Augustine (354-430)

Hilarius Bogbinder on the philosophical life of a key figure of the Catholic Church.

- HILARIUS BOGBINDER

Augustine was a saint. Not, mind you, merely because the Catholic Church bestowed the epithet upon him (which they did), but because he was, well, a good guy mostly. Thus it is reported that the Bishop of Hippo (as he was) “used the church chest to emancipate slaves oppressed in bad households” (Augustine, Henry Chadwick, p.110, 2001). And who could not be moved by the sensitive tenderness of his almost poetic prose in his Epistolae (Letters)? Few write more compassionately about how we “move towards God not by walking but by loving.” Being in the company of uneducated people, he even had the humility to continue that “moral character is assessed not by what we know but by what we love” (Epistolae p.155). In this light, it is not difficult to understand why Hannah Arendt wrote her doctorate on ‘The Concept of Love in Augustine: An Attempt at a Philosophical Interpretation’. Yet at the same time, this kind-hearted cleric sometimes fell short of ethical behaviour. When, he was Professor of Rhetoric in Milan, he sent his common-law wife, the mother of his son, back to Africa from whence he came in order to advance his own career prospects.

Seeds of Thought 

The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Augustine was born in Hippo (present-day Annaba in Algeria) on 13 November 354 AD. Young Augustine was a model student, who with the help of a benefactor earned an education, went on to study in Rome, and was given a chair at a learned institution in Milan. A gifted stylist (the study of rhetoric was not wasted on him), he wrote engaging Latin, with a turn of phrase that draws in readers without philosophical training.