The Story of One of History’s Most Important Theologians

Incalculable Influence

When ranking the most important theologians in the history of the church, the same few names always come up: Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. Maybe Athanasius and Anselm, and perhaps Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth from more recent centuries. But however long the list and no matter who is making it, one name is always on it: Augustine of Hippo. He “not merely created an epoch in the history of the Church,” the great 20th Century Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield observed, but also “determined the course of its history in the West up to the present day.”¹ No theologian was quoted more during the Middle Ages than Augustine. He was a key influence of Anselm, Aquinas, Gottschalk, Thomas Bradwardine, Gregory of Rimini, John Wycliffe, and Jan Hus. Luther read deeply in Augustine and began his career as an Augustinian monk. Calvin’s Institutes cites or alludes to Augustine over eight hundred times. Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein read Augustine as well. He was a pastor, poet, mystic, philosopher, controversialist, and theologian rolled into one. His influence on Christian history and on Western civilization as a whole is almost incalculable.

A Sensitive and Tortured Soul

Augustine was born in 354 in the town of Thagaste in North Africa (present-day Algeria). His father was a pagan (who eventually became a Christian), but his mother was a devout Christian, hailed in some church traditions as Saint Monica. Even at a young age, Augustine showed signs of introspection and a desire to make sense of himself and the world around him. Peter Brown (his most famous modern biographer) writes, “Augustine grew up a sensitive boy, acutely anxious to be accepted, to compete successfully, to avoid being shamed, terrified of the humiliation of being beaten at school.” ²

At age seventeen, Augustine moved to Carthage to further his education. As a student, he was highly intelligent and highly promiscuous. “The single desire that dominated my search for delight,” he later wrote, “was simply to love and to be loved.” He submerged himself “in a whirlpool of vice,”³ letting sensual desires overtake him. Before long, he had a concubine and a son, Adeodatus.

While studying rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine encountered Cicero for the first time, which turned him toward philosophy and the pursuit of wisdom. In his search for truth, Augustine became a “hearer” among the Manichaeans for nine years. As a religious sect, Manichaeanism functioned as both a tight-knit, almost secret, society and as a rationalistic approach to life. Augustine resonated with Manichaean philosophy because it solved two problems for him: the supposed crudeness of the Bible (which he concluded, at this point, was not divinely inspired) and the existence of evil (which he concluded had no connection to God whatsoever). Because no new mingling was allowed between the principles of light and darkness (which meant an abhorrence of all things physical), followers had to avoid procreation. Manichaeanism allowed the brilliant Augustine to adopt a religion that encouraged austerity without a strong notion of personal guilt and without the demands of a personal God with whom he must be in relationship.

And yet, Augustine was a hesitant follower of Mani’s ideas. He harbored lingering doubts on both the intellectual and existential levels. He became addicted to horoscopes. He battled with vanity and pride. Most of all, Augustine continued to be mastered by his passions. At last, when the great Manichean teacher, Faustus, could not answer his questions, Augustine rejected the Manicheans for good.

From Conversation to Consecration

In 384 Augustine moved to Milan—where he secured an enviable professorship, moving up the career ladder from teaching in Thagaste, then in Carthage, and now in Italy. Though successful as an orator and respected as a professor, Augustine struggled to find happiness. He had become disillusioned with the search for wisdom and skeptical of the tidy certainties of the Manicheans. And so Augustine decided to give Ambrose a hearing. Ambrose, fourteen years older than Augustine, had been the bishop in Milan for more than a decade. As the central ecclesiastical and political leader in Milan, Ambrose was shrewd, stubborn, energetic, and well-loved by the people. Over time, he found himself drawn to Ambrose’s wisdom, and he began to trust the Bible and the bishop’s handling of the text. But Augustine was not yet converted.

By 386 all the kindling was in place in Augustine’s heart—all that was needed was for God to strike the match. Augustine was torn between two opinions—drawn to the faith of his mother but still hesitant to commit himself to the God of the Christians. “Grant me chastity and continence,” he famously prayed, “but not yet.” Augustine did not want God to hear his prayer too quickly, lest “you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress.”⁴

All of this set the stage for what may be the most famous postbiblical conversion story in history. As Augustine was walking through a garden in Milan, “weeping in the bitter agony of my heart,” he suddenly heard the voice of a child repeating over and over again, “Tolle lege, tolle lege” (“Pick up and read, pick up and read”). He thought it might be some sort of children’s game, but he interpreted the voice as the voice of God “to open the book and read the first chapter I might find.”⁵ So Augustine hurried back to his friend, Alypius, grabbed the Bible he had left behind and opened it to see what word God had for him. Augustine was cut to the quick as his eyes fell on Romans 13:13–14: “Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” There was no need to read any further. Tears of grief turned to tears of joy, and “all the shadows of doubt were dispelled.”⁶ On Easter Sunday 387, Augustine and his son were baptized by Ambrose and received into the church.

[Augustine’s] influence on Christian history and on Western civilization as a whole is almost incalculable.

