Augustine of Hippo

In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, a thirty-two-year-old professor of rhetoric from Roman North Africa heard a child's voice from over the wall: "Take up and read." He opened Paul's epistles – and that ended a youth which had held a concubine, the Manichaean sect, a rhetorician's fame, and the prayer "grant me chastity, but not yet." He describes the scene himself in the Confessions, the first autobiography in Western literature and the first sustained portrait of an inner life.

He went on to become bishop of Hippo and the most influential Christian thinker between Paul and Aquinas. His fusion of Platonism and Christian doctrine – the City of God against the City of Man, time as a creature of the eternal, evil as the absence of good, the soul's restless turning toward God – defined Western theology for a thousand years.

The Confessions in particular invented an entire way of speaking about the self: as a being divided against itself, opaque to its own desires, in search of an authority it both flees and yearns for. Every later confessional writer – Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Knausgaard – is in his shadow.

Lineage

Lectures featuring Hippo

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