Saint Augustine (Latin: Aurelius Augustinus), born on November 13, 354, in Thagaste in Roman Africa and deceased on August 28, 430, in Hippo, is one of the greatest minds in Christian history and the most influential of the Latin Fathers of the Church.[1] A converted rhetorician, monk, bishop, theologian, exegete, and pastor, he is honored as a Doctor of the Church and numbered among the four great Doctors of the West, together with Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, and Saint Gregory the Great.[2]
His life was first of all a long search. For more than thirty years, Augustine sought happiness in rhetoric, ambition, passions, and sects — for nine years he was a Manichaean — until a child’s voice heard in a Milanese garden brought him to his knees: “Take and read!”[3] From this conversion came the most widely read spiritual narrative in the West, the Confessions, whose opening page contains perhaps the most famous sentence in Christian literature: “You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”[4]
Having become Bishop of Hippo in 396, for thirty-four years he bore the weight of a diocese, a divided African Church, and the whole field of Christian thought. He fought error on three fronts — Manichaean, Donatist, and Pelagian — and left an immense body of work: more than one hundred treatises and hundreds of letters and sermons, including The City of God, a vast meditation on history written as Rome was collapsing.[5]
He died at the age of seventy-five with the Vandals at the city walls, after having the penitential psalms displayed on the wall of his room so that he could read them and weep.[6] The Latin Church named him the “Doctor of Grace,” and no theologian — from Thomas Aquinas to Luther, from Pascal to Newman — escaped his influence. His relics now rest in Pavia.
An African Youth Between Two Worlds (354–371)
Thagaste: the Son of Patricius and Monica
Augustine was born on November 13, 354, in Thagaste, a modest town in Roman Numidia (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), within a deeply Latinized and largely Christian North Africa.[7] His father, Patricius, was a small pagan landowner and town decurion, an honorable but hot-tempered and irreligious man who received Baptism only shortly before his death. His mother, Monica, was a fervent Christian whose patience and tears accompanied every stage of her son’s wandering — and whom the Church venerates as a saint.[8]
This household divided between two faiths left a profound mark on Augustine. In childhood he received the salt of the catechumens and learned the name of Christ “with his mother’s milk,” as he would later say; but his Baptism was postponed according to the custom of the time, and the boy grew up Christian without yet fully being one.[9]
The Rebellious Schoolboy and the Gift of Words
Augustine was a gifted and unruly child. He detested school, hated the Greek he was forced to learn under blows, yet delighted in Latin, Virgil, and the ancient tales — he confessed that he had wept over the death of Dido more than over his own sins.[10] In Book II of the Confessions, with almost excessive lucidity, he accused himself of a childhood theft — stealing pears he did not need — in order to probe the mystery of evil committed simply for the pleasure of doing evil.[11]
Recognized for his ability, the boy was sent to study at Madaura, a nearby center of learning, and then, after an idle year in Thagaste for lack of money, to Carthage, the great African metropolis, thanks to the generosity of a patron named Romanianus.[12]
Carthage: Rhetoric and Passion
In Carthage, at about seventeen, Augustine threw himself into rhetorical studies and pleasure with equal intensity. “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of shameful loves seethed all around me,” he would write.[13] He took a concubine, whom he loved faithfully for fifteen years without marrying her, and around 372 she bore him a son whom he named — with tender irony — Adeodatus, “given by God.”[14]
But Carthage also awakened his taste for wisdom. Reading Cicero’s now-lost Hortensius suddenly inflamed him with love for philosophy and the search for truth: “That book changed my feelings [...] and suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible ardor I desired the immortality of wisdom.”[15] Yet one thing then kept him from turning to Christ: the name of Jesus, received with his mother’s milk, was absent from Cicero.
