Saints and early Christians

Augustine of Hippo

354 to 430 · North Africa, today's Algeria

Teacher, convert and bishop of Hippo, who told his own restless story to God in the Confessions.

Picture: Saint Augustine, Philippe de Champaigne, about 1645-1650. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public domain.

His path, in order

1. TeacherCarthage, Rome, Milan
2. MonkWith friends at Thagaste
3. PriestSeized at Hippo, 391
4. BishopOf Hippo, about 395 to 430

in numbers

• Million words of his that survive5
  • More than five million, says Britannica
  • From sermons to books of theology
  Britannica
• Works he reread in old age93
  • Divided into 232 books, or parts
  • Correcting what he now thought wrong
  Retractations, Book 2; Possidius, Life, chapter 28
• Healings written down at Hippo70
  • Almost seventy in under two years
  • At the new shrine of St Stephen's relics
  City of God, Book 22, chapter 8

did you know?

• As a boy he hated Greek. He understood not a word, and his teachers drove him on with threats and punishments. As a bishop he said his Greek scarcely counted as knowledge at all.

  Confessions, Book 1, chapter 14; Answer to Petilian, Book 2, chapter 38

• He had never heard of Antony of Egypt until a visitor from the emperor's court told him, shortly before he turned to Christ in a garden at Milan. The visitor also told of two officials at Trier who found a Life of Antony in a monks' cottage, and gave up their careers that same afternoon.

  Confessions, Book 8, chapter 6

• He knew what time is, he wrote, as long as no one asked him. Asked to explain it, he did not know.

  Confessions, Book 11, chapter 14

• The only silver on his table was the spoons. The dishes were clay, wood or marble, and that was his own choice.

  Possidius, Life, chapter 22

• He held that even babies sin. He had watched one, too young to talk, turn pale and glare at another baby sharing its nurse's milk.

  Confessions, Book 1, chapter 7

Born

13 November 354, at Thagaste in Numidia, today Souk Ahras in Algeria. He gives the day himself.

Grew up

At Thagaste. He went to school at Madauros, then Carthage. His mother Monica was a Christian. His father Patricius was a pagan until near the end of his life.

Died

28 August 430, at Hippo, of a fever. It was the third month of the Vandals' siege of his city.

Buried

At Hippo, with his friend Possidius there. The 1916 Roman Martyrology says his body was later taken to Sardinia, then to Pavia in Italy. The Orthodox Church in America says his relics lie today in San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro there.

Also called

Aurelius Augustinus, his Latin name. Blessed Augustine, in the Russian Church and the Orthodox Church in America. Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in the Greek churches. Often called the Doctor of Grace.

Status

A saint and a Doctor of the Church to Catholics. On the Orthodox calendar as Blessed Augustine, and Saint in Greek calendars. Anglicans keep his day, and Lutherans remember him.

Patron of

Britannica lists brewers, printers, converts and theologians, and the Augustinian orders.

In art

A bishop with a book and a pen. Often holding a heart, burning or pierced by an arrow. Sometimes with a child and a shell at the seashore, from a medieval legend.

Wrote

So much that scarcely any student could read it all, says his friend Possidius. Near the end he reviewed 93 of his works, in 232 books. His letters and sermons are not counted in that.

Pronounced

AW-guh-steen of HIP-oh. Also said aw-GUS-tin.

The Spark

His personality type

Light-hearted, and at his best when there is something to do.

In Gregory the Great's terms

• Cheerful
• Restless mind

Our reading of him as a young man, from the Christian Personality Test. The personality test reads him as he was before his conversion, when he loved talk, jokes and reading with friends. In the test, the Spark's opposite is The Deep Well, and its example is his mother, St Monica.

See The Spark

feast days

East and West, side by side

West

• Feb28

  In the 1916 Roman Martyrology, on the last day of February: his body brought from Sardinia to Pavia.

• May5

  In the 1916 Roman Martyrology: his conversion, at Milan.

• Aug28

  Catholic memorial. Also the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, and Lutherans in the Missouri Synod and the ELCA.

East

• Jun15

  Greek churches and the Church of Cyprus, as Saint Augustine. The Orthodox Church in America, as Blessed Augustine. The Russian Church keeps it on the old calendar, which is 28 June on today's calendar.

The West keeps 28 August, the day he died. The Orthodox churches agree on 15 June, but no source we found says why. Churches on the old calendar keep each date 13 days later.

