Augustine, ST (AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS), the greatest of the Latin fathers, was born at Tagaste, a town of Numidia, on the 13th of November 354 A.D. His father, Patricius, was poor, but of good family, and filled the office of magistrate. He continued a pagan till advanced in years, and was only baptised shortly before his death. He does not seem to have been remarkable for any elevation of mind; on the contrary, one may fairly conclude, from his son's statements, that he was an irascible, kind-hearted man, more intent on his son's advancement in this world than in that which is to come. Patricius was very anxious that Augustine should become a fine scholar, as he noticed that not a few people in his day were obtaining large incomes by their 'wits.' Augustine was accordingly sent to school at Madaura, and subsequently to Carthage, to complete his studies. Previous to this, however, he had enjoyed the inestimable felicity of a religious education at home. His godly mother, Monica, had been his best instructor. Neander truly says: 'Whatever treasures of virtue and worth the life of faith, even of a soul not trained by scientific culture, can bestow, were set before him in the example of his pious mother.'
The energy and penetration of intellect exhibited by the young Augustine excited the most flattering hopes. When he left home for Carthage, a joyous, ardent, and resolute student, a bright career of worldly prosperity seemed to open before him. But strong as Augustine was, the temptations of Carthage were stronger. His nature, deep, impetuous, and passionate, thirsted for excitement. He had just reached the age when pleasure is conceived to be synonymous with happiness, and Carthage, the second city of the empire, was rank as Rome in its sensual corruptions. Augustine fell. In his Confessions he paints the frightful abyss into which he felt himself plunged; nor does he seek to excuse himself; on the contrary, the shadow of his guilt is thrown forward over all his boyish life, and he displays even a morbid zeal and acuteness in pointing out what others, less censorious, might term the frivolous errors of his childhood, but which seemed to Augustine the parents of his subsequent vices, and therefore equally bad and equally reprehensible. Before he had reached his eighteenth year, his mistress bore him a son, who was named Adeodatus—afterwards baptised along with him at Milan. The thing which appears to have first stirred his deeper being into life was a passage which he suddenly came across in the Hortensius of Cicero, treating of the worth and dignity of philosophy. Fascinated by 'the delusive pretensions of the Manichæan sect, which, instead of a blind belief on authority held out the promise of clear knowledge and a satisfactory solution of all questions relating to things human and divine,' Augustine now became a professed Manichæan. Returning to his native town, he lectured for a short time on 'grammar'—that is to say, on literature. Soon afterwards, he returned to Carthage, to pursue his profession under more favourable auspices. Here he wrote, in his twenty-seventh year, his first work, De Apto et Pulchro—a treatise on aesthetics, which has unfortunately been lost. About the same time his spiritual nature became keener and more imperative in its demands. The futile speculations of the visionary sect to which he had attached himself now became apparent. He had a series of interviews and conversations with Faustus, one of the most celebrated teachers of Manichæism; and these so utterly disappointed his expectations, that he left the society in disgust and sad bewilderment, after having wasted ten years in a fruitless search for wisdom and truth.
In 383 he went to Rome, followed by the tears, the prayers, and the anxieties of his excellent mother, who was not, however, bereaved of hope, for both her faith and her love were strong. After a short stay, Augustine left Rome, and proceeded to Milan, where he became a teacher of rhetoric. No change could have been more fortunate. At this time the Bishop of Milan was the eloquent and devout St Ambrose. An intimacy sprang up between the two, and Augustine, who was at this time a zealous student of Plato, often went to hear his friend preach. He confesses that the Platonic writings 'enkindled in his mind an incredible ardour;' they awakened his deeper spiritual nature, which keenly upbraided him with his sins. Once more he studied the Bible, wishing to find in it 'those truths which he had already made himself acquainted with from the Platonic philosophy, but presented in a different form.' He began to think that Christ and Paul, by their glorious life and death, their divine morality, their great holiness, and manifold virtues, must have enjoyed much of that 'highest wisdom' which the philosophers thought confined to themselves. For some time he clung to his Platonic Christianity, and shaped the doctrines of the Bible according to it; but when he found that it was weak to overcome temptations, and that 'he himself was continually borne down by the ungodly impulses which he thought he had already subdued,' the necessity of a living personal God and Saviour to rescue him from the condemnation of his own conscience, and impart a sanctifying vitality to the abstract truths which he worshipped, shone clear through all the stormy struggles of his heart. In the eighth and ninth books of his Confessions he has left a noble though painful picture of his inward life during this momentous crisis. It is sufficient to say that the Spirit of God triumphed. On the 25th of April 387 A.D., Augustine, along with his natural son Adeodatus, was baptised by Ambrose at Milan. Shortly after, he set out on his return home. At Ostia, on the Tiber, his beloved mother, who had followed him to Milan, died; her eyes had seen the salvation of her son, and she could depart in peace. After her death, and before leaving Italy for Africa, Augustine wrote his treatises, De Moribus
