Christian theologian, bishop and saint; b. 13 November 354 (Tagaste, Numidia), d. 28 August 430 (Hippo Regius).
Aurelius Augustinus was born in Tagaste (today's Souk-Ahras), about 72 km south of Hippo Regius in the Roman province Numidia, today's Annaba in Algeria. His mother Monica was a Christian, but his father Patricius held on to his own religion. When the young Aurelius showed academic promise at an early age, the family, who was of middle-class descent, invested all its funds in his education, so that Augustine would qualify for government service.
Studying philosophy in Carthage, the 19 year old Augustine was impressed by the writings of Cicero and decided to abandon the idea of government service in favour of a life of search for truth. The unscientific approach of Catholicism to that aim did not impress him, and he turned to Manichaeism, a Christian sect that tried to explain the world through reason.
According to Manichaeism the world is a struggle between the substance of light and the substance of darkness and the human soul a part of light trapped in the area of darkness. Christ was seen as the saviour, who could liberate the trapped light particles and let them escape to the region of eternal light.
It soon became evident that the Manichaean priests were not the most gifted intellectuals and that Manichaeism could not answer Augustine's probing questions. At the age of about 28 Augustine, who had supported himself as a teacher of rhetoric, decided to leave Carthage for Rome, hoping to meet better minds and find better students. Through his new contacts he received an appointment as professor of rhetoric in Milan, capital of the Western Roman Empire.
The bishop of Milan was a cultured man, gifted intellectual and excellent public speaker. Augustine, who had been starved of good intellectual company for more than a decade, was so impressed by his sermons that he became a Catholic himself. This did of course not satisfy his materialistic approach to the questions of life, but it introduced him to Neoplatonism. The Neoplatonists based their philosophy on the original Greek notion that the universe is the expression of a single absolute unity in different forms. Matter is the lowest and last product of unity, the self-conscious mind or spirit and the soul or life are other, higher forms of expression.
According to his own writings Augustine underwent a mystical experience, which set him on the path of asceticism and suppression of earthly desires in 386. He resigned his chair as professor of rhetoric and went with his family and students to a friend's country retreat for a period of literary study. He then returned to Tagaste to establish a religious community.
In 391 Augustine visited the provincial capital Hippo Regius and ended up as assistant priest to its bishop Valerius. When Valerius died in 396 Augustine became bishop himself. He remained in that position until his death.
Being a bishop in a north African port city was not the life devoted to contemplation Augustine had wanted. It involved frequent contact with non-Christians and included the position of presiding judge of the court, and Augustine's philosophical ideas were put to the test every day. The advantage of the office was the availability of scribes and stenographers, who helped Augustine to produce a huge literary output despite his often frail health. His name was soon known across the Mediterranean, and he received requests for the solution of problems of all kinds.
Although Augustine participated in the debate caused by the various heresies of the time, his most influential writings are the product of his own independent thought. His theory of the universe accepts the idea of creation but rejects the Greek notion that it is without purpose; instead, he asserts that it is "the will of a good God that good things should be." His theory of knowledge derives directly from Plato, who said that a teacher cannot insert new knowledge into students but can create awareness of knowledge that already existed in them. His theory of ethics starts from the Greek idea of happiness as the aim of ethical behaviour and inserts it into his order of the cosmos; ethical behaviour thus becomes voluntary love of subordination of the body to the spirit and of the spirit to God and acceptance of one's place in the order of the universe.
Augustine used Greek science, in particular mathematics, as an example for his moral arguments. Just as mathematical knowledge is present in humans and a teacher only has to help them to become aware of their sleeping knowledge, so moral principles and a person's place in the order of the universe are present in that person's mind and have to be brought to awareness.
More than 400 of Augustine's sermons and over 200 of his letters survived. His two most important works are his autobiography Confessiones and his masterpiece De civitate Dei ("The City of God"), a momentous painting of the "beginnings, course and destined ends" of the two imagined societies of the chosen and the damned.