Saint Augustine Of Hippo Research Paper

Father of Neoplatonism

The Ever Lasting Effects of Saint Augustine of Hippo

By Ethan Seselja - 0608465

Early life of Saint Augustine:

Saint Augustine of Hippo was born on the 13th of November 354 AD to his mother, Saint Monica. He was born into a small African town and right from childhood knew of the religious differences overwhelming the Roman Empire. Even within his own household these differences reined; for his father was a devout pagan honouring old Punic Gods and his mother, by the very nature of being a saint, was a zealous Christian. Augustine’s parents were of the respectable class of Roman society, free to live on the work of others, but their means were sometimes straightened. They managed, sometimes they borrowed money, to acquire a first-class Christian education for Augustine, and, although he had at least one brother and one sister, he seems to have been the only child sent off to be educated. In his teenage years he began to focus less on studies and religion and more on sex and mischievous behaviour. Years later, he engaged in an affair with a married woman, and they bore a child. He wouldn’t marry this woman even after 15 years

The City of God was read in Augustine’s time and throughout the middle Ages and still demands attention today, but it is impossible to read without a determined effort to place it in its historical context. Confessions was not much read in the first centuries of the Middle Ages, but from the 12th century onward it has been continuously read as a vivid portrayal of an individual’s struggle for self-definition in the presence of a powerful God. The transformation was not entirely surprising. Augustine had always dabbled in one form or another of the Christian religion. All his writings from that time onward were driven by his allegiance to a particular form of Christianity both orthodox and