Like the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the French Revolution (1789–1795), the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 C.E. and the destruction of the Roman Empire was an event of momentous significance. At the time many Romans saw their world in ruins and sought to understand the event and to explain it, in part to assign blame and thereby to indict those responsible. Among these were pagan thinkers who ascribed Rome’s downfall to Christianity. In 312 Rome had become Christian, under Constantine; the results, these pagans claimed, were the weakened loyalty of its citizens, an otherworldly abandonment of civic responsibility, and desertion of the gods of the city. All this led to Rome’s weakness and her destruction and provided an historical refutation of the Church. By 413, Augustine (354–430), the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, had written the first three books of his reply to these charges, his sweeping panorama of history and eschatology, of the goal of history and the role of the state in it, of the nature of society and the two cities—the City of God and the earthly city—that constitute it, and of the two types of love that ground these two cities. De Civitate Dei (The City of God), begun in 413 and completed in 426, speaks out of the dramatic encounter between Augustine and the critics of Christianity in the early fifth century, but it is a work that transcends this situation and addresses all subsequent attempts to understand the complex relations among politics, religion, history, and the moral ends of human life. In it, moreover, Augustine not only responds to the critics of Christianity; he also incorporates into his own conception of the “city of man” many central political values of his republican, stoic, and Roman law opponents, thereby providing a vehicle for transmitting these values to medieval Europe.
Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, in North Africa. His father was pagan, his mother, Monica, a Christian. As a youngster Augustine studied Latin and the Latin classics. By 370 he was in Carthage, mastering the works of classical rhetoric and becoming increasingly estranged from his mother’s Christianity. In 374 he moved back to Thagaste to teach rhetoric, and then returned to Carthage, where he established a school of rhetoric.
During this period Augustine read Cicero’s dialogue Hortensius (a work now lost) and was stimulated by it to pursue wisdom and truth through philosophy, in place of the irrational Christian doctrines he had rejected. He found an alternative in Manichaeism, a doctrine of two principles, the forces of light and darkness, of good and evil, that are eternally engaged in battle over the soul of each person and over the world itself. Augustine was especially drawn to this dualistic theory as a solution to the problem of the existence of evil, which the theory ascribed to the force of evil and not to God, and the problem of base human desires and passions.
In 383 Augustine moved to Rome, once again to teach rhetoric, and in 384 took the position of municipal professor of rhetoric in Milan. There Augustine was introduced to a neo-Platonic interpretation of Christianity in the sermons of Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, and through acquaintance with other Christian intellectuals in Ambrose’s circle. Here, finally, was the true philosophy which he had been seeking. By 386 Augustine was converted, and in 387 Ambrose baptized him into the Church.
Augustine returned to Thagaste in 388, where he established with friends a small monastic community. Within a few years and against his wishes, he was ordained a priest and called upon to aid the pastoral affairs of the aged Bishop of Hippo, a seaport town one hundred fifty miles west of Carthage. When the Bishop died in 396, Augustine replaced him, a position which he held until his death. During the years of his episcopacy, Augustine wrote extensively—Scriptural commentaries, theological treatises, letters, and much else. He engaged in polemics and controversies, with the Donatists and Pelagians, among others, delivered sermons, and conducted the affairs of his diocese. In 410 he completed his most important doctrinal work, De Trinitate (On the Trinity), and in 400 he published his greatest work, the Confessions, in which he recounts the spiritual journey of his first thirty-three years.
In 430, twenty years after the Visigoths had sacked Rome, the Vandals, under Genseric, flooded into Northern Africa from Spain and besieged Hippo. In the midst of the crisis, on August 28, 430, Augustine died, in time to avoid seeing the invaders burn his city.
Recommended Readings
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Burns, James (ed.). Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, 350–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine. New York: Random House, 1968.
Kirwan, Christopher. Augustine. London: Routledge, 1979.
Markus, R. A. (ed.). Augustine. Garden City: Doubleday, 1972.