RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Augrusti Augustine
AUGUSTINE, SAINT, OF HIPPO.
. Life.
1. Formative Period. Sources for a Biography (§ 1). Boyhood. Parental Influences (§ 2). Schooling andEarly Marriage (§ 3). Comes Under Manichean Influences
(§4). Teaches at Thagaste (§ 5). Rejection of Manicheanism. Removal to Rome (§ 6). Life Under Ambrose at Milan (§ 7).
Attracted to Neoplatonism (§ 8). Conversion to Christianity (§ 9). Baptism. Ordination in Africa
(§ 10). Presbyterate at Hippo (§ 11). Beginnings of Polemic Activity
(§ 12). 2. Work as Bishop.
Election to the Bishopric (§1). Possidius's View of Augustine's
Services (§ 2).
Doctrinal Importance of Augustine
(§3). Events of His Episcopate (§ 4). II. Theology and Writings.
His Anti-Manicheanism (§ 1). His Anti-Pelagianism (§ 2). Anti-Pelagian Writings (§ 3). Activity Against Donatism (§ 4). Development of His Views (§ 5). Additional Writings (§ 6). Miscellaneous Works (§ 7).
I. Life: 1. Formative Period: Augustine, bishop of Hippo (Lat. Augustinus; the prsenomen Aurelius given by Orosius, Prosper, and others, has no evidence in his own writings, or in letters addressed to him), is not only the most important of the Fathers of the early Church, but at the same time the one best known through a variety of specially full and useful sources. He was one of the most fertile writers of the early period, and the multiplication of his manuscripts has allowed his works to come down relatively complete in number. Among these, the Confessioi. Sources nes and the Retractationes have a for a Bi- unique value for the history of primiography. tive church life, while others are full of biographical details. Moreover, a countryman of his, Possidius, Bishop of Calama, who was in close relations with him for forty years and present at his death, has given us a life which deserves a place of honor in early hagiography. We have thus remarkably satisfactory sources both as to Augustine's life and as to his literary work. He himself, in his Confessiones (written between 397 and 400), has described the events of his first thirty-three years; and for the rest of his life we have both the treatises and letters, which begin about the time when the Confessiones stop, as well as the biography by Possidius. For the historical understanding of his works, as well as for their dates and criticism, Augustine himself has left in the Retractationes (completed at the end of 427) a unique guide. In this review he takes up each one of his writings, except the letters and sermons, in chronological order, with the purpose of explaining things which might be misconstrued or of restating them in a better way; and Possidius has given us also a comprehensive and systematic list of all the writings, as an appendix to his biography.
Augustine is the first ecclesiastical author the whole course of whose development can be clearly traced, as well as the first in whose case we are able to determine the exact period covered by his career, to the very day. He informs us himself that he was born at Thagaste (Tagaste; now Suk 2. Boyhood. Arras), in proconsular Numidia, Nov. Parental 13, 354; he died at Hippo Regius Influences, (just south of the modern Bona) Aug. 28, 430. [Both Suk Arras and Bona are in the present Algeria, the first 60 m. w. by s. and the second 65 m. w. of Tunis, the ancient Carthage.] His father Patricius, as a member of the council, belonged to the influential classes of the place; he was, however, in straitened circumstances, and seems to have had nothing remarkable either
in mental equipment or in character, but to have been a lively, sensual, hot-tempered person, entirely taken up with his worldly concerns, and unfriendly to Christianity until the close of his life; he became a catechumen shortly before Augustine reached his sixteenth year (369-370) . To his mother Monnica (so the manuscripts write her name, not Monica; b. 331, d. 387) Augustine later believed that he owed what he became. But though she was evidently an honorable, loving, self-sacrificing, and able woman, she was not always the ideal of a Christian mother that tradition has made her appear. Her religion in earlier life has traces of formality and worldliness about it; her ambition for her son seems at first to have had little moral earnestness and she regretted his Manicheanism more than she did his early sensuality. It seems to have been through Ambrose and Augustine that she attained the mature personal piety with which she left the world. Of Augustine as a boy his parents were intensely proud. He received his first education at Thagaste, learning to read and write, as well as the rudiments of Greek and Latin literature, from teachers who followed the old traditional pagan methods. He seems to have had no systematic instruction in the Christian faith at this period, and though enrolled among the catechumens, apparently was near baptism only when an illness and his own boyish desire made it temporarily probable.
His father, delighted with his son's progress in his studies, sent him first to the neighboring Madaura, and then to Carthage, some two days' journey away. A year's enforced idleness, while the means for this more expensive schooling were being accumulated, proved a time of moral deterioration; but we must be on our guard against forming our conception of Augustine's vicious living from the Confessiones alone. To speak, as Mommsen does, of " frantic dissipation " is to attach too much weight to his own penitent expressions of selfreproach. Looking back as a bishop, he naturally regarded his whole life up to the 3. Schooling " conversion " which led to his bapand Early tism as a period of wandering from Marriage, the right way; but not long after this conversion, he judged differently, and found, from one point of view, the turningpoint of his career in his taking up philosophy in his nineteenth year. This view of his early life, which may be traced also in the Confessiones, is probably nearer the truth than the popular conception of a youth sunk in all kinds of immorality. When he began the study of rhetoric at Carthage, it is true that (in company with com-
Augustine