WHO IS AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO?
No other Church Father has left such a deep influence on Western culture, and maintained such a robust ongoing popular memory, as Augustine of Hippo. Martin Luther reportedly loved Augustine’s writings above any other non-Scriptural source, memorizing hours-long passages for use in theological dispute and pastoral address. Poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s avant-garde autobiography Circonfessions (1991) unfolds literally in the margins of Confessions, pointing up Augustine’s foundational contributions to autobiography and philosophy. In that most commercial of Christendoms, American evangelicalism, Augustine’s quotable quotes are evergreen on T-shirts, mugs, Bible covers, and even indie band lyrics.
Born in 354 to an upper-class family in a small North African outpost on the margins of the Roman Empire, Augustine grew up with an honorable pagan father and a devout Christian mother. Augustine began to study rhetoric at Carthage at age 17. He quickly adopted Manicheanism, a syncretic religion that combined elements of Christian Gnosticism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Jewish apocalypticism into a vivid dualism in which the good, spiritual world of light and order coexists with an evil, material world of darkness. Though almost completely forgotten today, Manichaeism was then a major world religion, and a fast-spreading new religion among the Roman upper class. Despite following a religion that strongly condemned acts of the flesh—procreation, fornication, acquisition of wealth, harvesting, eating meat, drunkenness—Augustine lapsed into a short period of self-described hedonism. At the end of this time, he formed a partnership with an unknown woman. The relationship would last for 15 years, produce a son named Adeodatus, and carry the legal equivalence of a common-law marriage. But Augustine never recorded her name.
Advancing to a brilliant career as a wordsmith and philosopher, Augustine built a fifteen-year career as a rhetoric tutor to young noblemen in Tagaste, Carthage, and finally Rome. In 383, Augustine’s well-heeled Manichean friends connected him with Symmachus, the prefect of Rome who happened to be the one-man search committee for the imperial court’s rhetoric professor position. Symmachus appointed Augustine to the court position. At thirty years old, Augustine occupied the most visible academic position in the empire, with easy access to power and influence.
But Augustine was unsatisfied. Restless, he rejected Manicheism. His mother Monica and a Christian friend began urging him to reconsider Christianity. Around the same time, Augustine began reading deeply in Neoplatonism and listening to sermons by Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. Augustine was fascinated with Ambrose’s Neoplatonism-flavored exegesis on the Old Testament. These sermons helped Augustine imagine a new way of interpreting both sacred texts and personal experience. The objects, people, and events recorded in Scriptures could themselves be signs of higher, spiritual meanings, pointing beyond themselves to transcendent truths. In Neoplatonism’s language-centric metaphysics, Augustine found a possible way to moderate (though never totally erase) Manicheanism’s sharp moral distinction between spiritual and physical realities.
Augustine began stumbling towards conversion. The first step was a grievous one. He sent away his partner of fifteen years, ripping out the sexual transgression that she represented to make way for a lawful marriage to an eleven-year-old noblewoman. “So deeply was she engrafted into my heart, that it was left torn and wounded and trailing blood,” Augustine wrote (5.15). His ex-partner was equally heartbroken, and returned to Africa, leaving their son behind. Scholars have debated the trustworthiness of Augustine’s account, suggesting that this decision reflected his mother’s desire for a respectable marriage more than a “genuine” virtuous step. Whatever the case, Augustine developed this story into a series of powerful but problematic spiritual metaphors in his sermons and later writings. He turns his lower-class partner into a symbol of illicit desire; Augustine’s choice to send her away to make space for a legitimate spouse becomes a metaphor for a virtuous soul sending away the love of the world and preparing for union with Christ.
The final break with his old life came in 386. After a remarkable personal experience, Augustine converted to Christianity. He immediately altered his career to apologetics, publishing On the Holiness of the Catholic Church in 388. Shortly thereafter Augustine lost both his mother and son to death, and he hoped to follow the example of Anthony of Egypt in monastic life. He reluctantly accepted a call to ordination in 391. As a priest, then a bishop, Augustine brought a classical rhetorician’s perspective to pastoral care. Ever aware of his audience’s emotional needs in different rhetorical situation, communally-shared beliefs, and level of understanding, Augustine could muster a range of different styles to reach his congregation and his city.
Augustine’s theological contributions took off in the late 390s. His most famous work, The Confessions, appeared in 397. The same year, he wrote the first three books of De Doctrina Christiana, an exegetical handbook for how to interpret Scripture and teach it responsibly. He also began writing exegetical treatises on books of the Old Testament, using Christian Neoplatonism to pry open tough interpretative shells and retrieve spiritual pearls. In 400, he turned his thoughts towards the problem of the Trinity, producing a cornerstone text of Christianity: De Trinitate. Ever mindful of addressing both the rhetoric masters of Rome and the children in his parish, Augustine put forth the famous “psychological analogy” of the Trinity. He compares the functions of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, to the human mind’s faculties of Memory, Understanding, and Will.
