Augustine of Hippo
354–430 CE, Thagaste and Hippo, North Africa
Patristic Christianity
Desire is restless until it finds something infinite to rest in.
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
The life
Augustine was born in Thagaste in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria. His mother Monica was Christian and relentless about it; his father Patricius was not. He was educated in rhetoric at Carthage and became a professor of it, first there, then in Rome and Milan.
For around nine years he was a Manichaean, drawn by their explanation of evil as an independent cosmic force. He lived for over a decade with a partner whose name he never records, and had a son with her, Adeodatus. His mother eventually engineered a socially advantageous marriage, and the partner was sent away.
In Milan he encountered Neoplatonism and the preaching of Ambrose, and converted in 386 after the episode in the garden where he hears a child's voice saying "take up and read". He was made bishop of Hippo in 395 and spent thirty-five years administering, preaching and arguing. He died in 430 while the Vandals besieged the city.
What shaped the ideas
Augustine wrote as the Western Roman Empire came apart. Rome was sacked in 410, and pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. The City of God is his answer, and it is why his political thought assumes earthly institutions are provisional.
He is also the hinge between classical and medieval thought. He read Plato through Plotinus and carried that inward, contemplative cast of mind into Christianity, where it stayed for a thousand years.
Core arguments
- 01
The restless heart
Human desire cannot be satisfied by any finite object.
Every attainment is followed by wanting something further, which suggests the capacity to desire exceeds anything available to fill it. Augustine reads this structural dissatisfaction not as a fault but as evidence about what the desire is actually aimed at.
- 02
Evil as privation
Evil is not a substance but a lack of the good that should be present.
If evil were a thing, a good creator would have made it. But blindness is not a thing, it is the absence of sight; corruption is not an addition but a falling away. So evil can be real and destructive without being an entity, which dissolves the Manichaean picture he had spent nine years inside.
- 03
Time as extension of the mind
Past and future exist only in the present mind, as memory and expectation.
The past is gone, the future has not arrived, and the present has no duration. Yet we compare long and short times, so we must be measuring something present. What is present is an impression in the mind: memory of what has passed, attention to what is passing, expectation of what is coming.
- 04
The divided will
We can want something wholeheartedly and still fail to do it.
In the garden he finds himself commanding his own will and not being obeyed. The body obeys instantly; the will does not obey itself. He concludes the will is not a single faculty but is divided against itself, which is why knowing the good is not sufficient for doing it. This is a direct rejection of the Socratic view.
Commonly got wrong
- Confessions is not a modern memoir. "Confessio" means both admission of sin and profession of praise, and the book is addressed to God rather than to readers, which is why it keeps breaking into prayer.
- The stolen pears are not about pears. The point is that he wanted nothing from them and threw them to pigs, so the attraction was the wrongdoing itself, which his existing theory of evil could not explain.
- His doctrine of original sin and his views on sexuality shaped Western Christianity enormously, but they are his development, not a plain reading of scripture, and were contested in his own lifetime by Pelagius.
Works
Confessions c. 397–400 CE
Autobiography addressed to God. Books I–IX are the life; X–XIII are memory, time and Genesis.
City of God 413–426 CE
Twenty-two books written after the sack of Rome, contrasting the earthly and heavenly cities.
On the Trinity c. 400–428 CE
His most technical work, and the source of the psychological analogy for the Trinity.
On Christian Teaching 397–426 CE
How to read and interpret scripture. Effectively a theory of signs.
Confessions Book VIII for the conversion, or Book XI if you want the philosophy of time, which is the part that still gets cited.
Why they still get taught
He invented the Western introspective self, the one that examines its own motives and finds them murky. Every autobiography and most psychology is downstream of Confessions.
Chapters
- Augustine's Restless Heart · Faith & Reason