Who Was Augustine of Hippo? His Life from Thagaste to Hippo
Augustine of Hippo was a North African Christian teacher and bishop who lived from 354 to 430. He grew up in the Roman province of Africa, became a brilliant teacher of rhetoric, spent years in a false religion and in sin, and was converted to Christ in Milan at about thirty-two. He then went home to Africa, served for decades as bishop of the port city of Hippo, and wrote books that shaped Christian thinking for the next fifteen hundred years. The best known is the story of his own conversion, The Confessions.
Much of what we know about his early life comes from the Confessions itself. The rest comes from his letters and sermons and from a short life written by his friend Possidius, a fellow bishop.
Boyhood in Thagaste
Augustine was born in November 354 in Thagaste, a small town in what is now Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a town official of modest means and not a Christian for most of his life. His mother, Monica, was a devout believer. Augustine says she taught him the name of Christ from his earliest years:
For this name, according to Thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour Thy Son, had my tender heart, even with my mother's milk, devoutly drunk in and deeply treasured.
The Confessions, Book III
He was enrolled as a learner in the faith as a child, but his baptism was put off, as was common then. He was a gifted student who hated being forced to study and loved Latin poetry. He studied in nearby Madaura, then spent a restless year at home at sixteen while his father raised money to send him on. That is the year of the stolen pears he describes in Book II. His father died not long after, having come to faith near the end of his life.
Student and teacher in Carthage
Around the age of seventeen Augustine went to Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa, to study rhetoric, the art of public speaking that opened the way to careers in law and government. He threw himself into its pleasures. He took a companion, a woman he lived with faithfully for many years but never married, and they had a son, Adeodatus.
At nineteen he read Cicero's Hortensius and was seized by a love of wisdom. He tried reading the Bible but found its plain style beneath him. Instead he joined the Manichees, a sect that claimed to follow Christ but taught that the world is a battle between two equal powers of light and darkness. He stayed with them about nine years. Monica wept and prayed and, for a time, would not let him live in her house.
He taught in Thagaste and then in Carthage. In those years a close friend died, and Augustine's grief was so deep he left his hometown.
Rome and Milan
In 383 Augustine sailed for Rome, hoping for better students. He slipped away from Monica by a lie while she prayed at the shore. In Rome he fell gravely ill, recovered, and grew disillusioned with the Manichees. A year later he won the official post of professor of rhetoric in Milan, where the emperor then kept his court. It was a high position for a young man from a small African town.
In Milan he went to hear the bishop, Ambrose, as a professional curious about a famous speaker. Augustine later saw God's hand in it:
To him was I unknowing led by Thee, that by him I might knowingly be led to Thee.
The Confessions, Book V
Ambrose's preaching showed him that the Old Testament could be read with understanding instead of scorn. Monica came to Milan. A respectable marriage was arranged for him, and the mother of his son was sent back to Africa, a parting he describes as a wound. He read the Platonist philosophers, who freed him from thinking of God as a physical thing, and then he turned to the letters of Paul.
The conversion in the garden
In the summer of 386, in a garden behind his lodging in Milan, Augustine reached the end of his resistance. He heard a child's voice singing "Take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and read Romans 13:13–14. His doubt was gone. Our article on Augustine's conversion story tells that day in his own words.
He gave up his teaching post and spent the following months at a friend's country house outside Milan with Monica, his son and a few friends, reading the Psalms and writing. At Easter in 387 he was baptized in Milan by Ambrose, together with his friend Alypius and his son Adeodatus.
Monica's death and the return to Africa
That same year, as the family waited at Ostia, the port of Rome, to sail home, Monica fell ill and died. Shortly before, she and Augustine had stood at a window and talked of heaven. Book IX of the Confessions records what she said to him then:
My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?
The Confessions, Book IX
Augustine went back to Africa and settled at Thagaste with friends in a simple shared life of prayer and study. His gifted son Adeodatus died young, not long after.
Bishop of Hippo
In 391 Augustine visited Hippo Regius, a port on the coast. He had been avoiding towns that needed a bishop, afraid of being pressed into service. While he was in a service there, the congregation took hold of him and asked that he be ordained a priest, and he was, against his wishes and with tears. A few years later, around 395 or 396, he became the bishop of Hippo, and he held that office until his death, some thirty-five years.
He preached constantly, settled disputes among his people, cared for the poor, and lived in community with his clergy. He wrote the Confessions soon after becoming bishop, around 397 to 400. He also wrote The City of God, begun after the sack of Rome in 410, and On the Trinity, along with hundreds of letters and sermons. He spent much of his strength defending the faith against the Manichees, against the Donatists, a group that had split from the main body of African Christians, and against Pelagius and his followers, who taught that people can obey God without his grace. Against them Augustine pressed the truth he had learned in his own life: that salvation is the gift of God from first to last.
His death
In 430 the Vandals, a Germanic people who had crossed into Africa, laid siege to Hippo. Augustine fell ill during the siege. Possidius writes that in his last days he had the penitential psalms copied out and fixed to the wall where he could read them from his bed, and that he prayed and wept over them. He died on August 28, 430, at seventy-five.
Why he still matters
Augustine is claimed by Christians of many traditions. Protestant reformers quoted him more than any other early writer, especially on sin and grace. But most readers meet him first in the Confessions, because there he is not a famous theologian but a sinner telling God the truth about his life. Start there. Our book-by-book summary will help you find your way, and our collection of Confessions quotes gathers his most loved lines. When you're ready, read The Confessions of St. Augustine free in TheWay Library, or see more by Augustine of Hippo.