Soon after, Augustine left for North Africa to settle in a monastery. On the way, his mother, Monica, died. “I cannot speak enough of the love she had for me,” Augustine later wrote. “She suffered greater pains in my spiritual pregnancy than when she bore me in the flesh.”⁷ A few years later, his son, Adeodatus, also died. Augustine wanted nothing more than to hide away and live a life of study and contemplation. He knew that he had been gifted with supreme intelligence and that he had thus far wasted his gift in follies. His plan was to retire to the mountains and pursue the life of a scholar. But that was not the plan God had for him.

In 391 Augustine arrived in Hippo, eager to establish a monastic community. But Augustine was not an unknown commodity. Christian leaders knew of his reputation as a writer, speaker, and thinker. One Sunday, Valerius, the bishop of Hippo, saw Augustine sitting in church. Valerius proceeded to preach a sermon about how God always sends shepherds to care for his flock. He then had the church pray for guidance in case there might be such a minister in their midst. Naturally, the congregation thought of Augustine, and despite his protestations Augustine was ordained as a priest.

Four years later, Augustine was ordained as co-bishop. When Valerius died in 396, Augustine was consecrated the bishop of Hippo—a position Augustine never sought and probably never wanted. He certainly couldn’t have imagined, after all the places he had been, that Hippo would be his home for the rest of his life.

A Writing Life

Augustine’s entire post-conversion life was spent in controversy. Like many Christians before and after him, Augustine was not granted his desire for a life of contemplation. Instead the Lord put him into the midst of battle and gave him a life of action. Toward the end of his life, Augustine compiled a list of over eighty heresies he had combated. He even got involved in the worship wars of his day. Some church leaders worried that singing along with music (as opposed to just chanting) could lead congregants to be carried away by the music instead of the content of the song. Augustine shared this concern but believed music was too useful to forbid altogether:

When I remember the tears which I poured out at the time when I was first recovering my faith, and that now I am moved not by the chant but by the words being sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and entirely appropriate modulation, then again I recognize the great utility of music in worship.⁸

Augustine labored long and hard on many fronts—from the city he pastored, to the clergy he trained, to the monastery he founded—but undoubtedly, he left his most profound mark on the world by what he wrote. He wrote sermons and letters. He wrote works of theological reflection (e.g., On Christian Doctrine, On the Trinity, The City of God). He wrote commentaries on books of the Bible. He wrote polemical works against groups like the Manicheans, the Donatists, and the Pelagians.⁹ From the fifth century onward, no serious theologian in the West could ignore Augustine. In fact, wherever possible, theologians have tried to show how their views stand in continuity with the great bishop of Hippo. Augustine provided the language, the categories, and many of the theological conclusions that still guide the church today.

Of all the theological controversies involving Augustine, the most important may have been his debate with Pelagius, the British monk who taught that humans must have the ability to overcome their sin. According to Pelagius’s reasoning, man could not be blamed for his sin if we are powerless to overcome sin. He did not believe in inherited guilt and depravity. In par-ticular, Pelagius opposed the line from Augustine: “Grant what you command, and command what you will.”¹⁰ Pelagius scoffed at the idea that we wouldn’t have the innate capacity to do what God asked of us. He thought Augustine’s view of human inability made man too passive and undermined human responsibility.

Throughout the controversy with Pelagius, Augustine proved himself to be the church’s champion of sovereign grace. Because of original sin, he taught, human beings are born into the world with an inherited guilt and depravity. The fallen human will is in bondage to corruption, utterly incapable of choosing the good. We do what is wrong not merely by imitation or by following bad examples, as Pelagius taught, but because we are bad people. We can only be saved by grace—and more than that, we can only accept God’s grace by the regenerating power of grace itself.

Augustine’s emphasis on original sin and human inability did not make him dour and joyless. Far from it. Augustine combined the most rigorous intellect with the highest affections for God. In fact, Augustine believed that the only grace that could convert twisted human hearts is the grace that magnifies the surpassing beauty and majesty of God. “There is a delight which is given not to the wicked,” Augustine wrote, “but to those who worship you for no reward save the joy that you yourself are to them. That is the authentic happy life, to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you.”¹¹ Or to put it more memorably: “He loves thee too little who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake.¹²

The True Eternal City

Augustine was fifty-six years old when he was told that Rome had been sacked. The Roman world was in shock and struggled to make sense of such a calamitous event. How could the Eternal City have fallen? And to a crude Germanic people like the Visigoths? Could the civilization of the Greeks and the Romans really be coming to an end?

For the next sixteen years, Augustine worked on one of the most important books ever written, De Civitate Dei contra Paganos, or The City of God Against the Pagans. The book had two main goals: (1) defend Christianity against those who thought the recent adoption of Christianity in the empire was the reason for its decline and (2) explore the relationship between the city of man and the city of God.

By these two cities, Augustine did not mean heaven and earth. The city of man and the city of God are two cities living on earth at the same time. The comparison was not literal or spatial but mystical. The two cities were two human societies, “one consisting of those who live according to man and the other of those who live according to God.” The one city was “predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other to undergo eternal punishment with the devil.”¹³ The city of man, no matter how impressive it looks, will eventually pass away. Not so with the other, divine community on earth. By the end of Augustine’s life, Rome had fallen, but the city of God lives on.

This article is adapted from Church History for Everyone: The Story of Christianity from the Fall of Jerusalem to the Dawn of the Reformation (Volume 1) by Kevin DeYoung.

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