Augustine of Hippo, was an Algerian-Roman philosopher and theologian of the late Roman period and early Middle Ages. To this day he is extolled as the greatest of the Fathers of the Christian Church (along with Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome and Saint Gregory). More than any other writer, he developed what would become known as systematic theology, or an explanation of how Christianity fits into views of the universe, creation, and humanity's relationship with God.
The Hedonistic Life of Augustine
Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a while. Hedonism was a moral and philosophical doctrine of Ancient Greece that preaches the idea of extreme pleasure, the incessant search for pleasure and the denial of pain as a means of finding happiness. Seeing the path he was starting to walk, his parents decided to transfer him to the mythical Carthage, a city on the coast of North Africa, near the current city of Tunis.
In Milan, his mother negotiated a marriage contract with a girl from a better family. Augustine, on the other hand, assiduously frequented the brothels of Carthage. Before he chose her to reach puberty, he had a relationship with a young woman named Floria Aemilia.
He later said that this only happened because, at the time, he was a slave to lust. In book 8.7 of his famous work Confessions he wrote: give me chastity and continence, but not yet. Floria was his concubine for over fifteen years and bore him a son named Adeodatus (gift of God).
Manichaeism, the ongoing struggle between good and evil
Despite his fondness for leisure, Augustine was still a man blessed with a brilliant mind. His interest in philosophy was sparked by reading Hortensius, a dialogue by the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero.
Mani, a Persian Christian prophet, who claimed to be the last of the prophets sent by God, emphasized the polarity of good and evil along Zoroastrian and Gnostic philosophical principles. Although officially declared a heresy, Manichaeism remained a popular sect in the Roman Empire and in the East along the Silk Road.
Manichaeism defended a double vision of existence: the world is in a continuous struggle between good and evil. A struggle to which human life is no stranger. The soul represents light, good; while the body, which is subject to the passions, represents evil. To achieve liberation from the first over the second, the Manicheans opted for a different ascetic of renouncing everything material. They considered their religion the ultimate and true belief, above all other confessions.
Augustine came into contact with the sage Faust of Milevo, one of the great figures of Manichaeism. Against all odds, Faust disappointed him deeply and made his Manichean beliefs crumble.
Conversion to Christianity
In 383 (age 29), Augustine moved to Rome to teach rhetoric. However, he was disappointed by the apathetic and crooked Roman schools. The following year he accepted an appointment as professor of rhetoric at the Imperial Court of Milan, a highly visible and influential academic chair.
During his time in Rome and Milan, he turned away from Manichaeism, initially embracing the skepticism movement New Academy. A combination of his own studies in Neoplatonism, his reading of an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the Desert , and the combined influence of his mother and particularly the influential Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose (338 - 397), inclined Augustine towards the Christianity. Augustine was intellectually interested in Bishop Ambrose's sermons. He would later adapt much of this teaching into his ideas.
One day, Augustine heard what he thought was a child playing with a song sung: Take it and read. As he didn't see anyone, he realized it was a supernatural calling. He said he found a New Testament and opened it to Paul to the Romans and it changed his life and he became a Christian.
Augustine was a perfectionist. If he was going to be a Christian, then he would be a celibate Christian. The death of his mother was traumatic for Augustine and perhaps contributed to what became his metaphysics of guilt (reatus), whose basic idea was that God made everything out of nothing, and every created thing is good, with natural faculties. Everyone owes a debt to God for his creation. When they abuse their faculties (sin), this misuse results in guilt because of the debt.
In the summer of 386, he officially converted to Catholic Christianity, abandoned his career in rhetoric, left his teaching post in Milan, and gave up any ideas of society marriage that had been arranged for him. He dedicated himself entirely to the service of God, the priesthood and celibacy. He detailed this spiritual journey in his Confessions, which has become a classic of both Christian theology and world literature.
Augustine's conversion to Christianity became famous because he wrote about it in detail in Confessions (397), a psychological review of his life. Augustine, at a more advanced age, analyzed the decisions he made over time. Modern scholars tend to describe their quest for meaning in life as an intellectual rather than an emotional quest. However, the Confessions embody a personal and spiritual struggle that is familiar to all humans.
What is God for Augustine?
God must transcend space and time, his essence must be goodness, wisdom (omniscience) and power (omnipotence). Augustine conceives of God as necessarily simple, in the sense of not consisting of parts. The reasons for creating things remain unchanged in him, because in his mind is the plan for the world, the execution of which describes the different stages of universal history. All things have ontological truth insofar as they embody or exemplify the pattern rooted in the divine mind.the Ontology philosophy that considers being in itself, in its essence, regardless of the way it manifests itself.
The soul is created by God and is joined to the body, but not by punishment as in Plato. The divine creation is the fruit of goodness, for such is the essence of God. Augustine was interested in the question of whether God created each individual soul separately or all in Adam's.
This would imply that all souls descend from the first man by inheritance. Augustine chose the second explanation because, while it allows him to confirm the existence of a divine plan, it serves to justify the transmission of original sin as described in Scripture.