Years of Wandering: Manichaeism and Ambition (371–386)
Nine Years in Mani’s Sect
Seeking a wisdom that could account for evil in the world, Augustine fell into Manichaeism, a dualistic religion from Persia that divided the universe between two eternal principles: Light and Darkness, Good and Evil.[16] The system attracted him because it relieved him of guilt: according to Mani, the evil he committed came from an alien evil “substance” within him. Augustine remained a Manichaean “Hearer” for about nine years, drawing his friends into the sect with him.[17]
“I did not yet know that evil is nothing but the privation of good, tending toward non-being.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, III, 7[18]
During those years he taught rhetoric — first in Thagaste, where the death of a very close friend plunged him into a despair he would describe as one of the deepest sorrows of his life, and then in Carthage.[19] Gradually the Manichaean system cracked: its scientific claims proved false, and his long-awaited meeting with the great Manichaean bishop Faustus of Milevis, who was supposed to resolve every objection, ended in disappointment. Faustus spoke beautifully but knew nothing.[20]
Adeodatus and Augustine’s Concubine
Augustine’s life at this time was that of a brilliant and tormented young teacher, divided among love for his concubine, tenderness for his son Adeodatus, worldly ambition, and thirst for truth. Adeodatus displayed remarkable precocious intelligence: Augustine later gave him a speaking role in his dialogue De Magistro (The Teacher).[21] The boy was baptized alongside his father and died very young, around 389 — a grief Augustine now bore with peaceful faith.
Rome and Milan: The Imperial Chair of Rhetoric
In 383, disappointed by the unruly students of Carthage and drawn to the capital, Augustine sailed for Rome — after deceiving his mother and leaving her weeping on the shore.[22] In Rome he taught, continued to associate with Manichaeans, yet inwardly drew away from them and moved toward the skepticism of the Academics. The following year, with the support of the pagan prefect Symmachus, he secured the prestigious chair of rhetoric in Milan, then an imperial residence: the summit of his worldly career.[23]
The Decisive Encounter with Saint Ambrose
Milan was home to one of the greatest bishops of the West, Ambrose. Augustine first went to hear him as a professional rhetorician evaluating his eloquence, but he emerged moved by the substance of the preaching.[24] Ambrose revealed a reading of Scripture completely unlike the crudely literal interpretation mocked by the Manichaeans: “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
“I listened with delight whenever Ambrose declared to the people, as a rule he carefully commended, that ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life,’ and when, lifting the mystical veil, he disclosed the spiritual meaning.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 4[25]
Monica, who had joined her son in Milan, placed all her confidence in this bishop. Through Ambrose, although Augustine did not yet realize it, he moved toward the Catholic Church: he abandoned the Manichaeans and once more became a catechumen.[26]
Neoplatonism: Discovering the Immaterial
One major intellectual obstacle remained: Augustine could not conceive a spiritual reality without body or extension; he imagined God as a subtle material substance diffused throughout space. Reading the “books of the Platonists” — especially Plotinus in the translation of Marius Victorinus — freed him from this materialism and enabled him to glimpse an intelligible world and an immaterial God.[27] But Neoplatonism, he later said, showed him the goal from afar without giving him the path: there he found the Word, but not “the Word made flesh” or the humility of the Cross.
“There I read, not in these words but with the same meaning, that ‘in the beginning was the Word’ [...]. But that ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,’ I did not read there.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, VII, 9[28]
Conversion: “Take and Read!” (386–387)
The Inner Struggle in the Milan Garden
By the summer of 386, Augustine was ready for faith yet unable to break with his habits, held back above all by attachment to the flesh. His will was divided — “I wished and I did not wish” — between the old self and the new.[29] The story of two imperial officials converted after reading Athanasius’s Life of Saint Anthony drove him into a decisive crisis. He fled to the far end of his garden and collapsed in tears beneath a fig tree.
Augustine himself would admit that, in those years, only fear of judgment kept him from sinking further: “I had nothing left to hold me back from sinking deeper into the abyss of carnal pleasures but the fear of death and of your future judgment.”[30] A useful guardrail, not a paralyzing fear: this fear restrained him without yet converting him.
“Tolle lege”: The Child’s Voice and the Epistle to the Romans
Then he heard a child’s voice coming from a neighboring house, chanting again and again: “Take and read! Take and read!” He recognized a divine command, opened the book of Saint Paul’s epistles at random, and found Romans 13:13–14: “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”[31] Light flooded him; every hesitation vanished.
