Background
He stayed in Rome only a year, for he found that his pupils there, while more mannerly, were careless about paying their fees. He was glad to get an appointment as municipal professor of rhetoric in Milan. There, outside of class hours, he could make friends at the emperor's court and hope perhaps for an administrative position. He was now exploring the skepticism of the New Academy (an Athenian school of philosophy), despairing of any final truth since Manichaeism had failed him. But at this point, through reading some Latin translations of Plotinus by the Roman rhetorician Victorinus, Augustine discovered Neoplatonism. Here he found his first clear understanding of God as a nonmaterial transcendent Being and an interpretation of evil as simply a deprivation of being. Moreover, Ambrose was bishop (374-397) in Milan; and when Augustine attended the Bishop's sermons to study their rhetoric, his eyes were opened to the reasonableness of orthodox Christianity. Other factors which contributed to his conversion were his mother's prayers (she had followed him from Carthage to Milan), his own reading in St. Paul's epistles (now surprisingly intelligible, in the light of Neoplatonism and of Ambrose's teaching), and a conversation with the Bishop's assistant, Simplicianus, from whom he hear the thrilling story of the conversion of Victorinus. Then one day a friend from the palace, Pontitianus, brought news of two young courtiers who had given up worldly advantage to become monks. Their heroic example greatly intensified for Augustine the struggle within his own will. Finally, the mystical hearing of a child's voice in a garden while Augustine was reading in Paul (Romans) brought an end to his hesitations.
He now resigned his professorship and retired for several months to Cassiciacum, at a villa provided by a friend. He was accompanied by Monica, his son Adeodatus, his brother, two cousins, his friend Alypius, and two pupils. With them he engaged in a study of Scripture and in philosophical discussions. Having accepted the authority of Christ, he was resolved, as he tells us in his Soliloquies, to "apprehend truth not only by believing it but by understanding it." From stenographic records of the group discussions he fashioned several dialogues, modeled on Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. They show Augustine putting Platonism to work in the service of Christian wisdom. At Easter 387 he was baptized in Milan with Adeodatus, whose promising career was to be cut short by death within two years and Alypius, who was to become bishop of Tagaste in 393.
These three and Monica started out for Africa, but on the way Monica died at Ostia. Her last conversation with her son, expressing a happiness beautifully recorded in the Confessions, provides the serene note on which Augustine closes his autobiography. Our knowledge of his later life depends on such facts as we can draw from his letters and treatises, together with a Life composed by Possidius to supplement the Confessions. Possidius was in close association with Augustine for almost forty years, first as a student in the monastery which Augustine established in 391 after his ordination at Hippo, and later as bishop of nearby Calama.
Possidius tells how Augustine on returning to Africa settled at Tagaste with a few friends in a monastic community and how three years later, during a visit to Hippo Regius, he was snatched up by the aged Bishop Valerius and forced into ordination by popular demand. Since Valerius was a Greek who had found preaching in Latin somewhat difficult, he was happy to assign his new assistant this task, even though it was not then customary in Africa for a mere presbyter to preach. In all but name, Augustine was soon functioning as Bishop of Hippo, a seaport city of some half dozen churches, and in prestige second to Carthage. By 395 Valerius had arranged for Augustine's consecration as bishop coadjutor and in 396 he died, leaving Augustine sole bishop. During the next thirty-five years Augustine's leadership reinvigorated the Christian community in North Africa, influenced the papacy to condemn Pelagianism, and won at last even the blessing of Jerome in Bethlehem, whose feelings had earlier been ruffled when Augustine dared to question a few of Jerome's scholarly views. Augustine's monastery at Hippo became virtually a theological seminary. Men trained there were called to minister in other African churches, ten of them as bishops. They in turn founded monastic schools modeled on his. Convents also were founded, modeled on the one headed at Hippo by Augustine's sister Perpetua. His pupils were quick to stir Church councils to action against Africa's dominant Donatist party and against the teaching of Pelagius.