Three men wrote down what they thought of him. Possidius was his friend for almost forty years. Jerome, an older scholar, argued with him by letter for more than twenty years. Macedonius, a Roman official in Africa, answered one of his letters.

1. Thagaste

   Aged 15, about 370

   The pears

   One night he and a gang of friends stripped a pear tree near his family's vineyard. The pears were not even good, and he had better at home. They ate a few and threw the rest to the pigs. Nearly thirty years later he spent pages of his Confessions asking why. His answer: the thrill was the theft itself. “To do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted.”

   Confessions, Book 2, chapters 2 to 9

2. Carthage

   His 19th to 28th years

   Nine years a Manichee

   In his nineteenth year he read Cicero's Hortensius and was “roused to a desire for wisdom”. As a student at Carthage he joined the Manichees, a sect he would later write against. He stayed with them nine years.

   Confessions, Book 3, chapter 4; Book 4, chapter 1; Book 8, chapter 7; Possidius, Life, chapter 1

3. Thagaste

   Teaching in his home town

   The friend who died

   Back home as a young teacher, he grew close to a friend he had known since childhood, and drew him into the Manichees. Within a year the friend fell ill with a fever, and was baptised while unconscious. When he came round, Augustine joked about it. The friend told him to stop if he wanted to stay friends. A few days later he died. “Mine eyes sought him everywhere, but he was not granted them.” Augustine wrote, “I became a great puzzle to myself.”

   Confessions, Book 4, chapter 4

4. Carthage

   383

   Lying to his mother

   He wanted to teach in Rome. His mother Monica followed him to the harbour, to stop him or to go with him. He told her he was only waiting to see a friend off. She spent the night praying in a chapel to St Cyprian by the shore, and he sailed without her. “And I lied to my mother—and such a mother!—and got away.”

   Confessions, Book 5, chapter 8

5. Milan

   A teacher in Milan

   The bishop who read in silence

   Milan asked the prefect of Rome for a teacher of public speaking. The prefect, Symmachus, set him a test speech and sent him. In Milan he went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, for his style, and stayed for what he said. He noticed that Ambrose read without a sound: “his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent”. Later he saw God's hand in it all: “To him was I unknowingly led by Thee, that by him I might knowingly be led to Thee.”

   Confessions, Book 5, chapter 13; Book 6, chapter 3

6. Milan

   Late summer 386

   Take up and read

   As a young man he had prayed, “Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.” Now, torn in two, he left his friend Alypius and threw himself down in tears under a fig tree in a garden. “How long, how long? Tomorrow, and tomorrow? Why not now?” Then from a house nearby he heard a child's voice chanting, “Take up and read; take up and read.” He went back to where Alypius sat, opened Paul's letters, and read the first lines his eyes fell on, from Romans 13: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” He read no further. “All the gloom of doubt vanished away.” Alypius joined him that day, and they went in to tell his mother, Monica. “She leapeth for joy, and triumpheth, and blesseth Thee.”

   Confessions, Book 8, chapters 7 and 12

7. Milan

   Easter 387

   Baptised by Ambrose

   Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, baptised him at Easter. Two others were baptised with him. One was his friend Alypius, a man so hard on his own body that he walked barefoot on the frozen ground of Italy. The other was his son Adeodatus. The boy was barely fifteen, and his father says he “in wit excelled many grave and learned men”.

   Confessions, Book 9, chapter 6; Possidius, Life, chapter 1

8. Ostia

   387

   His mother's last words

   Waiting at Ostia for a ship home, he and Monica stood alone at a window over the garden and talked about the life of heaven. About five days later she fell ill with a fever. His brother wished she could die in her own country. She told her sons, “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be.” She died there, in her fifty-sixth year. Augustine was in his thirty-third.

   Confessions, Book 9, chapters 10 and 11

9. Hippo

   391

   Seized in church

   As a layman he kept away from any church that had no bishop, he later told his friends. He feared such a church would make him its bishop. Hippo had one, so he stood in the congregation without a care. But the old bishop, Valerius, told the people that the city needed a priest. They laid hands on Augustine and brought him forward, shouting, “while he wept freely”. Some thought he wept from wounded pride, because he was only made a priest. He said he wept at the dangers of ruling a church.

   Possidius, Life, chapter 4; Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Augustine of Hippo

10. Hippo

    About 395

    Made bishop

    Valerius, the old bishop of Hippo, was afraid another city would take his priest. Once he even hid him so that he could not be found. Then he wrote in secret to the primate at Carthage and had Augustine made bishop beside him. Augustine refused at first, because his own bishop was still alive. He gave way, and later said it should not have been done.

