History-Makers: Augustine of Hippo Gets Dragged Into Sainthood

In the history of Christianity, I think it's fair to say the most important century is the one where Jesus showed up. Blistering take, I know. Where do I find so much bravery? But hold your applause as I posit the second most important century is the 300s AD. A stretch that opened with mass persecutions by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, followed with Constantine legalizing it, and ended on Theodosius mandating it. This is the critical century where Christianity came out from the shadows and transformed into the religion of state for the Roman world. But we've tackled this topic before, so instead of looking from the top down, let's zoom into the life of the one author in the history of Christianity who had the most transformative impact on his religion outside the cast of the Bible. A foundational mind in Christian theology and an invaluable window into the rapidly changing world of the late Roman Empire. This guy is also, as it happens, a mess of a human whose personal life is the story of a man getting dragged kicking and screaming into sainthood. This is Saint Augustine of Hippo. No. Oh my god, I wish. No. Hippo Aegeus is the name of a city in North Africa where he served as bishop, but man, could you imagine? I say the Hippo should get a saint of their own. But to put my casual Hippo heresy on the back burner and understand how Saint Augustine illuminates a crucial century of Christendom, let's do some history. Now, Augustine's winding story was far wackier than the average Roman's, but it cut across so many aspects of Roman life that it gives us a very vivid picture of the world around him. Born Aurelius Augustinus in 354 AD in the Roman province of Numidia, he was raised by a Christian mother and pagan father, yet his first choice of faith was neither. After studying the art of rhetoric in nearby Carthage, he took up a popular new religion from Persia called Manichaeism, which saw the world as the battlefield between the cosmic forces of goodness and evil. Augustine found the philosophy around evil fascinating to chew on, but his poor mother Monica was horrified by her son's turbo-heathenism. Even worse, that wayward Augustine was a lustin'. He took a lover for 15 years, didn't marry, did have a child, but when his mother arranged him a marriage to someone of status in the year 384, the bride-to-be was still underage. Yikes. So while waiting the brief two years, he took another lover because he was, his own quote, a slave of lust. So far, we've seen the life of someone who does not seem at all qualified for sainthood, yet here we have a quote of him reflecting on his past behavior with disappointment and a smidge of embarrassment. What changed? Well, several things, and none of them fast. It begins in Carthage when Augustine met the Manichaean bishop Faustus, hoping to learn from an esteemed authority figure, but instead walking away profoundly disappointed by the bishop's winding non-answers. Augustine didn't abandon the faith immediately, but his mind began to wander, and he dug back into his rhetorical catalog to learn more from classical philosophy. Specifically, he liked the conception of good and evil as taught by Neoplatonism, where there's no such thing as true evil, but merely the absence of good. That all is, on paper, more heathenism, but it's clear that some gears were turning in Augustine's poor, confused head. Things really started swerving after 380 AD. Emperor Theodosius formally declared Christianity the Empire State religion, but the citizens weren't all immediately on board, so when Augustine sailed to Italy in 383, looking to teach rhetoric in the big city of Rome, he found everyone there an absolute nightmare. Hypocritical Christians, crazy pagans, heretics galore, and worst of all, lazy students. Despite the depravity of the ancient megalopolis, Augustine still loved his work, and the following year, he snagged an appointment as orator of the imperial court in the western capital city of Mediolanum. It was there that Augustine played his game of mistress musical chairs, but he also met one Bishop Ambrose, a fellow student of rhetoric, and the total opposite of his brush with Faustus and Carthage. Where the Manichaean was all faff and disappointment, Ambrose helped Augustine understand Christianity more deeply by opening up the Bible to more allegorical and thematic interpretations beyond the, let's be generous, straightforward prose. Augustine trained on the finest literature in the Latin-speaking world, so in comparison, he saw the Bible as a bit of a step down in the writing department. Is that heresy? That might be heresy. So here Augustine was at a crucial tipping point, in limbo between Manichaean, Neoplatonist, and Christian, working in the imperial court and actively philandering while on the hook for an arranged marriage. In 386, all of this pressure led to a teensy little complete mental breakdown. Anguishing over the state of his soul, Augustine fell to the ground weeping when he heard a child's voice say, Latin for pick up and read. So he reached for a Bible and read the first passage he opened to, a letter from St. Paul essentially saying, quit being so dang lusty all the time and just follow Christ. And that was enough to make up his mind. In that moment, Augustine completed his conversion, vowing to take up the cross and return home as a Christian. Now, with the standards of documentation we're used to in the ancient world, you might rightly be wondering how on earth we know any of this. Well, you can thank Augustine himself, as he wrote an autobiographical narrative of his life in conversion. Titled The Confessions, this is a deeply internal, psychological story, tracing the evolution of his thoughts more than the who, what, and where of his career. It's also a heavily theological book, with a third of the chapters dedicated to topics like the nature of God, time, free will, and plenty else besides. Augustine was a wide-ranging author who was eager to get into the weeds of every possible discussion. His resulting catalogue of work from the 45 years after