Augustine, Saint

By: Eric Bennett

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Augustine, Saint

One of the most famous theologians of his time, Augustine was raised in a mixed household: his mother was Christian but his father, an official of the Roman empire, was pagan. He spent his early years in what is today called Souk-Ahras, in Algeria. Despite the piety of his mother, Augustine abandoned Christianity at an early age, attracted instead by Manichaeism, a system of material dualism that claimed the human soul was like light imprisoned by darkness. A precocious learner, Augustine considered Christian scripture intellectually crude. Inspired by Hortensius, a now-lost text by Cicero, he mastered rhetoric and, while still in his teens, held a professional chair of rhetoric in Carthage. Ever questioning the nature of things, Augustine discarded Manichaeism for Academic Skepticism, and, later, Neoplatonism. At the age of twnenty-eight, he left Carthage for the Roman capital of Milan in search of better-disciplined students. In Milan, Augustine was profoundly impressed by Saint Ambrose, the preeminent Roman churchman of the time, and converted to Christianity. Saint Ambrose baptized Augustine, who thereafter returned to Africa and passed the remainder of his life deep in Christian thought. In contrast to his youthful agnosticism, the repentant Augustine decided that faith was the first and most essential step toward wisdom. He was ordained as an assistant priest in Hippo Regius in 391 and became the bishop of Roman Africa five years later. Augustine's famous autobiography, The Confessions, showcases the tormented self-deprecation that underpins Augustine's theology and that flavored 1,500 years of Christian faith. Augustine's most influential works include his philosophy of creation and of time, his philosophy of history, and his theory of salvation. In contrast to Greek notions of eternal substance, Augustine believed that, as the Bible said, God created the world from absolute nothingness. Augustine also claimed that God was outside of time, existing always, and always the same. He posited that past and future were constructs of the human mind, ever-present sensations of memory and expectation. In The City of God, Augustine created what was perhaps the first philosophy of history. Here he proclaimed that two cities—that of earth and that of heaven—are combined in this world. At the end of this world, however, these cities shall be divided into their true forms: the elect and the reprobate, the saved and the damned, heaven and hell. Augustine claimed that the Church was the only means by which people could attempt to enter the City of God. By doing this, he set the stage for the struggle between emperors and popes that characterized Western European history until the Protestant Reformation. Although his work affected Western Europe more than it did Africa, Augustine was part of an imperial order that suppressed the Donatists, African Christians who often contested the Catholic establishment for economic and social as well as religious reasons. Augustine died on August 28, 430, as Vandals were besieging the city of Hippo; August 28 has since become the day on which Catholics honor him.

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