St. Augustine

The Christian philosopher and theologian St. Augustine (354-430) is best known for "The Confessions" and "The City of God." After the authors of the New Testament, he has probably been the most influential Christian writer.

The greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church, Augustine lived during a period in which the Roman Empire was in deep decline and Christianity was taking root as the official religion. It was a time of great political stress and widespread religious anxiety. Augustine's own spiritual struggles reflect the historical transition from a dying pagan antiquity to the Christian Middle Ages. The Confessions reveals much about his formative years, when he strove to overcome his sensual desires, find faith, and understand religious and philosophical doctrines.

Augustine was born at Tagaste (modern Souk-Ahras, Algeria) on Nov. 13, 354. Though his father, Patricius, was to become a Christian only when he was near death, Augustine's mother, Monica, was a devout Christian. She saw to his education in this religion, but in accord with what was then the custom, his baptism into the faith of his mother was deferred. Schooled in Latin grammar and literature at Tagaste and Madaura, Augustine showed promise and was sent to Cartage in 370 to study rhetoric. In Cartage, while successfully pursuing his studies, he abandoned the Christian moral teachings of his early years. He took a mistress, with whom he was to live for 10 years, and fathered a son, Adeodatus (The God-given).

Influence of Manichaeism

At the age of 19 Augustine read Cicero's dialogue Hortensius, a work that was an exhortation to philosophy. According to Augustine, "Suddenly all the vanity that I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom" (Confessions, III, 4). To this end, Augustine embraced the Persian religion of Manichaeism. The Manichaeans held that in the world there were opposing forces of good and evil, called Ormuzd and Ahriman, respectively. Their struggle with one another was represented in man by the conflict between the soul, the good element, and the body, the evil one. Manichaeism made a very strong appeal to Augustine because of its materialistic outlook and account of evil.

After having taught Latin grammar and literature at Tagaste, Augustine opened a school of rhetoric in Carthage in 373. During this time his confidence in Manichaeism was eroded. In particular, he found in its doctrines neither a satisfactory reason for the conflict of the forces of good and evil nor an account of the nature of human certitude.

In 383 Augustine went to Rome to teach rhetoric. But his students had the unpleasant habit of leaving their instructors just before the payment of fees was due. So the following year he took a civic post in Milan as professor of rhetoric. In Rome, Augustine had become sympathetic to the academic skepticism of Carneades and Cicero. The skeptics thought that certitude about any topic was not attainable and that therefore all of man's beliefs should be regarded as dubious.

Influence of Platonism

In Milan, Augustine was deeply impressed by the sermons of the bishop Ambrose. Around Ambrose there was a community whose members were as much Platonists as Christians. They regarded Platonism as compatible with, and an anticipation of, Christianity. Through reading certain Platonic writings, probably those of Plotinus and Porphyry, and meetings with Christian Platonists, Augustine was brought to accept such a viewpoint. The platonists' spiritualistic metaphysics and their idea that evil was only a privation of good replaced in Augustine's mind his earlier Manichaean materialism.

Augustine's skepticism began to dissolve in the face of his newly acquired convictions. Still, this extraordinary transformation was to him only an intellectual one. What was lacking, and what he now longed for in a state of torment, was the conversion of his will to Christianity and the acceptance of Christ.

Conversion to Christianity

This event is described in the famous "garden scene" in Augustine's Confessions (VII, 12). Upon hearing a child's voice repeating the words "Take and read," Augustine opened his Scriptures at random and saw this passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans (13:13): "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences." Augustine then notes, "I had no wish to read further and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart."

From then on Augustine was a confirmed Christian, and he was baptized by Ambrose on Easter 387. In 388 Augustine returned to Tagaste and established a religious community. Ordained a priest in 391, he founded a similar community in Hippo (modern Bone, Algeria), becoming bishop there in 396. Until 430 Augustine busied himself with pastoral labors and wrote theological and philosophical works. On Aug. 28, 430, Augustine died, while Hippo was under siege by the Vandals.

Augustine's works are far too extensive to list even by title. There are commentaries on parts of the Bible and many disputatious tracts against the Manichaeans, the Donatists, and the Pelagians. His main works are Contra academicos, De beata vita, De ordine, De immortalitate animae, Soliloquia, De libero arbitrio, De quantitate animae (all completed between 386 and 388), De musica (begun between 386 and 388 and finished between 388 and 391), De magistro (composed between 388 and 391), De doctrina Christiana (composed in 396 with a fourth book added in 426), Confessions (400), De Trinitate (begun in 400 and finished in 417), De genesi ad litteram (begun in 401 and completed in 415), The City of God (begun in 413 and finished about 420), and Retractions (composed in 426-427).