Ecclesiæ Catholicæ et de Moribus Manichæorum; De Quantitate Animæ; and De Libero Arbitrio. His character and principles of action had become fixed, and he now brought the whole majesty of his intellect to bear upon the side of Christianity. Having, as was then customary for converts, divided his goods among the poor, he retired into private life, and composed several treatises—De Genesi contra Manichæos, De Musica, De Magistro, and De Vera Religione, which secured him a high reputation. In 391 he was ordained a priest by Valerius, Bishop of Hippo in Numidia; and during the next four years, though earnestly engaged in the work of preaching, contrived to write three different works. In 395 he was made colleague of Valerius. Then ensued a period of hot strife, known in church history as the Donatist and Pelagian controversies. Augustine, as may naturally be supposed, having passed through so fierce a fire of personal experience on religious questions, would be very jealous both of what he knew to be the truth, and of what he only thought to be the truth. This, added to his acute and profound intellect, made him, in spite of the poverty of his historical erudition, a most formidable and relentless antagonist. But this portion of his career will fall to be treated more properly under PELAGIUS and DONATISTS (q.v.). In 397 appeared his Confessions, in 13 books. It is a deep, earnest, and sacred autobiography of one of the greatest intellects the world has seen. Passages of it have no parallel except in the Psalms of David. In 413 he commenced his De Civitate Dei, and finished it in 426. It is generally considered his most powerful work. Intended to be a great vindication of the Christian church, conceived of as a new order rising on the ruins of the old Roman empire, it is not only the grandest and most philosophical of the earlier monuments of Christian theology, but one of the most profound and lasting monuments of human genius. Yet exception may be taken to much that it contains. The learning is no doubt very considerable, but it is not accurate. Augustine was an indifferent scholar; he had studied the Latin authors well; but of Greek 'he knew little, and of Hebrew, nothing,' consequently many of his reasonings are based on false and untenable premises, and he errs often in his etymological explanations. In 428 Augustine published his Retractationes, in which he makes a recension of all his previous writings. It is a work of great candour. He frankly acknowledges such errors and mistakes as he had discovered himself to have committed, explains and modifies numerous statements, and modestly reviews his whole opinions. His end was now drawing nigh. In 429 the Vandals, under the barbarian Genseric, landed in Africa; next year they besieged Hippo. Augustine, now in his seventy-sixth year, prayed that God would help his unhappy church, and grant himself a release out of this present evil world. He died on the 28th of August 430, in the third month of the siege.
No mind has exerted greater influence on the church than that of Augustine. 'No controversy of his age was settled without his voice, and in his Letters (which fill a whole volume of the Benedictine edition of his works) we see the vastness of his empire, the variety of subjects on which appeal was made to him, and the deference with which his judgment was received.' Consistency of theological opinion is not to be looked for from him, nor from any of the church fathers. A larger sphere of freedom was permitted to religious speculation in those unfettered days, before creeds were encircled with that traditional sanctity they now possess. Nevertheless, we have little difficulty in determining the central tenets of his theological belief. He held the corruption of human nature through the fall of man, and the consequent slavery of the human will. Both on metaphysical and religious grounds, he asserted the doctrine of predestination, from which he necessarily deduced the corollary doctrines of election and reprobation; and finally, he strenuously supported, against the Pelagians, not only these opinions, but also the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. At the same time, it is but fair to add that, even on such points, his language is far from uniform; that much of the severity of his doctrines arose from the bitter and painful remembrance of his own early sins, and from the profound impression which the corrupt state of society in his time, and the vast desolations of barbarism, had made on his earnest and susceptible soul; and that, in his desire to give glory to God, he sometimes forgot to be just to man. In illustration of this may be mentioned the fact that the maxim which justified the chastisement of religious errors by civil penalties, even to burning, was established and confirmed by the authority of Augustine, and thus transmitted to succeeding ages. In his epistle to Dulcitius, a civil magistrate who shrank from putting in force the edict of Honorius against heretics, he uses these words: 'It is much better that some should perish by their own fires, than that the whole body should burn in the everlasting flames of Gehenna, through the desert of their impious dissension.' In the opinion of Neander, it was to the somewhat narrow culture, and the peculiar personal experience and temperament of Augustine, that the doctrines of absolute predestination and irresistible grace, first systematised by him, owed much of that harshness and one-sidedness which so long obstructed their general reception by the church, and which continue to render them repulsive to multitudes. It was not, however, by his controversial writings merely, but by his profound conception of Christianity and the religious life, and by his personal fervour and force of character that Augustine moulded the spirit of the Christian church for centuries. The church regarded him as the greatest of the fathers, and at the Reformation Protestants and Catholics alike appealed to his authority. Calvinism is by many regarded as little more than a reassertion of Augustinianism, though this is denied by the Catholic Church; and Jansenism was held by its supporters as the only real expression of Augustine's views. See articles CALVIN, JANSEN, ELECTION, HELL, PREDESTINATION, WILL.
The best complete edition of his works is that of the Benedictines, published at Paris in 8 vols. (11 parts) folio (1679–1700; reprinted in 22 half-vols. 1836–40). They occupy 16 vols. (32–47) of Migne's Patrologia Latina. Numerous editions of the Confessions and De Civitate Dei have appeared. A complete English translation of his works was published at Edinburgh in 15 vols. (1872–80) under the general editorship of Dr Marcus Dods, the City of God being by the editor, the Confessions by the Rev. J. G. Pilkington, the Letters by the Rev. J. G. Cunningham.
See the Church Histories of Tillemont and Neander; Milman's Latin Christianity; also Cloth, Der heil. Kirchenlehrer Augustin (Aachen, 1840); Bindemann, Der heilige Augustin (Berlin, 1844–69); Poujoulat, Histoire de Saint Augustin (6th ed. Tours, 1875); Dorner, Augustin, sein theologisches System und seine religionsphilos. Anschauung (Berlin, 1873); Böhringer, Augustin (Stuttgart, 1877–78); and W. Cunningham, St Austin and his Place in the History of Christian Thought, the Hulsean Lecture for 1885.