    Possidius, Life, chapter 8

11. Hippo

    413 to 426

    The City of God

    In 410 the Goths sacked Rome, and pagans blamed the Christians. At the suggestion of his friend Marcellinus, he began his answer in 413. He worked on it for thirteen years. It grew into twenty-two books about two cities, one built on love of self and one on love of God.

    City of God, Book 1, preface; Book 14, chapter 28; Marcus Dods, translator's preface

His friend Possidius says scarcely any student could read all he wrote. These lines are in the English of Schaff's Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, from the 1880s.

Each line is Augustine's own. TapClick “Show his line” to read it.

See where you stand beside him. Take the quiz

Monica

His mother, honoured as St Monica. For years she wept and prayed for him. A bishop told her, “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She lived to see him baptised, and died at Ostia soon after.

Confessions, Book 3, chapter 12; Book 9, chapters 10 to 13 Ambrose

Bishop of Milan. “That man of God received me like a father,” Augustine wrote. Ambrose baptised him at Easter 387. Years later Augustine still kept rules he had learned from Ambrose: never find a wife for another man, and never urge anyone to join the army.

Confessions, Book 5, chapter 13; Possidius, Life, chapters 1 and 27 Jerome

Jerome and Augustine wrote to each other for more than twenty years. Augustine questioned how Jerome read Galatians, and his new translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. The early letters were sharp. By 418 Jerome was praising him warmly.

Augustine, Letters 28, 40, 72, 82 and 195 Origen

Augustine rejected Origen's hope that even the devil and his angels would be freed in the end. He wrote that “Origen was even more indulgent” than those Christians of his own day who hoped that all would be freed, and that the Church, “not without reason, condemned him for this and other errors”.

City of God, Book 21, chapter 17 John Cassian

Cassian and his fellow monks in southern Gaul resisted Augustine's teaching on grace. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls Cassian “the soul and head of the whole movement”. About 433, after Augustine's death, Augustine's defender Prosper of Aquitaine wrote a book against him.

Catholic Encyclopedia, Semipelagianism

Patricius

His father, a pagan and a town councillor of Thagaste. His wife Monica won him to faith near the end of his life.

Confessions, Book 2, chapter 3; Book 9, chapter 9; Possidius, Life, chapter 1

Adeodatus

His son, born to the woman he lived with for years. He was baptised with his father at fifteen, and died young, a year or two later. Augustine wrote of him, “of me was there naught in that boy but the sin”. The rest, he says, was God's gift.

Confessions, Book 9, chapter 6

Alypius

His closest friend, from Thagaste. He was with Augustine in a garden at Milan when Augustine turned to Christ. He read on from the same page, and turned to Christ that day too. They were baptised together. He became bishop of Thagaste.

Confessions, Book 8, chapter 12; Roman Martyrology (1916), 15 August

Possidius

A monk of his house who became bishop of Calama. He tells of a bishop of Calama wounded in a Donatist ambush, without saying it was himself. He stayed in Hippo through the Vandals' siege and wrote the first Life. They were friends for almost forty years, “with no bitter disagreement”.

Possidius, Life, chapters 12 and 31

Pelagius

A monk who came to Africa after the Goths took Rome. His followers were condemned at Carthage in 412 for attacking the teaching of original sin. He could not bear Augustine's prayer “Give what You command, and command what You will” when a bishop quoted it to him in Rome. Augustine wrote against his teaching for almost ten years.

On the Gift of Perseverance, chapter 53; Possidius, Life, chapter 18; Catholic Encyclopedia

The Donatists

A rival church in Africa, which baptised again anyone who came to it from the Catholics. Their armed bands, the Circumcellions, lay in wait for him on the roads more than once. One time his guide took the wrong road by mistake, and so he escaped.

Possidius, Life, chapters 9 to 12

From the prayer that opens his Soliloquies, written soon after his conversion, in 386 or 387.

Quiz Which early Christian thinks like you? And which would argue with you? See where you stand beside Augustine. Start Quiz Christian Personality Test Augustine reads as The Spark as a young man. Find your own type. Start

Philip NeriThe Spark

Philip's biographer says he had “a very lively temperament, and without the least tendency to melancholy”. Philip hated idleness so much “that no one ever found him unemployed”. He welcomed all who came, rich and poor alike, and his room became known as “the Shelter of Christian Mirth”.

Pietro Giacomo Bacci, Life of St Philip Neri