13-14 and converted. He was baptised at Easter 387; Monica died at Ostia.

In 391 he was ordained priest at Hippo Regius, and in 395 became bishop until 430. He never left Hippo again. His output was the largest of any Latin Father: 5,000 sermons, 300 letters, 100+ books.

Three claims define him. First, the inward turn. Confessions Book 10 — men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains and the courses of the stars, and pass themselves by — opened the human self as a subject of philosophical investigation, anticipating modern selfhood.

Second, original sin and grace. In the Pelagian controversy he argued that since the Fall, the will is bent toward evil and cannot choose good without God's prior grace. This thesis became the engine of the Reformation; the Eastern church considered it overdrawn.

Third, the two cities. Written after Alaric's sack of Rome in 410, the City of God distinguishes the City of God from the earthly city and relativises political order. It founded the Christian philosophy of history.

He died on 28 August 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo, with the Penitential Psalms on his wall. He was the last ancient philosopher and the first medieval theologian. No Western thinker fails to read him.