Theory of Knowledge

One of Augustine's earliest works is Contra academicos, in which he attacks skepticism and lays the groundwork for the possibility of knowledge. He does so by calling attention to propositions that even the skeptic cannot doubt. First, one can be certain of exclusive disjunctive propositions. For example, it is certain that there is one world or more than one. It is also indisputable that, with respect to the world's having a beginning and an end, both are the case, or one and not the other, or neither. Second, though the senses are sometimes deceptive concerning the facts in a situation, one is certain of what appears to be the case. Error arises in man's judgments only when appearance is taken as reality. For example, one is not deceived in judging that a stick looks bent in water; error arises, however, when one states that the stick is actually bent. Third, the truth of mathematical judgments like two and two make four is immune from doubt. Lastly, in anticipation of René Descartes, Augustine points out that the experience of doubt and error presuppose the existence of oneself. A person cannot be in doubt or error unless he exists. In order to exist one has to be alive. Since both are known to be the case, one also realizes that he understands. Thus existence, life, and understanding are indubitable even to the skeptic.

Propositions of mathematics and logic have the special features of being eternally and necessarily true. Knowledge of these tends to be grouped by Augustine with the knowledge of standards that he thinks implied in comparative judgments about sensible things (for example, a standard of perfect beauty is implied in the statement, "This is more beautiful than that"). But cognitions of eternal truths and standards are acts beyond the natural capacity of man's intellect, since this faculty is mutable and temporal. Required then, says Augustine, is an illumination from a source that is itself eternal, necessary, and unchanging— namely, God.

Augustine shares the view of many Greek philosophers that the end of man is happiness or beatitude and that such a condition is a consequence of the possession of wisdom. But, by contrast, wisdom for Augustine is Christian wisdom. Philosophical conceptions are useful to faith only as preparatory and explanatory devices.

Creation from Nothing

Augustine's Christian philosophy has as one of its cornerstones the thesis that God freely created the world from nothing. Augustine thus opposed the Neoplatonic notion of a world emanating from God through necessity. "Creation from nothing" also involves the rejection of the Greek view of world formation, which is based upon the model of an artist making a finished product from materials at hand. Such a model requires preexisting and independent material for a divine craftsman to work upon. According to Augustine, either such unformed matter must be conceived so abstractly as to be the same as nothing at all, or it is something having form and made by the Creator.

At first sight, Augustine would seem to have mitigated his uncompromising position on creation by his further theory of seminal reasons (De genesi ad litteram, VI, 6, 12). This theory, found also in Plotinus and the Stoics, claims that things may exist in a seminal or germlike condition, having a potentiality for form that is actualized only over a period of time and if circumstance permits. Augustine's acceptance of this theory was dictated largely by considerations of scriptural interpretation. It is, however, consistent with his view of creation from nothing and affords an illustration of his use of a philosophical idea to clarify a theological issue.

According to Genesis, different forms of things appeared at different times, the successive days of creation. On the other hand, Ecclesiasticus teaches that all things were made together. The appearance of inconsistency vanishes, however, if one says, as Augustine recommends, that all things were created together from nothing but that some were created from nothing in a seminal condition, to be brought to actual formation later.

Time as Extension

The dependence of creation upon God is also stressed in Augustine's treatment of time. (His most sustained and interesting treatment is in Book XI of The Confessions. ) The Manichaeans claimed that the doctrine of creation from nothing contains no sufficient explanation of why God should create at any given moment rather than any other and that it further poses the unanswerable question of what God was doing before he created the world. Augustine rebuts such objections by insisting that they rest upon a mistaken assimilation of time to an event in time. Creation from nothing entails that time too is a creature, which came into being with other things created. Thus the notion of events before the beginning of time becomes meaningless.

Augustine became genuinely perplexed about the existence of the past and the future. He saw that man's temporal notions require time to be measurable and that measurability requires time to have magnitude. Yet, the past is what was and is not, the future is what will be and is not, and the present is indivisible and extensionless. How then does time exist as a magnitude? His tentative answer is: "The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight and the present of things future is expectation. … It seems to me that time is nothing else than extension; but extension of what I am not sure—perhaps of the mind itself" (Confessions, XI, 20, 26).

