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.

At the age of 17, after his father's death, Augustine left Thagaste for the big city of Carthage to study law. Like any number of students today, he left his mother's religion behind when he left the strictures of his home. He fell in lust and moved in with a girl who, a year later, presented him with a baby boy they named Adeodatus (lit., given by God). All his mother's worst fears, however, were realized when Augustine embraced Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion combining elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism.

Wouldn't you like to be a Manichee, too?

The chief attraction of Manichaeism for Augustine was its simple approach to the problem of theodicy, the conundrum that arises from accepting all three of these premises: God is omnipotent, God is good, evil exists. (You can accept any two of these premises with no problem, but to take all three requires some strange loops of logic.) The Manichaean system proposed moral dualism, the doctrine of two equally powerful, positive principles underlying all reality - one purely good and the other purely evil. Creation, then, is the cosmic battlefield between these two principles, and the destiny of individuals is determined by which of these principles they embrace. Augustine, being a philosophical materialist at this point, also appreciated that his new religion did not require any non-material beings, a concept he considered utter nonsense, such as the Christian God.

When in Rome...

After some years of teaching Latin rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine decided to move to Rome where the students supposedly were reputed to be not so unruly and disrespectful to their teachers. What he didn't realize, though, was that getting those polite Roman students to pay fees was like pulling dentia. They had the disconcerting habit of switching to another professor just as the teaching fees were due. Upon realizing this, Augustine moved on to Milan.

Country Roads, Take Me Home

Augustine's move from Carthage to Milan for professional reasons paralleled his spiritual journey from Manichaeism back to Christianity. This journey actually began before he left that famous North African city when he had the opportunity to meet with Faustus, a famous Manichaean bishop, and discovered that the logical inconsistencies of Manichaeism that had been troubling him could not be addressed satisfactorily even by one so far advanced. While working through his disillusionment, Augustine dabbled in astrology and flirted with Skepticism. This was the philosophy of the successors to Plato's Academy, beginning with Carneades, who held that certainty (or truth) exists, but can never be attained: the best that one can hope for is probable truth, which they then made their guide to moral action.

The Neo-Platonist

At Rome, Augustine discovered Neo-Platonism, particularly the writings of Plotinus. His exposure to these writings gave him a way of thinking about God as an immaterial being; about evil as privation, a negative principle; and the soul as a rational (rather than material) substance.

Under the Preaching of Ambrose

Upon moving to Milan, Augustine came under the preaching of Ambrose, which sent him back to a study of the Christian scriptures he had learned as a child. This completed what Frederick Copleston calls his intellectual conversion. Augustine's moral conversion took a little more work as we can see by his prayer at this time: "God, grant me chastity... but not yet!" He was in caught up in an anguish like that described by St. Paul in Romans 7:21-24. He knew the right, but felt powerless to give himself over to it.