“Suddenly I heard from a neighboring house a voice like that of a child, chanting and repeatedly saying: ‘Take and read! Take and read!’ [...] I had neither the desire nor the need to read any further: at the end of that sentence, a light of certainty poured into my heart, and all the darkness of doubt vanished.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 12[32]
It was late summer 386. Augustine was thirty-two. He resigned his chair of rhetoric and withdrew with his mother, son, brother, and several friends to a villa at Cassiciacum, near Milan, to prepare for Baptism through prayer and philosophical dialogue.[33]
Baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387
On the night of Easter 387 (April 24–25), in Milan, Ambrose baptized Augustine, his son Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius.[34] Tradition long attributed to that night the antiphonal composition of the Te Deum by the two saints; the legend is beautiful, but the hymn predates them.[35] What is certain is Augustine’s emotion before the singing of the Milanese Church, whose hymns — recently introduced by Ambrose — moved him to tears:
“How many tears I shed, deeply moved by the voices of Your Church sweetly singing Your hymns and canticles! Those voices flowed into my ears, and Your truth was distilled into my heart.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, 6[36]
The Death of Saint Monica at Ostia
Her mission accomplished, Monica could die in peace. On the return journey to Africa, at Ostia, Rome’s port, mother and son leaned at a window overlooking a garden and shared a famous ecstasy: speaking of eternal life, they rose for an instant “with one impulse of the heart” until they touched eternal Wisdom.[37] A few days later Monica fell ill. When her sons worried that she would die far from her homeland, she answered with these admirable words:
“Nothing is far from God, and there is no reason to fear that at the end of the age He will not recognize the place from which He must raise me.” — Saint Monica, as reported by Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, 11[38]
She died at the age of fifty-six in 387, on the ninth day of her illness. Augustine was thirty-three. Book IX of the Confessions became his mother’s literary tomb — one of the most beautiful portraits of a woman in antiquity.
Return to Africa and the Birth of a Monk (388–391)
Thagaste: A Community of “Servants of God”
After returning to Africa in 388, Augustine sold his family property in Thagaste, distributed the proceeds to the poor, and founded on what remained a small lay community devoted to prayer, study, and common life — “servants of God” who shared everything in imitation of the first Christians in Jerusalem.[39] He had no clerical ambition: he wished only to seek God with his friends, far from the world.
The Rule of Saint Augustine
From this experience of common life, through his letters and his organization of Hippo’s episcopal community, came the Rule of Saint Augustine: a brief code of life founded on fraternal charity, common ownership, and unity of hearts “on the way to God.”[40] Shorter and more flexible than the Rule of Saint Benedict, it became one of the great rules of the West, adopted over the centuries by countless orders and congregations — Canons Regular, Dominicans, Hermits of Saint Augustine, and many others.
“Before all else, live together in harmony in the house, having one soul and one heart turned toward God.” — Saint Augustine, Rule, ch. 1[41]
Priest and Bishop of Hippo (391–430)
The Unexpected Ordination at Hippo
In 391, Augustine went to Hippo (Hippo Regius, a Numidian port) to meet a friend whom he hoped to win to monastic life. He entered the church while the elderly bishop Valerius, a Greek by origin who spoke Latin poorly, told the people that he needed a priest. Recognizing the famous convert, the congregation seized him and pressed him toward the altar: Augustine was ordained a priest amid acclamations and tears.[42] He obtained only a period in which to study Scripture before assuming the duty of preaching.
Coadjutor Bishop, Then Diocesan Bishop
Valerius, aware that he had found a treasure, made Augustine his coadjutor. Around 395, contrary to the canonical custom forbidding two bishops in the same city, Augustine was consecrated Bishop of Hippo. At Valerius’s death around 396, he became the diocesan bishop, an office he would bear for thirty-four years until his death.[43] He immediately turned his episcopal household into a monastery of clerics, forming a whole generation of African clergy.
The Pastor: Preaching, Judging, and Feeding
The Bishop of Hippo was not a withdrawn theologian but an overburdened pastor. He preached tirelessly — hundreds of his sermons, recorded by stenographers, survive — spent entire days judging the disputes of his faithful in the episcopal court (audientia episcopalis), wrote, traveled, and defended the poor against the powerful.[44] At times he regretted the monastic peace he had lost, yet he gave himself entirely to his people.
“For you I am a bishop; with you I am a Christian. The first name denotes an office received; the second, a grace. The first is a danger; the second, salvation.” — Saint Augustine, Sermon 340, 1[45]
The Doctor in Three Great Controversies
Augustine’s theology was forged in controversy. Three great conflicts shaped his thought and, through it, the whole of Catholic theology.
Against the Manichaeans: Evil Is Not a Substance
Having himself been a Manichaean for nine years, Augustine knew the sect from within, and his earliest battles were directed against it.[46] His decisive answer, inherited from Neoplatonism but transfigured by faith, was that evil has no independent existence: it is not a substance, much less an evil god, but a privation of good (privatio boni), a deficiency, as shadow is an absence of light. Everything God created is good; moral evil arises from the free choice of a will that turns away from the supreme good.
