Saint Augustine of Hippo is the most influential early church father of the Western church. Numerous church doctrines, such as original sin, have the indelible stamp of the late 4th / early 5th century North African bishop imprinted upon the minds and hearts of millions of Christians down to the present day.
Roman Catholics look to Augustine for understanding the theology of sacraments, while all of the major magisterial Protestant leaders of the 16th century owe a debt to Augustine. Martin Luther himself was an Augustinian monk when he nailed his famous 95-theses to the Wittenberg church door. Even the Eastern Orthodox look to Augustine as one of the primary doctors of the church.
During his long tenure as the bishop of Hippo, Augustine was known to be a writing machine. At one point he employed two full time secretaries which allowed him to dictate the books he was writing. To date, there are still works by Augustine that have not been translated into English. The man was a towering intellect, impacting a great deal of Western thought that even non-Christian scholars and other readers come back generation after generation to study.
Pope Boniface VIII in the 13th century named him one of the four great Doctors of the Church, alongside Ambrose, Jerome, and Pope Gregory the Great. Augustine wrote what many believe is the first Western autobiography, the Confessions, chronicling his journey as a rebellious teenager and libertine, to become a stalwart defender of historic orthodoxy Christianity.
Augustine almost single-handedly shifted all nearly all of Christendom away from the doctrine of a literal 1,000 year future millennium, following Christ’s return (the premillennial return of Christ) to a more symbolic view, which essentially equated the millennium with the church age, a view which remained supreme unit the era of the Reformation. Practically all of Christendom accepted his view of infant baptism for that same time period, lasting ironically about one thousand years. In the early church debate regarding the afterlife, Augustine’s specific perspective known as the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, became the dominant view of hell until the modern era.
Much of what many Christians today take for granted as to “what the Bible says” stems back to the life and mind of this North African Christian. How did this former sex-addict turned bishop of the church become so influential?
Robin Lane Fox’s Augustine: Conversion to Confessions examines roughly the first half of the great Christian saint’s life, leading up the Augustine’s most famous written work, Confessions.
Veracity 