Eternal Soul

Among the things that come to be in time is the soul of man. Augustine's view of the soul is thoroughly Platonic. For him it is a substance distinct from and superior to the body, which is joined to the body by a sort of vital attention. (In sensory experience the soul uses the body as an instrument, increasing its vital attention in one organ.) Augustine states that, though the soul is something that came to be, it cannot cease to be. To show this, he adapts arguments used in Plato's Phaedo. For example, the soul is what it is because it shares in a principle, life, which does not admit of a contrary. So, being a soul, it cannot die.

A theological problem attends the genesis of the human soul. Does God create each soul individually or did He create all souls together in making Adam's? On the former view, combined with a belief in original sin, God would create something that is evil. On the latter view, Adam would have passed on a human soul to his descendants that was made evil by his sin but was not evil when God created it. Traducianism is the name of the second position, and it was the one to which Augustine was inclined.

Philosophy of History

Augustine's interest in time also includes a view of historical time. In The City of God he makes a striking departure from Christian thinking about the historical significance of the Roman Empire. Before the 4th century Christians had naturally tended to look upon Rome as a satanic oppressor. When Christianity was officially recognized in 312, the empire seemed to may to have become the instrument for the fulfillment of the Gospels. Such people were stunned by the Ostrogoths' sacking of Rome in 410.

Three years later Augustine began The City of God. In it, Rome differs from the Church both as a reality and as an ideal. As a reality, Rome is one empire among others that have come and gone, and the fate of the Church need not be bound up with it. As an ideal, Rome is the earthly city opposed to the ideal of the heavenly city. According to Augustine, a people is a "multitude of reasonable beings united by their agreement in the things that they respect" (City of God, XIX, 24). The character of a society then is determined by the choices of the individuals who make it up. If the choice is of self-love rather than love of God, then one has the earthly city; if of God rather than self, then one has the heavenly city.

In contrast to Greek thinkers like Hesiod and Plato, Augustine does not talk about ideals as having existed in a remote past. Rather, he claims that the two ideals will only become historical realities at the end of time. Then the two cities will exist actually and separately. Members of the heavenly city will be with God, but members of the earthly city will suffer eternal punishment. Meanwhile, in the present, the two ideals are commingled in one historical reality. However qualified by Augustine, the implication is that Church and state can have at best an uneasy unity and that the true Christian will look elsewhere than to Rome, or any other state, for the fulfillment of his hopes.

Further Reading

One of the most commonly used translations of Augustine's works is Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, edited by Whitney J. Oates (2 vols., 1948). Henri I. Marrou, Saint Augustine and His Influence through the Ages (trans. 1957), is a fine introduction, which includes an account of Augustine's life and thought along with brief translations from his writings. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1967), is an outstanding biography covering both the theological and practical aspects of Augustine's career. Other works on Augustine's career and writings include Vernon J. Bourke, Augustine's Quest for Wisdom: Life and Philosophy of the Bishop of Hippo (1945); Jacques Chabannes, St. Augustine (trans. 1962); and Gerald Boner, St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (1963).

Written from a Thomistic perspective, but still the most thoughtful account of Augustine's philosophy, is étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (trans. 1960). See also Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (1963). For the thought of the period consult the monumental survey, A. H. Armstrong, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (1967). □

Augustine

WORKS BY AUGUSTINE

WORKS ABOUT AUGUSTINE

Aurelius Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo Regius (now Bona) in Africa, is by common consent the greatest name in political philosophy between Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. He was the first thinker to attempt the elaboration of a systematic Christian philosophy of society; he set the stage for the great controversy over the relation between church and state that was to be the central preoccupation of political philosophers throughout the ensuing centuries; and it has been claimed for him, variously, that he is the keystone of a supposed “bridge” that leads from classical political philosophy (much of which he certainly knew at first hand) to modern political philosophy, that he is the founder of the philosophy of history, and that he is one of the remote sources of that emphasis upon “the individual” and “individuality” that some authorities deem to be characteristic of the intellectual tradition of the West. His thought is known to us primarily through two books, The Confessions, written in the years 397–401, and The City of God, which he began in the year 413 and completed in 425. Augustine was, inter alia, a teacher of rhetoric, an ecclesiastical administrator who greatly influenced the history of the Roman Catholic church in Africa, a theologian, and the founder of the “rule” observed even today by many Catholic religious orders.