“I sought what evil is and found no substance, but the perversity of a will turned away from the supreme substance — from You, O God — toward lower things.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, VII, 16[47]
Against the Donatists: The Unity of the Church
Africa was torn by the Donatist schism. Since the Diocletian persecution, the Donatists — a majority in some regions — claimed to form the Church of the “pure” and held that sacraments administered by ministers they judged unworthy were invalid. These were the traditores, who had surrendered the Scriptures to the persecutors.[48] Augustine opposed two fundamental principles to them: the validity of the sacraments does not depend on the holiness of the minister, because Christ Himself baptizes; and the Church is by nature catholic, spread throughout the world, not confined to an African faction.
“The judgment of the whole world is secure.” (Securus iudicat orbis terrarum) — Saint Augustine, Against the Letter of Parmenian, III, 24[49]
This formula, struck like a thunderclap, crossed the centuries. Encountered by chance in 1839, it shook Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Anglican convictions and set him on the road to Rome.[50] Augustine’s evolving support for public coercion against violent Donatists, especially the Circumcellions, remains debated by historians.
Against the Pelagians: Grace and Original Sin
The deepest struggle — the one that earned him the title “Doctor of Grace” — set Augustine against the British monk Pelagius and his disciples Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum. Scandalized by moral laxity, Pelagius taught that man could save himself by his own powers, without interior grace, and denied that Adam’s sin had wounded human nature.[51] Augustine recounted that the rupture was provoked by a simple sentence in the Confessions that Pelagius could not bear to hear:
“Give what You command, and command what You will.” (Da quod iubes et iube quod vis) — Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 29[52]
Against Pelagius, Augustine maintained that since the Fall, man needs God’s grace not only to know the good but to will and accomplish it; grace is a free gift, and even final perseverance is itself a gift.[53] Pelagianism was condemned by African councils, especially the Council of Carthage in 418, then by Pope Zosimus in his Epistola tractoria, and finally by the later Magisterium as a whole.[54] The Church retained from Augustine the absolute primacy of grace, while later correcting some of his severest formulations on predestination, which Trent and Catholic tradition would read within a balanced whole.
The Written Work: A Literary Continent
Possidius, his friend and biographer, wrote that no one could read everything Augustine had written.[55] His disciple compiled an Indiculum, or catalogue, listing more than a thousand works: treatises, letters, and sermons. Two summits dominate this vast range.
The Confessions (c. 397–401)
The Confessions are both a spiritual autobiography and a long prayer addressed to God. Across thirteen books, Augustine rereads his whole life — his sins, his search, his conversion, and his mother’s death — as the story of a mercy that pursued him. The final books rise into meditations on memory, time, and creation.[56] It is the first great narrative of interiority in world literature: Augustine may be said to have invented the Western “I.”
“You were more inward to me than my inmost self, and higher than the highest summit of my being.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, III, 6[57]
The City of God (413–426)
After Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, pagans accused Christians of causing the Empire’s fall by abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered with his largest work, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), written in twenty-two books between 413 and 426.[58] He opposed two “cities,” intermingled in history until the end of time: the earthly city, built by “love of self to the contempt of God,” and the City of God, built by “love of God to the contempt of self.”[59] It is the first great theology of history, written as an entire world collapsed.
“Two loves have therefore made two cities: love of self to the contempt of God, the earthly city; love of God to the contempt of self, the heavenly city.” — Saint Augustine, The City of God, XIV, 28[60]
On the Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, and Other Works
Three works stand out from the rest of his enormous corpus. De Trinitate (On the Trinity, fifteen books, c. 400–420) seeks within the human soul — memory, understanding, and will — a created reflection of the Trinitarian mystery.[61] De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine) founded the Christian art of interpreting and teaching Scripture. And at the end of his life, in a gesture of humility unique in antiquity, Augustine reread his entire body of work in the Retractations (Retractationes), correcting whatever he himself judged inaccurate or imprudent.[62]
Sermons and Letters: The Living Voice of the Pastor
Alongside the great treatises, perhaps the sermons — more than five hundred survive — and the letters — more than three hundred — best reveal the man: the pastor who explained the Gospel to ordinary people, consoled, exhorted, corrected, and whose most elevated thought remained nourished by love for souls.[63]
Augustinian Spirituality
Augustine was not only a theologian but a spiritual master, and one of the most ardent. His interior teaching rests on several insights, all governed by desire and love.
