Augustine of Hippo

Who Was Augustine of Hippo?

Augustine of Hippo is, after Paul, the most influential theologian in the history of Western Christianity. Born in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa, to a Christian mother (Monica) and a pagan father (Patricius), he was educated in rhetoric and philosophy and spent his young adulthood in a restless pursuit of wisdom, truth, and pleasure — a pursuit that led him through Manichaeism, academic skepticism, and Neoplatonism before culminating in his conversion to Christianity in Milan in 386, under the influence of Ambrose.

His Confessions (c. 397–400), the first great autobiography in Western literature, is also the first great work of Christian introspection — a sustained examination of the self in the presence of God that established the terms in which subsequent Western thought would understand interiority, memory, time, and desire. His City of God (413–426), written in response to the sack of Rome, is the foundational text of Christian political theology.

Augustine understood, with a clarity that remains unmatched, the theological dimensions of human desire. The heart that is restless until it rests in God is not merely a pious sentiment but a diagnostic claim: that the longings which drive human beings — for beauty, for truth, for love, for permanence — are oriented toward an object that only God can be. Literature, in this light, is the record of that restlessness.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Confessions — c. 397–400
• The City of God — 413–426
• On Christian Doctrine — 396–426
• On the Trinity — c. 400–416
• Enchiridion — c. 421