Augustine of Hippo

Augustine, bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa, is the most influential theologian of the Western Church, shaping Catholic and Protestant thought alike. Born at Thagaste to a pagan father and the Christian Monica, he trained as a rhetorician and taught at Carthage, Rome, and Milan.

The restless heart His [Confessions](/christianity/library/books/confessions-augustine) — the first great autobiography of the West — trace a long search through Manichaeism, scepticism, and Neoplatonism before his conversion in a Milan garden in 386, where a child's voice, *tolle lege* ("take up and read"), sent him to Romans 13. Its opening prayer states his whole theology: "you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." He was baptised by Ambrose of Milan in 387.

Bishop and controversialist Ordained at Hippo in 391 and made bishop in 395, Augustine wrote against three movements that sharpened his thought: the Manichaeans on the origin of evil (which he located in the will, not in matter); the Donatists on the holiness of the Church and the validity of sacraments administered by unworthy ministers; and the Pelagians on grace and free will.

Grace and free will Against Pelagius, who taught that human beings can take the first step toward God by their own power, Augustine insisted — reading Paul in Romans 7 and 9 — that fallen humanity is unable to save itself and that salvation is the work of God's unmerited grace, including his teaching on original sin and predestination. This "Doctor of Grace" became the authority to whom the Reformers appealed a thousand years later; the Catholic tradition equally honours him while reading grace and free will in its own way. The precise balance of grace and human freedom has been debated ever since — a debate the traditions carry differently, not one this page resolves.

The City of God After Rome fell to Alaric in 410 and pagans blamed the Christians, Augustine answered with [The City of God](/christianity/library/books/city-of-god), contrasting the earthly city, built on self-love, with the city of God, built on the love of God — a philosophy of history that framed the Western mind for a millennium. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo.

Legacy Augustine is a saint and Doctor of the Church for Catholics, a revered Father for the Orthodox, and the most-cited ancient authority of the Reformers. Few thinkers have so shaped Western ideas of the self, time, memory, grace, and history.