Augustine of Hippo

354-430 · Roman African · Patristic Philosophy, Philosophical Theology, Late Ancient Philosophy, Christian Platonism

Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.

Augustine spent nine years as a Manichaean, dabbled in skepticism, kept a mistress, and famously prayed to be made chaste "but not yet" — before a child's voice in a Milan garden sent him to the letter of Paul and changed everything. Born in 354 in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and the relentlessly devout Monnica, this trained rhetorician turned his own messy interior into the raw material of philosophy. In the Confessions he invented a new genre: the soul investigating itself as the privileged route to God, dwelling on memory, on the strange experience of time, and on his own divided…

Topics Augustine of Hippo addresses

• original sin
• grace and predestination
• the two cities
• evil as privation of being
• the restless heart
• the order of love
• caritas and cupiditas
• frui and uti
• the divided will
• time as distention of the soul
• faith seeking understanding
• the bondage of the fallen will
• concupiscence
• the psychological trinity
• the inner teacher
• illumination
• memory and self-knowledge
• the saeculum
• just war
• coercion of heretics
• the Pelagian controversy
• the Donatist controversy
• the Manichaean controversy
• seminal reasons

Converse with Augustine of Hippo on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Augustine of Hippo's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.