Augustine

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Augustine

Born 354

Died 430

North African church leader and philosopher

A side from Jesus Christ and others from the New Testament, no one had as great an influence on the shaping of the Christian faith as Saint Augustine, who helped bridge the period between ancient and medieval times. He grew up in a world heavily influenced by the Roman Empire, but during his life the power of Rome became increasingly shaky, and he promoted Christian faith as a more stable foundation than any earthly kingdom.

Augustine served as bishop or church leader over the North African city of Hippo, and he wrote literally hundreds of books discussing specific aspects of Christianity. Many of the questions addressed by Augustine have long since been decided, but two of his works, Confessions and the City of God, remain classics with an eternal appeal.

Christians and pagans

He was born Aurelius Augustinus (aw-gu-STY-nus) on November 13, 354, but it was by the name Augustine (aw-GUS-tin) that he would become famous. His hometown was Tagaste (tuh-GAS-tee), a city in what is now Algeria, which at that time was part of the Western Roman Empire.

Like many Romans, Augustine's father Patricius believed in the old Roman religion, which was pagan, meaning that its followers worshiped a variety of gods. Many other Romans, including Augustine's mother Monica, had accepted Christianity. The latter religion had developed in the three centuries following the deaths of Jesus and his followers, and had gained wide acceptance among the emperors of Rome.

As for young Augustine, he did not believe in the pagan gods, but he refused to accept Christianity either. He later recalled in the Confessions, a book detailing his experiences as a youth and his eventual acceptance of the Christian faith, that Monica prayed for him often during his wayward youth.

A reckless young man

Because Augustine's parents wanted their son to get ahead in life, they enrolled him at one of the best Roman schools, in the city of Madura. In 370, when he was sixteen years old, he completed his studies there, and hoped to go on to the equivalent of college. However, his father had to raise the money for his studies, so in the meantime, Augustine returned home. He spent a year in Tagaste, during which time he associated with other young men who encouraged him to engage in reckless living, including sexual activity, theft, and acts of destructiveness.

In 371, Augustine went away to Carthage to continue his studies. Located in what is now Tunisia, Carthage was the greatest city of Roman Africa—but it was also a place where a young person could get into a great deal of trouble. While there, Augustine became involved in a number of sexual relationships, one of which resulted in the birth of a son, Adeodatus (ay-dee-AHD-uh-tus). He also spent time with a gang of troublemakers called the "wreckers," and flirted with a faith called Manichaeism (man-uh-KEE-izm).

A religion which had originated in Persia or Iran, Manichaeism had many Christian elements. Yet it differed

sharply from Christianity in a number of other ways, most notably in Manichaeans' claim that they alone had special knowledge concerning the true nature of good and evil. Augustine would remain associated with the Manichaeans for nine years, and encouraged many of his friends to accept that faith. Despite his later rejection of Manichaeism, Augustine recognized that his interest in the religion was an early step in the quest for understanding that would lead him to Christianity.

On to Rome

Patricius, who became a Christian on his deathbed, died in 372; however, a wealthy man named Romanianus agreed to support Augustine in the completion of his education. When he finished his schooling in 374, at age twenty, Augustine returned to Tagaste, where he planned to teach. However, when Monica learned that her son was a Manichee, she refused to allow him into her home, so he returned to Carthage.

Augustine remained in Carthage for a few years, but he knew that if he really wanted to make a good career for himself, he would have to get closer to Rome itself. Therefore in the fall of 383, he moved to the northern Italian city of Milan (mi-LAHN), where he got an important job as a teacher of rhetoric, the art of speaking and writing. Though he was well on his way to great success, he found that something was lacking in his life, and he became deeply depressed. In the midst of his unhappiness, he reached out for the faith of his mother: Christianity.

From convert to bishop

In fact Monica herself had by then come to Italy, and she was a great influence on Augustine during this time of searching. So was Ambrose (339–397), the bishop of Milan, another key figure in the establishment of medieval Christianity. But perhaps the greatest influence on Augustine's conversion was his direct reading of the Bible itself, which he undertook after hearing a child at play chanting "Pick up and read, pick up and read." In July 386, Augustine converted to Christianity, and on Easter Sunday 387 was baptized, or lowered into water as a symbol of death and rebirth in Christ.

Soon after his conversion, Augustine planned to go back to Africa, but he had to go alone: just before the time they were supposed to leave, Monica became sick and died— but she died happy, knowing that her son had become a Christian. In 388, he established a monastery, a place for men who wanted to escape the outside world and spend a quiet life searching for spiritual understanding, in Tagaste. Augustine, however, was not destined to have a quiet life. In 391, while visiting the nearby town of Hippo, he became a priest, and five years later became the bishop of Hippo.

Addressing religious disputes

During the years that followed, Augustine would face a number of disputes between mainstream Christianity

Simeon Stylites the Elder

Like Augustine, Simeon Stylites the Elder (SIM-ee-un stuh-LIT-eez; c. 388–459) was later named a saint—that is, someone officially recognized by the church for their holiness. Yet whereas Augustine lived a life closely tied to the central events of his time, Simeon was an offbeat figure at the fringes of society. The name Stylites is a variation on a Greek word meaning "pillar-hermit," and in fact Simeon was the most famous of these men, who went out into the desert and lived atop tall pillars or columns.