conversion is truly monstrous, and it survived almost entirely intact. Treatises, letters, and speeches totaling in the ballpark of 20,000 pages of cold, hard theology. For a quick comparison, the literal Bible is typically under a thousand pages all up. So at a foundational moment in Christian development, one guy is out here contributing a hundred times the word count of the New Testament. Literally, the man stopped being horny all the time, and became the greatest Latin writer of the millennium. This productivity hack is brought to you by... ASEXUALITY! Think of all the free time you'll have! Even so, it's a shock that Augustine had any time to write, because after returning to Numidia, he started founding monasteries to spend his time in blissful theological contemplation, but when he came to the city of Hippo in 391, the local Christians voluntold him to instead become a priest and eventually a bishop. As bishop of Hippo, he preached a ton, giving multiple sermons a week to an enthralled audience for hours, and 500 of those dictated speeches made it into his written corpus. Wow, the trained orator is good at oratory. Crazy how that happens. But that talent for argumentation served Augustine well in his multi-treatise quest against heresy, with several volumes dedicated to combating the prominent heresies of Arianism, Donatism, and Pelagianism. To narrow in on one, the Donatism controversy highlights a very human angle of the early church. See, during Diocletian's persecutions a century earlier, countless Christians renounced their faith, handed over their Bibles, or otherwise submitted to the empire. The question was how forgiving the church should be, whether those people could get back in good graces, and if returning priests could still administer sacraments like investing new priests. If they couldn't, those consequences ripple fast, and a century later, entire provinces of Christians could be, surprise, totally invalid. Augustine's theological and practical arguments for leniency led the empire to whack Donatism with the heresy hammer in 409. Crisis averted. So we see Augustine working on multiple things at once. On top of day-to-day bishop duties, he's combating heresies, actively preaching, and freestyling mountains of fresh theology with the aforementioned ass-ton of books. But as the 300s give way to the 400s, things start changing because Rome starts burning. In 410, the Visigoths sack the city of Rome. What was seen as the unmoving center point of the empire suddenly became just as fragile as a province on the frontier, and those also started falling away. First Britannia, then parts of Gaul and Hispania, North Africa in the 430s, and within a few decades, poof, goes the empire in the west. The sudden realization that Rome could fall was frankly more shocking than the eventual fall itself, but amid that panic, pagan Romans claimed the timing of all this was suspicious. Rome outlaws paganism, then within a generation, things fall apart. Hmm. This explicit challenge, that Christianity is to blame for the empire's decline and their god clearly isn't that good if he can't protect his people, leads Augustine to compose his multi-volume masterwork, The City of God. Easily Augustine's biggest rhetorical hoist, this book extends far beyond the core accusation, beyond even the typical premise of theology, and examines the entire relationship between Rome and Christianity. Tackling how Christians fit into a state built on the objective mortal sins of mass murder and theft, how they can find kinship with a society rooted in paganism or take up arms to defend it, and whether they can pull any art, literature, or philosophy out of the classical past without fear of corruption. As a classical orator with an affinity for Neoplatonic philosophy, these were dense, heavy topics for Augustine to wrestle with, but it all springs from the question of what the hell is happening to our beautiful empire, and why? To simplify substantially, because we do not have the time, he conceives of the universe as two cities, the heavenly city of God and the earthly city of man. Arising from the moment Lucifer and friends fell from heaven, yet remaining tangled up with each other for all of humanity's messy history, which he recounts through this lens in the second half of the book. In the context of that, Rome is no fixture of civilization, but humanity's most elaborate sandcastle. On one level, this is what's called cope, rationalizing a horrendous situation in the comforting terms of divine salvation. But it's eloquently argued and resonated at a time when Rome started to mean something more malleable. The empire in the East was still Rome, maybe these kingdoms carved out of the Western Empire and ruled by Christians could also be Rome. If the city of God is the real goal, what happens in the city of man is just a means to an end. And those implications are wild. This becomes what's so fascinating about the influence of the later Saint at Augustine. His ideas guide Christianity as it enters late antiquity in the Middle Ages and proceed to spill out in staggeringly far-reaching ways over the next thousand years. Way more of Christianity than I'd ever have time to get into here traces back to Augustine. And all that's on top of his life story alone being an invaluable lens for us to understand the changing world of the 3 and 400s. If Augustine didn't exist, or even worse, did exist but stayed trapped in his harlot era, no one could have replaced the effect he had. Nobody in the second most important century in Christendom was that vital a changemaker in his day and a resource for future generations. So I will accept him over the hippo bishop. Reluctantly. Thank you for watching. I've got some beef with whomever set the pronunciation of Augustine as Agustin rather than Augustine. The Latin was fine, and this way makes Augustine too close to Augustus. I'll be responsible and say it the way everyone else does and after my Vanessa debacle I've lost any leg to stand on but I'm not happy about it. In any case, this was a great year of videos for OSP and we hope you had as much fun as we did. We'll see you next year.