“Our Heart Is Restless”: The Desire for God
For Augustine, everything begins and ends with the restlessness of the human heart, which finds rest only in God. This is the opening theme of the Confessions and the key to his entire life:
“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, I, 1[64]
Man is a being of desire, and his desire is greater than all creation: no finite thing can satisfy him because he was made for the Infinite. The spiritual life consists in purifying that desire and turning it toward its only true object.[65]
“Return Within Yourself”: Interiority
Against the Manichaeans who sought God in space, and against his former self who had sought Him “outside,” Augustine taught the path of interiority: it is by entering one’s deepest self that one finds God, more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.
“Do not go outside; return within yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.” — Saint Augustine, On True Religion, 39[66]
“Late Have I Loved You”: The Beauty of God
At the heart of Book X of the Confessions comes one of the most famous cries of love in all mystical literature — the confession of a man who had long sought elsewhere the Beauty waiting within him:
“Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You! And behold, You were within, and I was without, and there I sought You. [...] You were with me, and I was not with You.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 27[67]
Grace and Humility
From his struggle against Pelagius, Augustine drew a spirituality of absolute humility: everything good within us is God’s gift, and the pride that imagines itself the author of its own salvation is the root of every evil. Grace does not abolish freedom; it heals, frees, and enables it to love.[68] This acute awareness of the gratuitousness of salvation made Augustine the great Doctor of petitionary prayer: grace is not earned but begged for.
“Love, and Do What You Will”
Augustine’s moral teaching is finally gathered into charity. His best-known phrase — often quoted, sometimes misunderstood — is not an invitation to laxity, but the affirmation that true love of God is the root and rule of every right action:
“Love, and do what you will.” (Dilige, et quod vis fac) — Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, VII, 8[69]
Whoever truly loves God can will only the good: charity is “the root from which nothing but good can spring.”[70] This is the summit of Augustinian spirituality — a Christianity of the heart more than of rules, of ordered love more than mere observance.
Death in Besieged Hippo (430)
The Vandal Siege
Augustine’s final years were darkened by catastrophe. The Vandals, a Germanic people who professed Arianism, swept across Roman Africa under their king Genseric from 429 onward, burning, plundering, and killing.[71] In the spring of 430, they laid siege to Hippo. Old and ill, Augustine watched the world he had served collapse: churches devastated, the faithful scattered or slain. He urged his fellow bishops to remain with their people rather than flee.
The Penitential Psalms on the Wall
In the third month of the siege, Augustine contracted a fever from which he would not recover. Possidius, an eyewitness, recounts that he had the penitential Psalms of David copied in large letters and displayed on the wall of his room, so that from his bed he could read them and weep continually during his final days.[72]
“He was accustomed to say that after Baptism, even praiseworthy Christians and priests should not leave this body without fitting and appropriate penance. This he did in his final illness: he had the Psalms of David concerning penance copied [...] and, gazing at them fixed to the wall, he wept abundantly.” — Possidius, Life of Saint Augustine, 31[73]
“The Great Doctor Fell Asleep”
Augustine died on August 28, 430, aged seventy-five, with his faculties intact and surrounded by his companions in prayer.[74] He left no will — he owned nothing — apart from his library, which he asked to be carefully preserved for the Church. Possidius notes that providence spared this treasure: the saint’s writings survived the destruction of Hippo, soon burned by the Vandals. Through them, the dead Augustine would conquer far more than the Africa he lost while living.
Cult, Relics, and Legacy
The Relics: From Hippo to Sardinia, Then Pavia
Augustine’s body was first buried in Hippo. When the Arian Vandals persecuted Catholics, exiled African bishops carried his relics to Sardinia, at Cagliari, in the late fifth century.[75] Two centuries later, with the island threatened by Saracen raids, Peter, Bishop of Pavia, alerted the Lombard king Liutprand, who purchased the saint’s remains and had them transferred around 720–725 to his capital, Pavia, and the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro.[76] They still rest there in the magnificent fourteenth-century sculpted marble tomb known as the Arca di Sant’Agostino. Rediscovered in October 1695 in a lead and silver coffin, the relics were solemnly reinstalled at San Pietro on 7 October 1900, an event Pope Leo XIII celebrated with a poem.
