Augustine of Hippo, St

Augustine of Hippo, St (354–430). Christian father and doctor of the Church. He was a native of Tagaste in N. Africa. His mother Monica was a Christian, but as a young man he gradually abandoned what Christian belief he had. For nine years he was associated with the Manichaeans, but had left this religion also by the time he came to Rome as a teacher of rhetoric. Becoming a professor of rhetoric at Milan, he became a Neoplatonist and, under the influence of Ambrose, was converted to Christianity in 386, after responding to a command, ‘Tolle, lege’, and opening the New Testament at Romans 13. 13 f. He returned to N. Africa, was ordained priest in 391 and became bishop of Hippo (modern Bōne in Algeria) c.396. His own life and conversion were the subject of his deeply moving Confessions.

Augustine's influence on Christian thought and theology, especially down to the 13th cent., has been immense. His own theology was formulated in controversy with three opponents in particular. First, against Manichaeism, he defended the essential goodness of all that God, as sole creator, has created. Thus evil could only be privatio boni, the absence of the good which ought to be. Second, the Donatist controversy caused him to formulate systematic doctrines of the church and sacraments. Augustine's last battle was with the Pelagians, clarifying his teaching on the fall, original sin, and predestination. He held that man's original endowment from God was lost by the fall of Adam, so that now all suffer from an inherited defect and liability from Adam's sin; and from this the whole human race is justly massa damnata, to be saved only by the grace of God. Since God knows what he intends to do, Augustine is inevitably predestinarian to some extent, and this influenced especially Calvin and other Reformers. Apart from his polemical works, the Confessions and The City of God are most important.