Hippo critical

Who was the most influential Roman? Various names could challenge for the title, but if the criterion is the individual who most shaped the world with his words, there can be only one winner. No, not Cicero; not Caesar; not Virgil. But an African who lived in the last century of the Roman Empire: Augustine.

That a boy born in Thagaste, Numidia — what we now call Souk Ahras, Algeria — would somehow cross the Mediterranean, convert to Christianity and return to Africa as Bishop of Hippo, is remarkable enough. But that he would become the dominant ecclesiastical writer of his age, and the most authoritative Patristic figure throughout the Middle Ages, is almost a miracle.

St Augustine’s surviving corpus is uniquely immense. Some 5.3 million words survive — and even now the occasional lost sermon still turns up – which equates to nearly three quarters of all extant Latin from the Classical period.

He was born in 354 to a family of multiple cultural ties: his father Patricius was a low-ranking Roman official of pagan belief; his mother Monica was a Christian and a Berber, who was thus fluent in Punic, the language of the the Carthaginiains (themselves Phoenician refugees). 

As a young man Augustine followed Manichaeism, the dualistic doctrine of the Persian prophet Mani, which appealed to inchoate minds: the universe hosts a cosmic battle between Light (Good) and Dark (Evil), and human bodies are wicked prisons for our noble souls, which can only attain liberation through bodily purification. But after posing some direct questions to a leading proponent of this religious movement, Augustine saw through the scam.

For this man was made different: his vision always exceeded his setting, his horizons ever expanding. After leaving the village for school in Madauros (M’Daourouch), Augustine studied further in the cultural capital of Carthage. Following a dull spell as a teacher, he felt drawn to the true imperial capital of Rome, where he would teach the essential subject of his age: rhetoric. His brilliance was soon spotted and he was commended to one of the most influential men of the age, Ambrose, Bishop of Mediolanum (Milan), who duly appointed him to one of the most influential posts, Rhetoricae magister, Professor of Rhetoric. 

Yet all was not well in the world. Augustine, now in his early thirties, was consumed by doubt and self-loathing. As he later recalled, in perhaps the most famous sentence he ever wrote, his appeal to God was Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo: Give me chastity and restraint — but not now. Every human knows that their life can be lived better, but there’s always some reason or other to delay the complete overhaul.

And then, while weeping in his Milanese garden, Augustine heard what seemed to be a child’s voice, repeating “Tolle, lege; tolle, lege” (“Pick up and read, pick up and read”). Dashing for a copy of the Pauline Epistles, he opened it at random and read, “Not in rioting and drunken sessions, not in bedrooms and lewd acts, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and don’t make not provision for the flesh in acts of lust” (Romans 13:13–14). The divine instruction was unmistakeable: the game was now up. The following year Augustine was baptised into Christianity along with his son Adeodatus (meaning Gift-from-God).

Who had helped provide such a gift from god? An unnamed African, of low status, who had been Augustine’s partner since his late teens. But Monica disapproved of this long-term concubine and instead arranged marriage with a wealthy Italian; the innominate Berber woman was sent unceremoniously back to Africa, although Augustine’s imminent conversion would remove any prospect of marriage. Thus Augustine found himself acting out in real life a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid over which he had wept as a young man: the disbelief, anger, sorrow, and suicide of Dido, Queen of Carthage, when Aeneas abandoned her because of god-given duties that transcended human passions.

Christianity was Augustine’s divine mission. This did not mean entering a life of retreat and silent contemplation: Augustine was an untiring polemicist who devoted much of his energies to demolishing, from each and every possible angle, heretical views – not just the Manicheans of old but also the emergent enemies of Donatism and Pelagianism.

Over 130 works survive from Augustine’s stilus, treating all manner of subjects: alongside Christian topics – Biblical commentaries, Original Sin, the Trinity – he made foundational contributions to the study of time, psychology, memory, music, political philosophy, and education. Much the most important work, fifteen years in the making, was The City of God (De civitate Dei). This 22-book defence of the Christian faith (and destruction of pagan superstitions) argues for the parallel existence of two distinct realms: the earthly City of Man, where humans are motivated by self-love and destined to fall, and the celestial City of God, where all is motivated by God’s eternal love, which transcends all mundane concerns. 

Augustine’s most read work, however, is the Confessions — an autobiographical memoir of 13 books written for curiosum genus ad cognoscendam vitam alienam, desidiosum ad corrigendam suam (“a class of people curious about the life of another but inactive in correcting their own”). To pick just one episode, the detailed exploration he provides of how and why he, among a gang of teenage boys, stole pears from a neighbour’s garden is — whether the tale be true or allegorical for something darker — one of the most self-aware accounts of the futility but inevitability of human sin.

At the end of his life Augustine came to weigh it all up. His Retractationes critically appraised his corpus of writings, mixing approval and disapproval of his younger self. Meanwhile the wider world was rapidly collapsing: the Vandals had swept across the Roman frontier, moved into south-western Europe, crossed into Africa, and were then besieging Hippo. Augustine, as it happened, died in 430 from a rapid disease aged 75, and so did not witness his own see become the invading horde’s capital, before they moved on to Carthage. A generation later, the Vandals would sack Rome; a generation after that, the (Western) Empire would collapse, as Augustine knew it must.

But, though he knew little of it at the time, Augustine had done enough to change the world. His rich and roving life offers many a lesson about the challenges of conflicting desires and ambitions, about how faith demands sacrifice, and about how one’s ultimate role in the world always extends far beyond our human comprehension.