Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE LIFE OF AUGUSTINE

While, in the East, a succession of Councils determined the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, in the West the Church had been ringing with debate about the relation between the purposes of God and the freedom of human beings. The decisive influence in these debates was a man who was to prove the most influential of all Christian philosophers, St Augustine of Hippo.  Augustine was born in a small town in present-day Algeria in 354. The son of a Christian mother and a pagan father, he was not baptized as an infant, though he received a Christian education in Latin literature and rhetoric. Having acquired a smattering of Greek he qualified in rhetoric and taught the subject at Carthage. At the age of eighteen, on reading Cicero’s lost Hortensius, he was fired with a love of philosophy, and especially of Plato. For about ten years he was a follower of Manicheism, a syncretic religion which drew elements from Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity. The Manichees believed that there were two worlds, a world of spiritual goodness and light created by God, and a world of evil fleshly darkness created by the devil. Their distaste for sex left a permanent mark on Augustine, though for several years in early manhood he lived with a mistress, and had by her a son Adeodatus.