Doctor of the Church and One of the Four Great Latin Doctors
Venerated as a saint by popular acclamation from soon after his death, Augustine was counted by the entire tradition among the Fathers of the Church and, by a decree of Pope Boniface VIII in 1298, officially numbered among the four great Doctors of the Latin West.[77]
| Latin Doctor | Life | Principal contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Saint Ambrose | c. 339–397 | The bishop-pastor, liturgy, and hymns |
| Saint Jerome | c. 345–420 | The Vulgate and biblical exegesis |
| Saint Augustine | 354–430 | Grace, interiority, and The City of God |
| Saint Gregory the Great | c. 540–604 | Pastoral ministry and liturgy |
He bears the distinctive title “Doctor of Grace” (Doctor gratiae) because of his decisive teaching on grace and original sin. His liturgical feast is celebrated on August 28, the day after the feast of his mother Monica on August 27 — the liturgy thus keeping the son, in death as in life, close to the woman who gave birth to him twice.[78]
An Unrivaled Legacy
Few authors have shaped Western thought so profoundly. In the Middle Ages, his Rule structured religious life, while his theology nourished all scholastic thought — Thomas Aquinas cited him more often than any other Father. The Augustinian orders claim him as their father: one of them, the Hermits of Saint Augustine, later received a monk named Martin Luther, a passionate — and partial — reader of the Doctor of Grace.[79] Pascal, Bossuet, Newman, and even the modern philosophy of subjectivity are, in different ways, all his heirs.
Yet the heart of his legacy lies elsewhere. The Church has loved Augustine so deeply because he showed more clearly than anyone that no life is lost to God: a brilliant mind and disordered heart, long enslaved to error and passion, can become by grace alone the greatest Doctor of love. His story is that of every sinner who is called — and that is why, sixteen centuries later, the Confessions are still read.
“You were within, and I was without. [...] You called, You cried out, and You shattered my deafness.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, X, 27[80]
Further Reading
- Saint Monica — Augustine’s mother, whose tears and prayers obtained his conversion; a model for Christian mothers.
- Saint Ambrose of Milan — the bishop who completed Augustine’s conversion and baptized him at Easter 387.
- Saint Anthony the Great — the father of Egyptian monasticism, whose Life by Athanasius shook Augustine on the eve of his conversion.
- Saint Jerome — Augustine’s learned contemporary and biblical scholar, at times a stormy correspondent, and another great Latin Doctor.
- Saint Gregory the Great — the last of the four great Latin Doctors, closing the Christian antiquity Augustine had illuminated.
- The Doctors of the Church in History — the complete list and the meaning of the title Doctor of the Church.
Notes and References
Eugène Portalié, “Life of St. Augustine of Hippo” and “Teaching of St. Augustine of Hippo,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2, New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1907; text reproduced by New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02084a.htm. Used for: birth in Thagaste on November 13, 354; father Patricius and mother Monica; studies in Madaura and Carthage; concubine and son Adeodatus (c. 372); nine years of Manichaeism; Faustus of Milevis; departure for Rome (383), then the Milan chair of rhetoric (384); encounter with Ambrose; reading of the Platonists; Baptism at Easter 387; return to Africa (388) and common life in Thagaste; priestly ordination at Hippo (391) by Valerius; coadjutor episcopate (c. 395), then diocesan episcopate (c. 396); Manichaean, Donatist, and Pelagian controversies; works (Confessions, De Trinitate, De Civitate Dei, De doctrina christiana, Retractationes); death on August 28, 430; feast on August 28.
1 7 12 14 17 20 21 23 26 33 34 39 42 43 46 48 58 61 62 78On the four great Doctors of the Latin Church (Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great) and Pope Boniface VIII’s decree of 1298 ordering the celebration of their feasts throughout the Latin Church, see “Doctor of the Church,” Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent), and the Ignispedia article The Doctors of the Church in History. Augustine bears the distinctive title Doctor gratiae, “Doctor of Grace.”
2 77Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII: Ponticianus’s account of imperial officials converted by reading Athanasius’s Life of Saint Anthony; the divided will — “I wished and I did not wish”; the Milan garden scene in summer 386 and the child’s voice “Tolle, lege!” (VIII, 12); opening Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 13:13–14. Latin text at The Latin Library, conf8.
