Saint Augustine of Hippo

Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(354–430)

Saint Augustine of Hippo is perhaps the greatest theologian the Western Church has produced and one of the most influential thinkers in the entire history of Western civilisation. He was born on November 13, 354, at Thagaste in North Africa, the son of Patricius, a pagan Roman official, and Monica, a devout Christian who would be venerated as a saint. His mother's prayers and tears accompanied him through the long years of his intellectual and moral wandering before his conversion.

He received an excellent classical education and showed from his youth a brilliant and restless intelligence. He went to Carthage to study and there fell into a long relationship with a woman by whom he had a son, Adeodatus. He embraced Manichaeism for nine years, then drifted into Academic scepticism. He went to Rome and then to Milan, where as professor of rhetoric he came under the influence of Bishop Ambrose, whose preaching began to break through his intellectual resistance to Christianity.

The crisis of his conversion, described in the Confessions with an intimacy and psychological depth that has made this book one of the great documents of human self-understanding, came in a garden in Milan in the summer of 386. He heard a child's voice singing Tolle, lege, take up and read, and opening Paul's Letter to the Romans he read the passage about putting on Christ, and felt his heart flooded with light. He was baptised by Ambrose at Easter 387 and returned to Africa, where he established a monastic community and was ordained a priest in 391 and Bishop of Hippo in 395.

As bishop he wrote ceaselessly, producing the Confessions, The City of God, and On the Trinity, among hundreds of other works, while governing his diocese, preaching daily, adjudicating disputes, and combating the Donatist and Pelagian heresies. He died on August 28, 430, as the Vandals besieged Hippo. He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Boniface VIII. His feast is celebrated on August 28th.