There are several major doctrines commonly associated with Augustine’s name. (1) Man, in his quest for knowledge of the highest good (which he is duty-bound to achieve) and of the greatest evil (which he is duty-bound to shun), can find infallible guidance only in sacred Scriptures. (2) Man must, therefore, cultivate the “sacred science,” which bases itself upon principles revealed to man by God and treats the subject matters of the several philosophical sciences (such as ethics, politics, and history) with an eye to those principles. (3) While the ancient philosophers rightly held that the life of politics is not the best life (Plato) and that man must pursue a way of life more divine than human (Aristotle), they could not, in the absence of sacred science, define the goal of the best life or discover the path that leads to it; concretely, the higher truth toward which they were groping is the truth that man owes absolute allegiance to no earthly society. (4) Man’s proper goal and the path he must follow are laid down by the holy laws that God gave to the people of Israel, by the Old Testament prophets, and in accordance with the latter’s prophecies, by Jesus Christ and the church Jesus founded; the man who follows that path follows God. (5) Both history and politics achieve a higher unity and acquire new and valid meaning when considered in the context of the principles of sacred science.

The Confessions, an autobiography, is superficially an account of Augustine’s conversion to Christianity and of his subsequent spiritual struggles and ordeals. Many critics, indeed, have read it as merely the record of a single individual’s progress from bad to good and from unbelief to belief. More penetrating critics have seen in it a history, epic in conception and execution, of a representative man’s struggle to find a foothold that will enable him to contemplate reality from the point of view of the Divine. Confession, Augustine argued in Book x, i-iv, is less a profession of faith than a mode of discovery; and in Book x, v ff., he contended that the individual can, through the faculty of memory, become conscious of his own existence in history and thus of himself as the subject of history. Some scholars hold that Augustine’s act of self-awareness constitutes a major turning point in the intellectual and spiritual history of Western man.

Augustine’s contributions to political philosophy may be considered under two categories: “the two visible societies” and “the two invisible cities.”

The two visible societies. Although previous political philosophers had taught that the problems of politics necessarily transcend political philosophy and must be dealt with on the metaphysical or even the religious level and that political authority must therefore be confined within certain bounds, Augustine was the first political philosopher to pose the problem of the limits of political philosophy in the now familiar terms of two “spheres”: the secular, that is, the state, and the religious, or the church, each a distinct “society” and each beneficent. Augustine, echoing Aristotle, defined the state as the rule of free men over free men; it is rendered necessary by the “order of nature” and properly concerns itself with “just dealing” and “good manners.” He did not, as some interpreters suggest, attribute the existence of the state as such to “sin” and “guilt”; rather, sin and guilt, which take the form of “ambition” and “proud sovereignty,” explain only one kind of state, namely, the state whose characteristic is not rule of free men by free men through deliberation (which is the rule prescribed both by nature and by God) but rule by masters through coercive authority. Augustine thus enunciated ideas that are genuine landmarks in the development of antiauthoritarian political philosophy in the West.

The two invisible cities. History, for Augustine, is the unfolding relation between the “earthly city,” the abode of all men dominated by self-love, and the “heavenly city,” made up of men dominated by the love of God. The history of the former is “profane history,” an account of man’s actual political life; the history of the latter is “salvation history,” that is, an account of man’s relatedness to God. Armed with these two concepts—which must not be confused with those of church and state— Augustine attempted (a) a total critique of pagan political order, especially the Roman Empire, which he deemed bad in principle because wrongly related to God and divine law, and (b) the outlines of a Christian philosophy of right order and of the conditions under which man’s history becomes meaningful.

To do justice to Augustine’s theory of the state and to his indictment of the pagan empire one must understand the visible societies against the background of the invisible cities. Despite what some commentators have said, Augustine was not a detractor of the state but taught rather that the citizens of the heavenly city have a duty to work within the state on behalf of the rule of free men and so against the ambition and pride that are its typical vices; only the “blessed” can move the state toward its proper end, which is the temporal common good; any attempt, like that of the empire, to develop within the state the virtues necessary to that end without reference to God and divine law, is foredoomed to failure; the virtues it develops, because pursued not for God’s sake, but their own, are in fact vices. The state, then, far from being simply evil, is more or less good to the extent that it is penetrated—through the ministrations of the second visible society, the church—by the heavenly city. The critical problem for political philosophy thus became with Augustine (and continued to be through many centuries) that of the relation between church and state.