3 29 31 32Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, ch. 1: “Fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te” — “You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Also Book I on the greatness of God (Ps 144/145), Christ’s name received “with the milk” of Monica, hatred of school, love of Latin, and tears for Dido. French reference translation in the local collection (Les Confessions, Écrits des saints et mystiques); Latin text at The Latin Library, https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/conf1.shtml.
4 9 10 64Possidius of Calama, Vita sancti Augustini (Life of Saint Augustine), written c. 432–439 by a bishop who was Augustine’s friend and an eyewitness. Source for: the scale of Augustine’s output (“no one could read it all”) and the Indiculum (catalogue of writings); the Vandal siege of Hippo under Genseric (430); his final illness in the third month of the siege; the penitential psalms copied and posted on the wall, read with tears (ch. 31); death on August 28, 430, aged 75 (born November 13, 354, he had not reached his 76th birthday); the library preserved for the Church. Reference English translation: H. T. Weiskotten, Princeton, 1919 (text at tertullian.org).
5 6 55 71 72 73 74Benedict XVI, catecheses on Saint Augustine (1 and 2), General Audiences of January 9 and January 16, 2008, vatican.va: Augustine born in Thagaste in 354 to a pagan father, Patricius, and a Christian mother, Monica; the theft of pears in the Confessions; Manichaeism; conversion in Milan; the Confessions as spiritual autobiography and prayer; the later legend of an improvised Te Deum at the Baptism; Augustine’s influence on all Western thought, including Luther, an Augustinian friar.
8 11 16 35 56 79Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book III: “Veni Carthaginem, et circumstrepebat me undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum” (III, 1); Cicero’s Hortensius kindling his love for wisdom (III, 4); entry into Manichaeism and evil understood as privation of good (III, 7); “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” (III, 6). Latin text at The Latin Library, conf3.
13 15 18 57Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book IV: the death of his youthful friend in Thagaste and the violence of his grief; the nine years of error; teaching rhetoric; the lost treatise De pulchro et apto (On the Beautiful and the Fitting).
19Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book V: departure for Rome (383) after deceiving Monica and leaving her weeping on the shore; disappointment with Faustus; the chair of rhetoric in Milan obtained through Symmachus (384); Ambrose’s preaching first heard for its rhetoric and then received for its substance.
22 24Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book VI, ch. 4: Ambrose publicly teaching that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6) and lifting the veil from the spiritual meaning of Scripture; Monica’s arrival in Milan; Augustine once more a catechumen.
25Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book VII: the “books of the Platonists” (Plotinus through Marius Victorinus) freeing him from materialism (VII, 9); there he read “in the beginning was the Word” but not “the Word was made flesh”; evil defined as the perversion of a will turned away from God rather than a substance (VII, 16). Latin text at The Latin Library, conf7.
27 28 47Saint Augustine, Confessions, VI, 16: “I had nothing left to hold me back from sinking deeper into the abyss of carnal pleasures but the fear of death and of your future judgment.”; cited by Matthieu Lavagna, La question difficile de l'enfer, 2026 (publisher not specified in the excerpt), p. PDF 65 (citing Saint Augustine, Les Confessions, VI, 16, BAug 13, p. 571).
30Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book IX: retreat at Cassiciacum; Baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387 (Augustine, Adeodatus, and Alypius); tears at the hymns of the Milanese Church (IX, 6); the ecstasy at Ostia with Monica while speaking of eternal life (IX, 10); Monica’s death on the ninth day of her illness, in her fifty-sixth year and Augustine’s thirty-third (IX, 11), and her words, “Nothing is far from God.”
36 37 38Saint Augustine, Regula (Praeceptum): the first precept asks the community to live in harmony, “having one soul and one heart turned toward God” (Acts 4:32). Founded on fraternal charity and common ownership, the Rule was adopted by Canons Regular, Dominicans, Hermits of Saint Augustine, and many other orders. See Portalié, Catholic Encyclopedia, and Sermons 355–356 on the common life of the clergy of Hippo.
40 41Benedict XVI, catecheses on Saint Augustine (3 and 4), General Audiences of January 30 and February 20, 2008, vatican.va: the overworked Bishop of Hippo and his pastoral duties (preaching, audientia episcopalis, charity); hundreds of sermons recorded by stenographers; “For you I am a bishop, with you I am a Christian” (Sermon 340, 1; PL 38, 1483); the episcopal household transformed into a monastery of clerics; the importance of letters and sermons as the pastor’s living voice.