Simeon was born in northern Syria in about 388, and he spent his childhood and teen years working as a shepherd boy. At age sixteen, he decided to become a monk—someone who leaves the outside world to search for spiritual understanding in a center called a monastery. Many monks engage in self-denial, for instance by going without food for long periods of time, but Simeon took things much further. He wrapped a rope tightly around his body and lived that way for more than a year, until his flesh rotted and no one could stand to be near him because of the smell. When the abbot, leader of the monastery, inspected Simeon's bed and found it covered with maggots, he ordered him to leave the monastery.

Simeon spent three years living in a hut, where he pushed himself to ever more difficult feats, for instance by standing for long periods. When this proved too easy, he forced himself to live atop a cliff in the desert. By then, however, word of Simeon's impressive self-denial—which many interpreted as a sign of great devotion to God—had spread throughout the area, and followers came seeking spiritual wisdom. Determined to remove himself from the world, Simeon arranged for the erection of a pillar with a small platform on top. It was there he would live for the remainder of his life.

Initially, Simeon's pillar was about nine feet high, but over time it was replaced by increasingly taller ones; by the time of his death he was living on a column fifty or sixty feet high. Followers still came to him, climbing a ladder along the side, and his many admirers included Roman emperors and bishops. After thirty years atop the pillar, Simeon died on September 2, 459.

and other versions of the faith. Among his first opponents were the Manichaeans, and in this conflict Augustine found himself pitted against old friends. Some, such as Honoratus (for whom he wrote a book called On the Virtue of Believing in order to explain Christian faith), converted to Christianity; others, including Fortunatus—subject of a book by Augustine called Against Fortunatus the Manichee—did not. After Augustine won a public debate with the Manichaean leader Felix in 404, Manichaeism ceased to be a significant force in Hippo.

Another threat came from the Donatists (DOH-nuhtistz), a North African splinter group who rejected the mainstream church leadership—that is, the bishop of Rome, who became known as the pope. Beginning in 410, Augustine also squared off with the Pelagians (puh-LAY-jee-unz). Their leader, Pelagius (c. 354–c. 418), taught that humanity was born without sin, and did not need the help of God to achieve goodness. This directly contradicted mainstream Christianity, which held that all humans were sinful in the absence of God. Augustine led the fight against Pelagianism with works such as On the Merits of Sinners and Forgiveness (411).

In his latter days, Augustine found himself in conflict not only with the Pelagians, but with groups around the Christian world who embraced the idea of predestination (pree-des-ti-NAY-shun). Predestination is the belief that a person's ultimate fate—that is, whether they will go to Heaven or Hell—is already decided before their birth. It has some basis in the Bible, but so too does the idea of free will, or the belief that humans have complete freedom to choose whether or not they will follow God. Augustine set out to demonstrate that free will and predestination were both true, and furthermore that predestination did not give people a license to sin.

City of God

In his early years as the bishop of Hippo, Augustine had written the Confessions. This work could properly be called the first real autobiography, or personal history, because it is not nearly as concerned with outside events as it is with the inner life of Augustine himself. It is one of Augustine's two greatest contributions to literature, the second being City of God, which he wrote between 413 and 425.

The event that inspired the writing of the latter book was the sacking, or destruction, of Rome by an invading tribe called the Visigoths in 410. In hindsight, historians recognize the sacking of Rome as the beginning of the end of the Western Roman Empire, which ceased to exist in 476; at the time, people viewed it as the worst disaster in the history of the world. Believers in Rome's pagan religion blamed Christians, saying that the destruction of the city was a punishment from the gods.

Augustine took exactly the opposite position: the destruction of Rome, he said, was God's punishment for the Romans' persisting belief in their old pagan religion. In City of God, he pointed out many examples in Roman history when the people had called on the gods' help, but to no avail. Perhaps drawing on his past belief in Manichaeism, which viewed the world as an eternal struggle between good and evil, Augustine now explained all of existence as a conflict between the "City of God," or the church, and the "City of Man"—that is, the belief systems that opposed Christianity.

Facing the end of the ancient world

As Augustine was writing On the Predestination of the Saints in 429, shadows were gathering over the world he knew. A tribe called the Vandals, who like the Visigoths were barbarians or uncivilized people, had conquered Spain, and in the spring of 429 the Vandals launched an attack on Africa. By the wintertime, they had begun a siege, or sustained military attack, against Hippo. On August 28, 430, while the Vandals were besieging the city, Augustine died.

The Vandals would later launch such a vicious attack on Rome itself that their name became a synonym for reckless destructiveness. Yet even they respected the name of Augustine: when they captured and destroyed the city in 431, they allowed a library containing his books to remain standing.

The fact that Christian beliefs are so clearly established today is a tribute to the work of Augustine and others who lived in a time when basic issues had not yet been decided. In his own life, he saw the rapid decline of Roman civilization and the beginnings of the barbarian triumph that would plunge Western Europe into centuries of confusion. His work helped Christians weather this painful transition.