His other major work, The City of God (426), responded to the violent sack of Rome by Visigoth tribes in 410. He consoled Christians across the crumbling Roman Empire, who had lived to see Christianity be adopted as the state religion and now faced accusations of weakening or hollowing out the empire from within. In twenty-two volumes, Augustine expounded an allegorical reading of history as war between two cities: the pagan Earthly City, whose politics and religion prioritized power and pleasure, and the City of God, a foreshadowed but never fully realized paradise. City of God remains a foundational text of Western history and political thought.
Two major emphases pervade Augustine’s works. The first is a virtuosic command of language, and a keen interest in how language relates to experience. The second is the concept of logos, or Reason, a concept inherited from Neoplatonism and reworked into a rational structure or ordering intelligence that unites and upholds every part of reality. Many of Augustine’s most famous arguments emerge seemingly spontaneously out of the narratives he builds. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Confessions.
In the thirteen books of the Confessions, Augustine shapes his own experience into a spiritual autobiography. The first nine books are mostly narrative, interspersed by reflections and prayers. The tenth book is a deep dive into how memory works. The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth books use the concept of Logos to connect personal narrative to biblical history and natural history.
One famous scene particularly exemplifies how Augustine’s ideas build on each other: the infamous pears of temptation in Book 2. As a young teen, Augustine falls in with a seedy friend group—the “nasty lads” or “Destructors.” Spying a pear tree laden with mediocre fruit, the lads decide to steal the fruit. “We did eat a few, but that was not our motive; we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden,” Augustine admits (2.4) His narrating self cross-examines his past self, trying to establish a motive. Did he steal for hunger? Jealousy? A desire to impress the other boys? He confesses it was none of these. “I was in love with my own ruin, in love with decay; not [in love] with the thing for which I was falling in decay but with decay itself” (2.4). Augustine is shocked and almost amazed at his past self’s depravity. He turns this experience into a symbol for all sinful temptation. Augustine infers a broader psychological truth that explains the gross moral failures of recent rulers, and a deep metaphysical truth. He concludes that evil is not rational.
The irrationality of evil weaves in and out of the pages of Confessions. Throwing up in his mouth a little at the thought of a Manichean cosmology in which good and evil are equal opposites, Augustine “struggles to see for myself the truth of an explanation I had heard: that the cause of evil is a free decision of our will” (7.5). Reflecting that the actions of his own will are always informed by his semi-conscious desires, Augustine wonders who or what originated this unconscious bent towards wickedness. Satan? If so, who corrupted Satan? Where does evil and evil desire come from? Light bursts upon him when he reads some translated Platonist texts alongside the first chapter of John. Augustine identifies the Word of John 1 with Plotinus’s Neoplatonic logos: the rational structure that orders the universe, and connects the hypostases (fundamental realities) with the material world. Accepting this metaphysics gave Augustine a way out of his problem. If God had rationally ordered the universe on the principles and structures of his Word, his logos, irrational evil had no connection to existing things, reason, or anything substantial. Instead, Augustine argued, “evil… has no substance” (7.16) It is not an independent, opposing force, but the negation of God’s good creation and created order—as tempting as hard pears, as satisfying as slow decay. And because evil had no substance, there was no real battle between evil and God, good, existence and rationality. Neither was there an available evil choice that could put someone entirely beyond the reach of God’s ordering light. Evil choices reflect a perversion of the human will, which is created to be rational and to seek goodness.
But Augustine’s golden vision of a morally legible metaphysics had a thorny side as well. If choices to do evil things are just irrational distortions of the universe’s transcendent order, then a truly free will is one that only chooses good things. True freedom means freedom from evil temptations, not freedom to do wicked things (like fornicating or preaching heresy). Human sexuality, and its distortion by lust, is Augustine’s go-to example when theorizing the ethics of religious freedom and religious coercion, the ideal relationship between imperial power and Christian institutions, and the just grounds of warfare. These questions vexed Augustine’s later years, as he found that rational persuasion often fell short of modifying heretical beliefs. In his later years, he became more comfortable with allowing, or even invoking, state coercion against to safeguard true freedom. For example, when the Donatist heretics plaguing his bishopric failed to respond to his winsome rhetoric, Augustine admitted that imperial persecutions had their uses. Today, Augustine’s complicated answers and actions continue to vex his modern readers.
Augustine’s Christian Neoplatonism posits a rationally-ordered universe, upheld by the resounding Word (Logos) of God. In this all-encompassing vision, there are structural similarities between the workings of the human mind, the divine Trinity, and the created order. Humans can refine their own understanding, becoming more and more in tune with the transcendent Logos, and the Logos will actively illuminate human thought processes. Indeed, Augustine suggests, the more humans observe language use, the better they will understand the story God is writing throughout history—and in their own lives.
