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Augustine

by Augustine of Hippo

AUGUSTINUS (A.D. 354-430), son of a pagan Patricius of Tagaste in North Africa and his Christian wife Monica, while studying in Africa to become a rhetorician, plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts in search of truth, joining for a time the Manichaean society. He became a teacher of grammar at Tagaste, and lived much under the influence of his mother and his friend Alypius. About 383 he went to Rome and soon after to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, being now attracted by the philosophy of the Sceptics and of the Neo-Platonists. His studies of Pauls letters with Alypius and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose led in 386 to his rejection of all sensual habits and to his famous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. After a year in Rome again and his mothers death he returned to Tagaste and there founded a religious community. In 395 or 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, and was henceforth engrossed in duties, writing and controversy. He died at Hippo during the successful siege by the Vandals. From his large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions which reveal Gods action in man; On the City of God which unfolds Gods action in the progress of the worlds history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over Pagan in adversity; and some of the Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical history and Augustines relations with other theologians.