Augustine of Hippo

Introduction

Augustine of Hippo is the most influential theologian of the Latin Christian tradition and one of the most consequential intellectual figures in Western history. His synthesis of Christianity with Neoplatonism shaped the conceptual vocabulary of Christian theology for over a thousand years; his Confessions invented Western autobiography as a literary form; his City of God organized the Latin Christian understanding of history, politics, and the relation of the church to the state. Almost every subsequent Latin theologian — Aquinas, Anselm, Bonaventure, Luther, Calvin, Pascal — wrote in conversation with him.

He is also one of the very few figures from late antiquity whose interior life is recoverable in detail, because he wrote about it himself at length and with unusual psychological acuity. The Confessions in particular has been read continuously since the late fourth century, in part for its theology and in part for the recognizable picture it gives of a person working out who they are.

Life

Augustine was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria). His father Patricius was a minor Roman official and a pagan; his mother Monica was a devout Christian whose persistence in pressing Augustine toward conversion is documented throughout the Confessions. He was educated in rhetoric, the standard track for an ambitious young Roman, first locally and then at Carthage. As a teenager and young man he lived with a concubine for over fifteen years, with whom he had a son, Adeodatus.

He taught rhetoric in Carthage, then in Rome, and from 384 in Milan, where he held the imperial chair of rhetoric. The Milan years were decisive. He encountered the bishop Ambrose, who modeled a Christianity intellectually serious enough to compete with the philosophical schools; he read what he calls the libri Platonicorum (probably translations of Plotinus and Porphyry), which provided a metaphysical framework that allowed him to think coherently about an immaterial God and the nature of evil; and in 386, in a garden in Milan, he experienced the conversion narrated in Confessions VIII.

He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387, returned to North Africa, and lived in a small monastic community. In 391 he was pressed into ordination at Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria); in 395 he became its bishop, a position he held for the rest of his life. He died in 430, while Hippo was under siege by the Vandals.

The problem he worked on

Augustine's life work was the construction of a Christian intellectual framework adequate to the philosophical sophistication of his cultural moment. He inherited two main resources — the scriptural tradition of the church and the philosophical tradition of Greek and Roman antiquity — and his project was to integrate them without subordinating either. The result, articulated across forty years of writing, became the substrate of Latin Christian thought.

Within this larger project, several specific problems organized particular works. How can there be evil in a world created by a wholly good God? (the problem of evil, addressed against the Manichean position he had earlier held). What is time, and how does an eternal God relate to a temporal creation? (the Confessions XI). What is the relation between the church and the political order? (the City of God, written against the charge that Christianity caused the sack of Rome in 410). How is divine grace related to human freedom? (the long anti-Pelagian controversy of his later years). Each of these became a defining problem for Western theology for centuries afterward.

Contributions

The doctrine of original sin and the analysis of will

Augustine's account of the human will and its fallen condition is the most influential single contribution. Drawing on Paul, his own introspective experience, and his late polemic against the British monk Pelagius, Augustine developed the view that the human will is wounded by inherited disorder — original sin — such that humans cannot consistently will the good without the prior assistance of divine grace. The will is divided against itself; the Confessions gives the canonical phenomenology in Book VIII.

This doctrine shaped the medieval and Reformation traditions decisively. Luther's On the Bondage of the Will is, structurally, a more rigorous Augustinianism. Calvin's predestinarian theology develops directly out of Augustine. Modern philosophical accounts of weakness of will, divided agency, and addiction return repeatedly to Augustinian categories.

Time and eternity

Confessions Book XI contains Augustine's analysis of time, one of the most sophisticated treatments in the ancient world and a continuing reference in contemporary philosophy of time. Augustine argues that the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present is a vanishing instant; if these are the only candidates for what time is, time would seem not to exist. He resolves the puzzle by locating time in the soul — in the distentio animi, the soul's stretching across memory, attention, and expectation. The analysis influenced Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and most subsequent phenomenological treatments of temporal experience.

The two cities

The City of God, begun in 413 and finished in 426, is Augustine's interpretation of history as the unfolding of two intermingled communities: the civitas Dei (city of God), oriented toward God, and the civitas terrena (earthly city), oriented toward self-love and worldly goods. The two cities are not the church and the state; they are spiritual communities running through and across institutional boundaries. The work shaped the Latin Christian understanding of history and politics throughout the Middle Ages and provides much of the conceptual vocabulary still used in political theology.

Illumination and the foundations of knowledge

Augustine inherited the Platonist account of knowledge as the soul's grasp of eternal truths and developed the doctrine of divine illumination: the human mind knows necessary and universal truths because God illuminates the intelligible objects in the same way the sun illuminates physical objects. The doctrine became the standard Christian-Platonist epistemology of the early Middle Ages until partly displaced by Aristotelian abstraction-theories in the thirteenth century.

