Augustine of Hippo

Aurelius Augustinus

Lived

354–430

Era

The fathers

Where

Hippo, North Africa

Tradition

The apostolic communities

Confessions, The City of God, and the shape of western theology

A North African rhetorician who passed through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism before his conversion at Milan under Ambrose, and spent thirty-four years as bishop of the port town of Hippo, dying as the Vandals besieged it.

Why it matters

No one has influenced western Christianity more. The Confessions invented the interior autobiography; the City of God answered the charge that Rome fell because it abandoned the gods, and set out a way of thinking about the church and the political order that Europe used for a millennium. His accounts of grace, original sin and predestination were fought over by Aquinas, Luther and Calvin alike, all of them claiming him. His arguments for coercing the Donatists back into the church were later used to justify a great deal he did not envisage.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.