Augustine's own controversial efforts were directed first of all against the Manichees, partly in the hope of converting former friends. Between 389 and 405 he wrote thirteen anti-Manichaean tracts, besides telling his life story in the Confessions, published around 397. At Hippo, moreover, the townspeople were eager to hear Augustine debate and by 392 had maneuvered him into a face-to-face encounter with a Manichaean priest named Fortunatus. In a two-day debate held at the Baths of Sozius, with the proceedings carefully recorded by a stenographer, Fortunatus found himself backed into questions he could not answer, and soon afterwards he fled. On another such occasion, in 404, Felix the Manichee broke down and confessed himself converted.
Augustine found the Donatists more difficult, since their method was to evade public debate while secretly slandering their adversaries and inciting mob violence, winking even at the so-called Circumcellions who supported them by brigandage. A gang of these ambushed Possidius in 403, though not fatally, and about the same time set for Augustine an ambush he narrowly avoided. The Donatists were schismatic North African Christians who had formed a communion of their own after the Diocletian persecution, alleging on unreliable evidence that certain Catholic clergy had handed over copies of Holy Scripture to Diocletian's officers and thus had betrayed the faith. Accordingly they refused to accept as valid any subsequent sacraments of ordination or of baptism except by their own priests. They were purists and rigorists, who advertised themselves as "the church of the martyrs" and found political support among African nationalists.
Augustine had made overtures to the Donatists for a conference to heal the schism, and he had written briefly against their theory and their slanders of himself. On learning of their injury to Possidius, he supported an appeal to the magistrate and resumed on a larger scale the literary debate. In 404 the Council of Carthage appealed to the Emperor Honorius for protection from violence, and the Emperor replied in 405 with laws against the schism itself. Though Augustine kept urging conciliation, he also justified this intervention by the state. Yet the outrages continued and even increased because law enforcement was lax. Finally, a second appeal from the Catholic bishops brought a tribune from Rome to hold a fact-finding conference at Carthage in 411, and the formal hearing was held amid a great assemblage from both camps. It ended in a clear ruling against the Donatists, followed this time by a severe enforcement which completely shattered their party. The most telling speech at the conference was Augustine's documented history of the Donatist schism.
Augustine next turned his attention to a new danger, the seductive doctrine being spread by Pelagius and his disciples. He wrote against it during the years 412-421, and again in the closing years of his life. With painstaking arguments he attacked the Pelagian attempt to minimize divine grace, exaggerate the liberty of the human will, and deny original sin. Augustine's great contribution was to make plain that without God's continual help the human will is weak and crippled. Grace is needed to regenerate the will and empower it. On predestination, however, Augustine sometimes spoke incautiously of "predestination to damnation," or of "irresistible" grace--phrases whose meaning is difficult to interpret and which later Catholic theologians have come to agree should be avoided. They have reaffirmed, instead, Augustine's declarations that God desires the salvation of all persons, that His grace does not coerce the will, and that He does not foreordain the commission of sin even though He foreknows the sin.
Apart from controversy, books of other kinds flowed from Augustine's pen, and on Sundays and certain weekdays he preached sermons, which stenographers usually took down. He had to give time, besides, to judging innumerable cases brought into his episcopal court, to directing parish charities, and to answering appeals from the sick or the perplexed. The Bishop of Milevis hailed him as "God's own busy bee." When he died on Aug. 28, 430, the Vandals were besieging Hippo, and when later they burned the city they spared only the cathedral and the Bishop's library.
Augustine's greatness lies in the synthesis he achieved of Christianity and classical learning. He mastered, criticized, and readapted the liberal arts of his age, using them as handmaids to Christian theology. His theology was Biblical and reinforced by an astounding memory for hundreds of texts, from which he could draw at will to weave illuminating chains of apt quotation. Taking as his motto Isaiah vii:9 in the Septuagint, "Unless you believe you shall not understand," he appealed to the authority of Scripture as his key for probing both the cultural issues of his time and the inner abyss of his own experience. From Scripture he took as his first principle charity, invoking it to set in order the scale of human loves and to give final meaning to all vehicles of language and thought.
