31 - Augustine

Summary

LIFE AND WRITINGS

Augustine was born in Thagaste (today’s Souk-Ahras, in Algeria), a municipium in the Roman province of Proconsular Africa and the ecclesiastical province of Numidia, in 354. His mother, Monnica, educated him in the Christian faith. His first encounter with philosophy took place in Carthage in 373, when he read a now-lost dialogue by Cicero, the Hortensius, and was won over by its exhortation to love wisdom, that is, to be a philosopher. Disappointed by the non-classical language of the Scriptures, Augustine was captured by the preaching of the Manichees, who promised him they would explain revealed truth by reason only. Throughout his adhesion to Manichaeism, he was in the lower ranks of the Hearers. He studied Aristotle’s ‘so-called Ten Categories’ by himself in 374, maybe in some paraphrased or commented version (Conf. 4.16.28–9). After becoming a teacher, he read books on the liberal arts (dialectics, geometry, music) and memorized ‘many writings of the philosophers’ (Conf. 5.3.3), chiefly astronomical books by pagan authors, which revealed to him the untenable nature of the Manichaean myths. His readings during this period included Cicero’s philosophical works and doxographical texts like those by Varro. Augustine wrote his first theoretical treatise, two or three books De pulchro et apto, in 380/1. It had already been lost by the time of the Confessiones (Conf. 4.13.20–15.27).