The meaning of history, Augustine argued, is not to be found within history itself, since historical events are, as such, empty of inner significance; it is to be found rather in the eruption into history of transhistorical purpose. The history of the earthly city is a history of sin, death, and human failure; that of the heavenly city, beginning with Adam, is a record of meaningful growth and development down through the centuries to the time of Christ, whose redemptive ministry initiates a final, nondevelopmental historical epoch, to end with the Second Coming of Christ. Augustine repudiated the hitherto regnant notions of historical inevitability and of historical development as “cyclical” and taught that while God “foreknows” some events and while there is a Divine Providence at work in history, historical events are nevertheless caused by free decisions made by man in the context of Divine Governance. If Western man typically thinks of himself as living in a historical present, between a past made by the free decisions of his forbears and a future for whose shape he and other men are responsible—that is, in historical time—Augustine has certainly been one of his great teachers.

Willmoore Kendall

[Related to Augustine’s work arePolitical theory; State; and the biographies ofAquinas; Aristotle; Plato.]

WORKS BY AUGUSTINE

Basic Writings of Saint Augustine. 2 vols., edited with an introduction and notes by Whitney J. Oates. New York: Random House, 1948. → Volume 1: The Confessions; Twelve Treaties. Volume 2: The City of God; On the Trinity.

Introduction to St. Augustine: The City of God, Being Selections From the De civitate Dei, Including Most of the XIX^th Book, With Text. Translated and with a running commentary by A. H. Barrow. London: Faber, 1950.

The Works of Aurelius Augustine. 15 vols., edited by Marcus Dods. Edinburgh: Clark, 1872–1934.

WORKS ABOUT AUGUSTINE

Andresen, Carl (editor) 1962 Zum Augustin-Gespräch der Gegenwart. Darmstadt (Germany): Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. → See especially the bibliography on pages 459–583.

Burleigh, John H. S. 1949 The City of God: A Study of St. Augustine’s Philosophy. London: Nisbet.

Callahan, John F. 1948 Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Chroust, Anton-hermann 1950 St. Augustine’s Philosophical Theory of Law. Notre Dame Lawyer 25:285–315.

Deane, Herbert A. 1963 The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Figgis, John N. 1921 The Political Aspects of St. Augustine’s City of God. London: Longmans.

Friberg, Hans D. 1944 Love and Justice in Political Theory: A Study of Augustine’s Definition of the Commonwealth. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Garrett, Thomas M. 1956 St. Augustine and the Nature of Society. New Scholasticism 30:16–36.

Gilson, ÉTienne H. (1931) 1960 The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. Translated by L. E. M. Lynch. New York: Random House. → First published as Introduction à l’étude de Saint Augustin.

Guardini, Romano (1935) 1960 The Conversion of Augustine. Westminster, Md.: Newman. → First published as Die Bekehrung des heiligen Aurelius Augustinus.

Hearnshaw, Fossey J. C.; and Carlyle, A. J. (1923) 1950 St. Augustine and The City of God. Pages 34–52 in Fossey J. C. Hearnshaw (editor), The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Mediaeval Thinkers. New York: Barnes & Noble.

Ladner, Gerhart B. 1953 The History of Ideas in the Christian Middle Ages From the Fathers to Dante in American and Canadian Publications of the Years 1940–1952. Traditio 9:439–514.

Ladner, Gerhart B. 1959 The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. → See especially pages 153–283 on “St. Augustine and the Difference Between the Reform Ideas of the Christian East and West.”

McCoy, Charles N. R. 1963 The Structure of Political Thought: A Study in the History of Political Ideas. New York: McGraw-Hill. → See especially pages 99–131 on “Christianity and Political Philosophy: The Relation of Church and State.”

Marshall, Robert T. 1952 Studies in the Political and Socio-religious Terminology of the De civitate Dei. Washington: Catholic Univ. of America Press.

Millar, Moorhouse F. X. 1930 The Significance of St. Augustine’s Criticism of Cicero’s Definition of the State. Volume 1, pages 99–109 in Philosophia perennis: Abhandlungen zu ihrer Vergangheit und Gegenwart. Edited by Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen. Regensburg (Germany): Habbel.

Augustine

For over 1,600 years, the works of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 c.e.), the great Christian theologian and teacher, have strongly influenced religious, philosophical, and psychological thought. His ideas of mortality were informed by various belief systems, such as the early Christian view that death is punishment for original sin and the Platonic notion of the immaterial and immortal essence of the soul.