Rivalry between faith and reason
Reason always leads humans to faith. Once you have it, reason must be used to deepen faith. This is how we must understand the Augustinian phrase: understand in order to believe, believe in order to understand. Therefore, reason and faith complement each other.
Knowledge of the truth must be sought out of an inner need, for it brings true happiness. Only the wise can be happy and wisdom requires knowledge of the truth. The skeptical claim that there is no truth is contradicted by pointing out the truth of the said judgment.
So even skeptics have to affirm the principle of noncontradiction that Parmenides enunciated. The question is not whether or not there is truth, but how to obtain certainties. The answer must be sought in self-knowledge: if I doubt, there is a subject who doubts and, consequently, I can say that this subject exists: if you fail, sum.
In both his philosophical and theological reasoning, he was greatly influenced by Stoicism, Platonism and Neoplatonism, particularly Enneads ' Plotinus. He was also influenced by the works of the Roman poet Virgil (for his teaching on language), Cicero (for his teaching on argument), and Aristotle (particularly his Rhetoric and Poetics).
In his theological works, Augustine exposed the concept of original sin (the guilt of Adam that all human beings inherit) in his works against the Pelagian heretics, exerting an important influence on Saint Thomas Aquinas. He helped formulate the theory of just war and advocated the use of force against Donatist heretics.
He also developed the doctrines of predestination (the divine predestination of all that will come to pass) and efficacious grace (the idea that God's salvation is granted to a fixed number of those He has already determined to save), which later found eloquent expression. in the works of Reformation such as Martin Luther (1483 - 1546), John Calvin (1509 - 1564) and Cornelius Jansen (1585 - 1638) during the Counter-Reformation.
Free will and original sin
Pelagius (354-418), a British monk, taught that when God created the first humans, he gave them free will (the ability to decide, choose according to their own will, exempt from any conditioning, motive, or determining cause) because God did not want slaves.
Human beings are free to choose good and evil because of free will, not because of their inherent nature of evil from conception. Augustine argued that God gave the first couple free will but, like immortality, it too was lost in Eden. Humans are only free to choose evil; in regard to the good, God by grace chooses them.
Augustine struggled to reconcile his beliefs about free will and his conviction that humans are morally responsible for their actions, with his conviction that one's life is predestined in his belief in original sin (which seems to make the almost impossible human moral behavior).
Human beings start with original sin and are therefore inherently evil (evil was not at all real, it was just the absence of good), so classical attempts to achieve virtue through discipline, training, and reason are all doomed to failure. . Only the redemptive action of God's grace offers hope. For him, we are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone.
As a biblical scholar, he turned to Genesis, the beginning of all creation, to analyze how evil entered the world and why humans sin. The 2nd century Church Fathers interpreted the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to claim that Eve was seduced by the serpent (the Devil in Christian theology), who then seduced Adam into disobedience. Seduction introduced the passion of lust (and shame) into human relationships. However, the sin of lust was a necessary evil, to populate the world and make the Church grow.
Augustine extended the concept through an idea we call genetics. God created human genitals, and the first commandment was to be fruitful and multiply. Augustine claimed that this human activity was originally supposed to be a natural function of humans, like walking or eating.
Augustine's concept of Original Sin was an incredibly fatalistic view of humanity. He referred to humans as the doomed masses because we are conceived in sin and therefore doomed from the moment of conception. Baptism was required as the initiation ritual that admitted the newborn into the Church to wash away this Original Sin, but it did not eliminate the human propensity for evil. As he knew, baptized Christians, like him, continued to sin in both body and mind.
Quoting Paul, he asserted that the only thing that can save human beings is the Grace of God, when God sent Christ into the world. This was really a gift because humans, being damned, could never achieve salvation on their own merits. Without grace, humans remain without reconciliation. Grace can only come from God, for the world is totally corrupted by evil.
Evil arose from human weakness in both physical and mental aspects: temptation is the desire to satisfy bodily instincts and the desire to disobey for oneself. Matter itself is not bad, but over-indulgence, easiness to forgive, in matter and one's attitude towards matter can be bad.
Humans are held responsible for evil and will be judged by God. Because God is omniscient (has infinite knowledge about all things). He knows in advance who will be saved and who will be damned. This idea was contested by other Christian bishops and intellectuals.
Doctrine of Double Predestination
Augustine was accused of holding to the doctrine of double predestination, which is the idea that people are condemned to heaven or hell by the will of God before they are even born. In the present day, there are still some Christians, particularly in the Calvinist denomination, who hold this view.
Predestination would seem to make God a very cruel being, as it would be punishing people in hell for actions that were not freely undertaken, but were always part of God's plan. Many Christians are known as compatibilists and try to argue in strange and complex ways that we have free will despite God's foreknowledge of all events.
There may be a clear logical contradiction in the attempt to hold that both foreknowledge God's free will are true, but surely there is an argument that can be made that both positions are held in the Bible. This is a significant problem with the Christian worldview, and it is one that Christians constantly struggle with. The solution to this situation, that God is in control of all things and therefore we have no free will, is logically coherent, but necessarily weakens the argument for Christianity.
