Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born at Thagaste in Roman North Africa to a Christian mother, Monica, and a pagan father. He studied rhetoric at Carthage, fell in love with philosophy at nineteen on reading Cicero's Hortensius, spent nine years as a Manichaean and then passed through a sceptical phase. As professor of rhetoric in Milan he heard Ambrose preach and read Plotinus; in 386, in a garden, he heard a child sing 'take up and read', opened the Scriptures and was converted.

He returned to Africa, was ordained a priest by popular acclaim in 391 and became bishop of Hippo in 396, spending thirty-four years in preaching, controversy and writing. He fought in turn the Manichaeans, the Donatists and the Pelagians, and in the dispute with Pelagius developed his doctrine of original sin and grace: the will cannot turn to the good by itself, and salvation rests wholly on God's unconditional election. When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 he answered the charge that Christianity had ruined the Empire with The City of God. He died as the Vandals besieged Hippo.

The Confessions is the West's first introspective autobiography, and its analyses of memory, time and desire have never been surpassed. What is time? he asks; if no one asks me, I know, and if someone asks, I do not. His answer is that time is a stretching of the mind. His discovery of the inner self, his emphasis on the will and his linear conception of history became the ground colour of European thought. Descartes' cogito and later existentialism both carry his shadow.