Augustine's Life

Introduction

Aurelius Augustinus was born on November 13, 354, in the Numidian village of Thagaste in Roman North Africa (located in the present-day Algeria). His parents were Romans people of modest means; his father, Patricius, was a pagan, and his mother, Monica, a Christian. The first nine, of thirteen, publications of his Confessions are autobiographical, dramatically explaining the first third of a century of his life to his second birth by baptism, in 387. The Confessions are mostly a narrative, addressed to God, of his sore, worried seek for spiritual fulfillment. As he writes on its very first sheet, "Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee."

Discussion

Augustine describes his adolescence in periods of "my past wickedness and the carnal corruptions of my soul." When he was nearly sixteen years old, he took a shatter from his investigations, so that some money could be put simultaneously to drive him away to study. During these times at home he says that he was pierced by the "briars of unclean lusts." He notifies a story about he a assortment of young men stole a load full of pears, for no cause at all except that it was wrong to do so (Brown, 78-221).

In 370, the year his dad past away Augustine was sent to study rhetoric at Carthage. As he composes, "I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illegal loves leapt and boiled about me. Iwas not yet in love, but I was in love with love." round 371, he took a concubine and "did drop in love, easily from liking to." He had a child by her, entitled Adeodatus about 372. But in 373, he read the Roman eclectic Stoic Marcus Tullius Cicero's Hortensius, which "changed the main heading" of his interests and kindled a passion for beliefs and its quest for reality.

Around 374, Augustine undertook a school of rhetoric at Thagaste. He writes that, all through the "nine-year time span, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth, I was directed astray myself and led other ones astray." throughout this time he stayed trustworthy to his concubine, bonded by "a lustful love," and nurtured for their son. With the help of Manicheans he secured a professorship of rhetoric in Milan in 384. There he perceived Bishop Ambrose preach. At first, Augustine was interested only in his eloquent style rather than in the content ...