The semiotic and hermeneutic tradition

De Doctrina Christiana lays out a theory of signs and the principles of biblical interpretation that founded the Western hermeneutic tradition. Augustine's distinction between signs and things, his analysis of figurative versus literal reading, and his account of the use and enjoyment (uti and frui) of created things shaped medieval semiotic theory and continue to be cited in contemporary work on hermeneutics and the philosophy of language.

Key works

Augustine's surviving corpus is enormous — over five million words. The canonical works:

• Confessions (397–400). Spiritual autobiography in thirteen books; the first nine narrative, the last four philosophical and exegetical.
• On Christian Doctrine / De Doctrina Christiana (begun 396, completed 426). Theory of signs and principles of biblical interpretation.
• On the Trinity / De Trinitate (399–419). The most sophisticated patristic treatment of trinitarian doctrine.
• City of God / De Civitate Dei (413–426). Twenty-two books on history, politics, religion.
• On Free Choice of the Will / De Libero Arbitrio (388–395). Early treatment of free will and the origin of evil.
• The anti-Pelagian works (412–430): On Nature and Grace, On Grace and Free Will, On Predestination, and others.
• Hundreds of letters and sermons.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: the Hortensius of Cicero (which directed him toward philosophy in his nineteenth year); Manichaeism (a dualist religion he adhered to for nearly a decade before rejecting it); the Neoplatonist libri Platonicorum, especially Plotinus and Porphyry, in Marius Victorinus's Latin translations; Ambrose of Milan; the Greek and Latin Christian tradition before him (Paul, the Cappadocian Fathers, Tertullian); and the rhetorical and literary tradition of the late Roman empire.

Influenced: virtually the entire Latin Christian tradition. Direct heirs include the early medieval Augustinians (Isidore, Bede), the high-medieval Augustinians (Bonaventure, the Victorines), the Protestant Reformers (Luther's order was Augustinian; both Luther and Calvin understood their work as Augustinian recovery), Jansenism and Pascal, Kierkegaard, Heidegger (whose early work engaged Augustine extensively), Wittgenstein (the Philosophical Investigations opens by quoting Augustine), and contemporary analytic theologians and philosophers of religion.

The most consequential single line of influence runs through medieval Augustinianism, the Reformation, and Jansenist Catholicism into modern accounts of moral psychology, the divided self, and the limits of human autonomy.

Reception

Augustine was institutionally dominant in the Latin Church almost immediately after his death; his works were copied, summarized, and excerpted continuously throughout the early Middle Ages, and he was the central theological authority before the rediscovery of Aristotle. The Carolingian revival, the eleventh-century reform movement, and the twelfth-century renaissance all proceeded with Augustine as primary reference.

The thirteenth century saw a partial displacement as Aristotelian philosophy entered the Latin West and figures like Aquinas developed alternatives to Augustinian illumination and Augustinian moral psychology. The Augustinian school remained vigorous nonetheless (Bonaventure, Henry of Ghent), and the late-medieval via moderna re-emphasized Augustinian themes against Thomism.

The Reformation made Augustine its most quoted authority. Luther read his own struggles through Augustine's Confessions; Calvin's Institutes are dense with Augustinian citation. The seventeenth-century Jansenist controversy (Cornelius Jansen's Augustinus, Pascal's Provincial Letters) re-fought the Pelagian controversy on French Catholic ground.

Modern reception is bifurcated. Some 20th-century traditions (Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, who wrote her dissertation on Augustine's concept of love) found in him a foundational interlocutor. Others (especially feminist theologians and historians of sexuality) have produced extensive critique of his theology of the body and his account of desire. Augustine scholarship remains an unusually active field, with the Augustine Studies journal, the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (2013), and continuing critical editions of the Sermones and Letters.

Continuing engagement

Contemporary scholarship on Augustine is centered in the Augustinian Studies and Studia Patristica journals and is institutionally supported by the Patristic Society, the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, and the Augustinian Heritage Institute. Major recent monographs include Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967; revised 2000), Carol Harrison's Rethinking Augustine's Early Theology (2006), and James Wetzel's Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (1992). Analytic philosophers of religion continue to engage Augustine on free will, divine foreknowledge, and theodicy (Eleonore Stump's Aquinas and Wandering in Darkness; the work of Katherin Rogers). The new Hyde Park Press edition of the Works of Saint Augustine (45+ volumes) has made the full corpus available in modern English translation for the first time.

Further reading

• Christian Theology — the tradition he most shaped
• Neoplatonism — the philosophical framework he inherited
• Confessions — the spiritual autobiography
• City of God — the political theology
• Aquinas — the high-medieval inheritor
• Free Will — the concept his analysis of will reshaped

The pivotal figure between classical philosophy and medieval Christian thought.