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Spotlight: Saint Augustine of Hippo
Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne, oil on canvas, c. 1645
Augustine of Hippo was one of the most influential thinkers in the formation of Western civilization and his works comprise a foundational part of the Western canon. Born in 354 A.D. in the late Roman Empire (modern-day Algeria), Augustine was educated in rhetoric and steeped in classical Latin literature, especially Cicero and Virgil. After a restless youth and adherence to Manichaeism, he converted to Christianity in 386 under the influence of Ambrose of Milan. He later became bishop of Hippo Regius, serving from 395 until his death in 430.
Augustine’s legacy rests chiefly on two monumental works: Confessiones (Confessions) and Civitate Dei (The City of God). Confessions pioneered the introspective spiritual autobiography, shaping Western notions of the self, memory, and interiority. Its exploration of desire, sin, and grace influenced writers from Dante Alighieri to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The City of God, written after the sack of Rome in 410, offered a sweeping philosophy of history, distinguishing between the ‘City of Man’ and the ‘City of God.’ This framework profoundly shaped medieval political theology and the Western understanding of church–state relations.
Theologically, Augustine articulated doctrines of original sin, divine grace, and predestination that became central to Latin Christianity, influencing both Thomas Aquinas and Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Philosophically, he fused Christian theology with Neoplatonism, transmitting classical thought into medieval Europe and thereby preserving and transforming what would become the West’s Greco-Roman intellectual heritage.
In the Western canon, Augustine stands at the crossroads of antiquity and the Middle Ages. His synthesis of biblical faith and classical philosophy laid the intellectual foundations for medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and even modern reflections on subjectivity and history. His enduring presence in theology, literature, philosophy, and political theory marks him as one of the architects of the Western intellectual tradition.
Verse: 'The Ruin' (8th century)
Wondrous is this wall-stone; broken by fate,
The castles have decayed; the work of giants is crumbling.
Roofs are fallen, ruinous are the towers,
Despoiled are the towers with their gates;
Frost is on their cement, broken are the roofs,
Cut away, fallen, undermined by age.
The grasp of the earth —stout grip of the ground,
Holds its mighty builders, who have perished and gone;
Till now a hundred generations of men have died…
Bright were the castle dwellings, many the bath-houses,
Lofty the host of pinnacles, great the tumult of men,
Many a mead hall full of joys of men,
Till Fate the mighty overturned that.
‘The Ruin’ comes down to us from the Exeter Book, an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry. We don’t know who wrote ‘The Ruin’, or even what ruin the poet is ruminating on, though it is often thought to be the city of Bath, which would have been strikingly grand in Roman times, but decrepit by the 8th century. The translation above was completed by R.K. Gordon, a former professor at the University of Alberta.
Pensées
Time - Our spotlight figure for today spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of time, concluding that it’s basically an element of our consciousness. We know time exists, but we perceive it only barely, because whenever we try to fix our mind upon a moment, it’s already past. Augustine said that time is an admixture of things past, things present, and things future. Newton thought time was immutable, and posited that the world basically runs on an invisible clock, whilst Einstein taught that time was relative.
Some of the world’s brightest minds have run into difficulty wrapping their heads around time. While we may never totally understand it, one thing we can say for a certainty, is that today we treat it like a commodity to be traded. Our time runs at a premium, and there never seems to be enough of it!
Q: What if you could pull something off your calendar and take some time back today? Who (or what) would you spend it on?
Diversions
If you were ever interested in learning Sanskrit, there’s now a place to do it online.
Long read: Allan Carlson divulges how Margaret Sanger spun birth control into a Protestant vs. Catholic issue.
Considering a commonplace notebook to jot down your thoughts? Watch this.
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