(also Aurelius Augustinus or Augus-tinus Sanctus). Born Nov. 13, 354, in Thagaste, Numidia, North Africa; died Aug. 28, 430, in Hippo, North Africa. Christian theologian and most illustrious representative of Western patrology. At first he was under the spell of Man-ichaeism and skepticism; he was baptized in 387. From 395 he was bishop of Hippo.
The spiritual world of Augustine is characteristically antithetic: a unique intellectual sensibility as opposed to a tendency to bracing dogma, and a developed individualistic consciousness as opposed to a church-inspired, impersonal mysticism. Augustine’s ontology and his teachings about God as an absolute being follow Neoplatonism, but Augustine attempted to rethink old ideas, starting from the subject rather than the object, and from human thought as self-evident witness, an anticipation of Descartes’ basic concept. According to Augustine, the existence ofGod is the connotation of man’s cognition of himself, while the existence of objects is not; this train of thought is similar to Anselm of Canterbury’s and the reverse of Thomas Aquinas’ approach. Augustine’s psy-chologism is revealed in his doctrine of time as a correlate of a remembering, percepting, and expectant soul.
A new feature in Augustine’s thinking was his attention to two problems ignored by heathen philosophy: the dynamics of human personality and the dynamics of mankind’s history. The former is dealt with in his Confessions—an inner autobiography that presents Augustine’s spiritual development from infancy to his final self-affirmation as an orthodox Christian. With a psychological self-analysis which was unattainable in heathen literature and philosophy, Augustine depicted the complexity of the formation of the personality. Augustine’s personalism implicitly inferred the doctrine of predestination. From an observation of the dark “abysses” of the soul, Augustine arrived at the conclusion of the necessity of God’s grace, which saves man’s nature from self-sufficiency and therefore leads to eternal salvation. The mystic recognition of history’s dialectic is presented in the treatise The City of God, which was written after Rome’s capture by Alaric in 410. Augustine perceived two opposite types of human communities: the earthly city, that is, a state based on “love of self extending to disregard of God,” and the heavenly city, a spiritual community based on “love of God extending to disregard of self.” The heavenly city is certainly not identical to the political theocracy, in the spirit of which medieval Catholic ideologists interpreted Augustine’s teachings; he stressed the unworldliness of the heavenly city and the impossibility of adapting it to political reality. Augustine found apt words to criticize the “Cain-like” spirit of the empire, the predatory nature of the civilization of late antiquity, and the callousness of the Romans, who conquered foreign cities and then complained when the same was done to their own city. However, Augustine found that all violence—from violence toward children in schools, expressively described in Confessions, to state violence—is the result of the sinful depravity of man and, although contemptible, is inevitable. For this reason, Augustine recognized the necessity for the authority of the state, which he likened to a “large band of robbers.”
Augustine’s influence was manifold. For the medieval era, Augustine was an undisputed authority on religion and philosophy who had no equal until Thomas Aquinas. The Platonic orientation of early scholasticism originated with him. His skill in conveying individual emotions was admired by the Humanists, and his experience of grace, by the early Protestants. The confession motif in the sentimental literature of Rousseau and others brought Augustine’s experience of introspection into the secular sphere. Contemporary Catholic neoscholastic thinkers, unsatisfied with the rationality of Thomism, turn to Augustine. Existentialists see Augustine as one of their forebears.
S. S. AVERINTSEV