The most renowned thinker among of the fourth and fifth centuries was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa (350-430). Trained at Carthage, he became a teacher at Carthage and Rome, and later was a professor of rhetoric at Milan. There he came under the influence of Ambrose and became a Christian. He had such conviction about personal sin and forgiveness that it shaped his thinking about theology. During his thirty-five years in the bishopric of Hippo, he worked out a system of Latin theology that became the Catholic standard for more than a thousand years. Augustine’s insistence on the personal relation of humanity to God made him acceptable even to the Protestants of the sixteenth century. In his Confessions Augustine wrote his spiritual autobiography. Convinced of the reality of sin, he felt that his only escape was through the mercy of God. Augustine was also the father of a philosophy of history, set forth in his City of God. He lived at a time of political and social upheaval when the foundations of the Roman Empire were being undermined. The Visigoths sacked the city of Rome in the year 410. Many pagans felt that Rome’s misfortunes were the consequence of the neglect of the old gods. Augustine wrote to show that the decline of paganism was due to other causes and to foretell the triumph of the Christian order in place of the empire whose end was near. He believed that God intended that the Church should rule the State rather than the State the Church.
Impact: Augustine’s idea of the City of God became the political philosophy of the medieval papacy.