44 45 63Saint Augustine, Contra epistulam Parmeniani, III, 24: “Quapropter securus iudicat orbis terrarum bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum” — “Therefore the whole world securely judges…” (often shortened to “Securus iudicat orbis terrarum”). On Augustine’s doctrine of the sacraments — Christ baptizes regardless of the minister’s worthiness; see also De baptismo contra Donatistas — and Catholic unity against the Donatist schism, see Portalié, Catholic Encyclopedia. This formula shook John Henry Newman in 1839; see Apologia pro vita sua.
49 50On the Pelagian controversy: Pelagius and Caelestius denied the necessity of interior grace and the transmission of original sin; Julian of Eclanum continued the debate. Augustine defended the absolute primacy of grace in De natura et gratia, De gratia et libero arbitrio, De praedestinatione sanctorum, and De dono perseverantiae. Pelagianism was condemned by the Council of Carthage in 418 (canons on original sin and grace; see Denzinger nos. 222–230) and by Pope Zosimus in his Epistola tractoria. See Portalié, Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent), cathen/02084a, and “Pelagius and Pelagianism.”
51 53 54 68Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, ch. 29: “Da quod iubes et iube quod vis” — “Give what You command, and command what You will.” Augustine himself reports in De dono perseverantiae 20, 53 that Pelagius could not bear these words when they were quoted in his presence in Rome, precipitating the Pelagian controversy.
52Saint Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The City of God), 22 books written between 413 and 426 in response to Alaric’s sack of Rome (410). Book XIV, ch. 28: “Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo: terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei, caelestem vero amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui” — “Two loves have made two cities: love of self to the contempt of God, the earthly city; love of God to the contempt of self, the heavenly city.” French reference translation in the local collection (La Cité de Dieu, Écrits des saints et mystiques) ; Latin text on The Latin Library, https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/civ14.shtml.
59 60Benedict XVI, catechesis on Saint Augustine (5), General Audience of February 27, 2008, vatican.va, on Augustine’s continuing conversion and spirituality; the restlessness of the heart and desire for God; interiority (“return within yourself,” from De vera religione 39, 72: “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas”).
65 66Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, ch. 27: “Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris [...]. Mecum eras, et tecum non eram” — “Late have I loved You, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved You! You were within, and I was without [...]. You were with me, and I was not with You.” One of the mystical summits of the work.
67 80Saint Augustine, In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos tractatus, VII, 8: “Dilige, et quod vis fac” — “Love, and do what you will.” The context identifies charity as the interior root: “let the root of charity be within; from this root nothing but good can spring.” The phrase is often misunderstood: it does not dispense with moral law but affirms that ordered love of God governs every right action.
69 70On the translation of the relics: Bede the Venerable, Martyrologium (eighth century), under August 28, reports that Augustine’s relics were carried from Sardinia to Pavia by the Lombard king Liutprand (Cult of Saints database, Oxford, entry E05608). The website of the Order of Saint Augustine (AUGNET) notes, following Bede’s ‘true Martyrology’, that the body was first brought to Cagliari by the bishops expelled from Africa by the Vandal Huneric (late fifth century), then ransomed from the Saracens and laid in Saint Peter’s in Pavia around 720: http://augnet.org/en/life-of-augustine/in-africa-again/1214-augustines-tomb-01/. A contemporary account: Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, VI, 48 — Liutprand, learning that the Saracens were ravaging Sardinia as far as Augustine’s tomb, ransomed it at great price and had it carried to Pavia (Ticinum): https://elfinspell.com/MedievalMatter/PaultheDeacon-PaulusDiaconus/HistoryOfTheLangobards/PaulTheDeacon-Book6.html. The warning given to the king by Peter, Bishop of Pavia, and the ransom at great cost are told in the letter of Archbishop Oldrad of Milan to Charlemagne on this translation. At Pavia: Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Pavia’ (New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11592b.htm) — Liutprand brought the body from Sardinia and concealed it; recovered in 1695 in a lead and silver coffin, after a lengthy identification process; fourteenth-century marble tomb; and ‘Hermits of St. Augustine’ (New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07281a.htm) — on 7 October 1900 the body was brought back from the cathedral to San Pietro, an event celebrated by a poem of Pope Leo XIII. The Order of Saint Augustine, guardian of the basilica since 1900, recounts the October 1695 rediscovery (marble chest, silver shrine with Lombard crosses): http://www.augnet.org/en/life-of-augustine/in-africa-again/1215-augustines-tomb-02/.
75 76