Bishop of Hippo
In 391, Augustine was ordained a priest and later Bishop of Hippo. He built his own monastery and became a famous preacher, particularly for opposing Manichaeism and heresies such as Donatism and Pelagianism. He often presented public debates at town hall meetings, where he addressed the continuing heresies in the province. He worked tirelessly to convert the various local racial and religious groups to the Catholic faith. He remained bishop in Hippo until his death in 430.
Augustine's commitment to celibacy never bothered him in a physical sense. He now had his own body under control. But as a perfectionist, he continued to be annoyed that he even thought about sex. He supposed such thoughts would disappear with old age, but his struggles with why he couldn't control his thoughts on this and other matters led to a more difficult question: why do people continue to sin when they know better (at least intellectually) ?
The Barbarian Invasions and the City of God
For Augustine, Christianity did not cause the sack of Rome in 390, it was the consequence of the victory of the Gauls Sennons led by Brennus over the Roman troops during the Battle of Allia. Military success allowed them to invest in the city and demand a heavy ransom from the defeated Romans.
Pagan gods often failed to protect Rome from disaster and military defeat. Despite their gods, Roman society had devolved into sexual immorality, corruption, and violence. Rather, God, in his foreknowledge, was responsible for Rome's successes. He knew that Roman victories and military expansion, with those imperial roads and the conversion of Constantine, would provide a coherent system for the conversion and salvation of the empire.
In the 5th century, however, the Roman Empire was besieged by continual invasions by Goths, Visigoths and Vandals.'s sack of Rome in 410 Alaric I motivated the remaining non-Christians to claim it was the Christians' fault for angering the gods.
Augustine's second great work, On the City of God Against the Pagans (413-426) was considered another classic of Western thought, Augustine perfected his earlier writings on the suffering of the righteous, the existence of evil, the conflict between free will and and divine omniscience and the concept of Original Sin. Its value is found in its arguments for the superiority of Christian philosophy over other schools and its ability to summarize and narrate earlier philosophical treatises.
The book presents human history as a universal conflict between God and the Devil. The earthly city is defined as a city of corruption and evil, where people immerse themselves in the cares and pleasures of the present world, while the City ofGod s, a new Jerusalem, contains those who are dedicated to God's eternal truth and eventual kingdom. heavenly for all believers.
Just War Theory
The City of God contains what has become known as the Just War Theory. To decide whether a war was morally justifiable, Augustine applied the criteria of the right to go to war and the right conduct in a war. He reviewed ancient traditions and philosophical writings on warfare as he developed his views. It concluded that individuals should not commit violence on their own. God gave the sword to governments, validated by Paul in his Letter to Romans 13:4.
He who has authority is a servant of God for his good. But if you do something wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not carry the sword for no reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath to punish the wrongdoer.The City of God was instrumental with the Scholastics and Humanists of the Middle Ages. Both Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) applied Augustinian arguments to their ideas of merging faith with reason.
Works of St. Augustine
Augustine wrote over 100 works in Latin, many of them texts on Christian doctrine and apologetic works against various heresies. He is best known for the Confessions (a personal account of his youth, completed around 397), De Civitate Dei (The City of God), consisting of 22 books, beginning in 413 and ending in 426, dealing with God, martyrdom, Jews and Other Christian Philosophies and De Trinitate (On the Trinity), consisting of 15 books written over the last 30 years of his life, in which he developed the psychological analogy.
Augustine left a catalog containing 113 books, 218 letters and 500 sermons. His writings are among the most complicated of the Church Fathers because throughout his life he returned to a theological concept to update it as his thoughts evolved and he matured.
This intellectual and spiritual journey from classical thought to Catholicism is masterfully described in Confessions, the most personal and significant work of his production. Augustine wrote it at the age of forty-three, when he was already bishop of Hippo. It is an authentic intellectual autobiography, very different from the previous ones we know, with surprising psychological depth. As Peter Brown pointed out in his splendid biography, the Confessions are a manifesto of the inner world that Augustine writes to settle accounts with himself. "Writing the Confessions was a therapeutic action; the many attempts that were made to explain the book merely as an external provocation, or as a fixed philosophical idea, ignore all the life that runs through it" (Brown 2001: 175).its pages, Augustine shows how the study of Plotinus' works meant for him the discovery of the answers he was looking for as a Catholic.
Final years
In 388, his mother died on the way back to Africa. Her son Adeodatus died soon after, leaving him alone in the world, without family. He sold his patrimony and gave the money to the poor. He converted the family home into a monastic foundation for himself and a group of friends.
Augustine died on 28 August 430, aged 75, during the siege of Hippo by the Germanic Vandals, who destroyed the whole city except the cathedral and its library, which was transferred to Europe. Augustine lamented not the invasion itself, but that the Vandals were heretics. He was canonized as a saint by the popular claim and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298.
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