Augustine of Hippo
Late Antique · Africa · 354 to 430
North African bishop who joined Christian faith with Platonic ideas and wrote searchingly about the will, time and the restless human heart.
What it is
Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430) was a North African bishop and philosopher who joined Platonic ideas to Christian theology and whose writings have had an enormous influence on Western philosophy and religion. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his ideas about sin, grace, free will, time and love shaped Western culture. Philosophers still read him for his ideas about knowledge, the will and the mind, and for his way of thinking, which is committed to biblical revelation but marked by relentless inquiry.
He was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, a town in Roman Africa that is now in Algeria, and he died on 28 August 430. He was a teacher of rhetoric who moved to Italy, where he heard the sermons of Bishop Ambrose in Milan. He later became a priest and then bishop of Hippo, and for the rest of his life he wrote and argued about church teaching.
The main ideas
- Platonism and Christianity. Augustine brought ideas from Platonic philosophy into Christian theology, using both reason and faith. Platonism remained a decisive ingredient of his thought.
- Love of God and neighbour. He thought that the whole teaching of the Bible comes down to the love of God and neighbour, and he built an ethics around loving rightly.
- Free will and evil. He wrote at length about how human freedom fits with evil in the world and with the idea that God knows and directs everything.
- Sin and grace. His views on sin, grace and predestination had a deep and lasting effect on Western culture. They were also contested: some opponents in his own time, the Pelagians among them, held that human beings have more power to do good by their own efforts.
- Time. He asked what time is, and he discussed the idea of God as outside time.
- Knowledge and the mind. He wrote about skepticism, language, the will, the emotions and the structure of the human mind.
What it looks like in practice
Picture someone who looks back on their own life and realises that they spent years chasing things that did not satisfy them. Augustine's Confessions is exactly that kind of look: a long address to God, in the first person, about how his own desires led him wrong and then led him somewhere else. The philosophical point is that what a person loves, and in what order, shapes who they become. Examining one's own loves is the beginning of changing them.
Books and moments
- The Confessions is his most famous work and the most important source on his own life.
- The City of God was prompted by the sack of Rome in 410. In it he replied to those who blamed Christianity for the disaster and set out his view of history and politics.
- Controversies. As a bishop he took part in arguments with the Manicheans, the Donatists and the Pelagians, and many of his books and letters come from those disputes.
Questions and criticism
- Does his picture of sin and grace leave enough room for freedom? His views provoked sharp criticism in his own lifetime, and they have been opposed again in recent times from humanist, liberal and feminist standpoints.
- How Platonic is he? Scholars still discuss how far his thinking depends on Neoplatonism, the later form of Platonic philosophy.
- Philosopher or theologian? Because his work is committed to biblical revelation, readers disagree about where his philosophy ends and his theology begins.
Close neighbours
Augustine is often listed as the first medieval philosopher, though he lived in the late Roman world. Thomas Aquinas, centuries later, stands in a Christian tradition that runs back to him. The page on theism describes the belief in God that his work argues about.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Philosophies they belong to or are close to
Who they connect to
Influenced
- Anselm of Canterbury · Anselm's method of faith seeking understanding follows Augustine.
- Blaise Pascal · Pascal's view of human nature as fallen and dependent on grace comes from Augustine through the Jansenists.
- Bonaventure · He followed Augustine closely in holding that the mind is lit by a higher truth.
- Hannah Arendt · Arendt's doctoral work was on love in Augustine, and his idea of birth as a new beginning stayed with her.
- Nicolas Malebranche · Malebranche saw himself as an Augustinian and argued that we see truths in God.
- René Descartes · Critics pointed out that Augustine had used an argument from doubt to existence before Descartes. (scholars disagree about this link)
- Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz · Sor Juana cites Augustine among the church authorities in defence of her learning. (scholars disagree about this link)
- Thomas Aquinas · Aquinas relied on Augustine as one of his chief authorities on grace, will and the soul.
Influenced by
- Cicero · Augustine says that reading Cicero's Hortensius turned him toward philosophy.
- Plato · Augustine read Plato through the Neoplatonists and took over the idea of a changeless truth known by the mind.
- Plotinus · Augustine credits the books of the Platonists, chiefly Plotinus, with freeing him from a material picture of God.
Reacted against by
- Ludwig Wittgenstein · The Philosophical Investigations opens by criticising an Augustinian picture of how words get meaning.
Other Late Antique thinkers
- Plotinus · 204 to 270
- Porphyry · 234 to 305
- Hypatia of Alexandria · 360 to 415
- Proclus · 412 to 485
- Boethius · 477 to 524