Augustine of Hippo/Introduction to Augustine of Hippo/Augustine's Spiritual Journey

[Augustine] is a rich, hot-blooded, highly complex and introspective personality, passionately Christian, but exquisitely and delicately human, sensitive and courageous, looking with reverence on Rome, possessed, with Virgil and Cicero, of a Roman love of authority and law, and an African touch of earth, yet ever withal having the nostalgia of the infinite. Within Augustine there struggles two personalities, a mystic, who could forego all forms... and fly straight - 'the alone to the Alone' - with a champion of ecclesiastical order, resolute to secure the rights of the Church.

John Neville Figgis in The Political Aspects of S. Augustine's 'City of God' (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963)

The Setting

With these words we begin a look at the single most important theologian in the history of the Western Church and a significant philosopher in his own right. Augustine of Hippo was born in a village in what is today Algeria in the northernmost part of Africa. His parents, the Christian Saint Monica and the pagan Patricius, represent in a certain sense the world into which he was born. It was a world not quite Christianized, yet no longer pagan; a world in which mother Church was still in covert competition with the state for the allegiance of their children. And yet, just like Patricius, the empire had already turned to embrace Christianity on its deathbed.

The Child Is the Father of the Man

Augustine was an active child, competitive and smart, but lazy in his studies. He was much more interested in games and stealing pears from a neighbor's tree than in Latin grammar. He was brought up in his mother's faith and was almost baptized at the age of six when he was seriously ill. He recovered before the rites were administered, however, and his mother thought it best to postpone the cleansing of his sins in baptism until after he had a chance to get the worst of them out of the way in adolescence.