This instinct is the basis for morality, as the rational self strives to preserve its rational nature and not to become irrational or inorganic in nature. Augustine takes from Greco-Roman culture, particularly from the Stoics, the notion that every living thing has an "instinct" for self-preservation. From the books of the Pentateuch, Augustine receives a juridical account of the origin and character of death: Death is a punishment (Gen. 3:19). In his epistles to early Christian communities, the apostle Paul (an ex-rabbi) makes a juridical understanding of death central to the Christian faith (2 Cor. 1:9); these letters become increasingly important for Augustine's understanding of the significance of death.

Augustine's evaluation of death undergoes a profound change after he encounters the theology of Pelagius. In his earlier writings, such as On the Nature of the Good, Augustine regards death as good because it is natural: Death is the ordered succession of living entities, each coming and going the way the sound of a word comes and goes; if the sound remained forever, nothing could be said. But in Pelagius's theology, Augustine encounters a radical statement of the "naturalness" of death: Even if there had never been any sin, Pelagius says, there would still be death. Such an understanding of death is very rare in early Christianity, and Augustine eventually stands with the mass of early Christian tradition by insisting upon the exegetically derived (from the Pentateuch) judgment that death is a punishment that diminishes the original "all life" condition of human nature. It is a distinctive and consistent feature of Augustine's theology of death that it is developed and articulated almost exclusively through the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis.

The fact of death has ambivalent significance. On the one hand, death is an undeniable reality, universally appearing in all living organisms: Life inevitably ceases, however primitive or rational that life may be. On the other hand, just as inevitably and as universally, death demands denial: Consciousness rejects the devolution from organic to inorganic.

See also: Catholicism; Christian Death Rites, History of; Philosophy, Western

MICHEL RENE BARNES

Augustine, St, of Hippo (354–430), was trained as a rhetorician and abandoned the Christianity in which he had been brought up. He was a Manichaean for some time, but was converted (387) after hearing the sermons of Ambrose, a scene he vividly described in his Confessions (c.400), which contains a celebrated account of his early life. He became bishop of Hippo (396) and was engaged in constant theological controversy, combating Manichaeans, Donatists, and Pelagians. The most important of his numerous works is De Civitate Dei, ‘The City of God’ (413–27), a treatise in vindication of Christianity. His principal tenet was the immediate efficacy of grace, and his theology (which contains a significant Neoplatonic element, probably from Plotinus) remained an influence of profound importance in the Middle Ages, when it was often characterized as being an alternative orthodoxy to the Dominican system of Aquinas. His views on literature became standard in the Middle Ages, particularly as they are expressed in De Doctrina Christiana.

Augustine ♂ English form of the Latin name Augustinus (a derivative of Augustus). Its most famous bearer is St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), perhaps the greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church. He formulated the principles followed by the numerous medieval communities named after him as Austin canons, friars, and nuns. Also important in England was St Augustine of Canterbury, who brought Christianity to Kent in the 6th century. See also Austin.

Cognates: Irish: Ághaistín, Aibhistín. German: Augustin. Dutch: Augustijn. French: Augustine. Spanish: Agustín. Catalan: Agustí. Portuguese: Agostinho. Italian: Agostino. Russian: Avgustin. Finnish: Tauno. Hungarian: Ágoston. Lithuanian: Augustinas.

Augustine, Saint (354–430) Christian theologian and philosopher. Augustine's Confessions provide a psychological self-portrait of a spirit in search of ultimate purpose. This he found in his conversion to Christianity in 386. As Bishop of Hippo, n Africa (395–430), he defended Christian orthodoxy against Manichaeism, Donatism and Pelagianism. In Enchiridion (421) he emphasized the corruption of human will and the freedom of the divine gift of grace. The City of God (426) is a model of Christian apologetic literature. Of the Four Fathers of the Latin Church, Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory I, Augustine is considered the greatest. His feast day is August 28.

Augustine (354–430 CE), born in Tagaste (in modern Algeria); after a life of dissipation and attachment to neoplatonism, influenced by Rom. 13 he became a Christian. As Bishop of Hippo his sermons and books were powerful and lasting expositions of Catholic doctrine in the West, but his exegesis of Rom. 5 became an influence on the Reformed theology of John Calvin. For Augustine, evil resides in human nature and is either itself sin or punishment for sin. He relies on Job 14: 4, John 3: 5 and Ephes. 2: 3. The judgement of God will lead to an unending division between the saved and the damned predestined to an eternal death.

Augustine ♂ (French) Feminine pet form of Auguste.

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