The MagazineSaint From HippoHow Augustine’s dilemmas shaped modern Christianity.May 3, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 31
• By EDWARD SHORT
 Augustine of Hippo  Photo Credit: Art Resource A Life No writer excelled at that exacting form, the short biography, better than Henry Chadwick (1920-2008), the former master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and historian of the early Church. In Augustine of Hippo, posthumously prepared for print by his devoted widow, he returned to the greatest of the early Church Fathers to write a biography that is a delight from start to finish, and a marvel of scholarly distillation. Augustine is a figure about whom we know a good deal. Born at Thagaste in 354 in what is now eastern Algeria of a pagan father and Christian mother, he studied rhetoric at Carthage with an eye to becoming a lawyer but instead became a teacher, what he called a “salesman of words in the market of rhetoric.” He followed ancient custom and parted from the Carthaginian concubine with whom he had a son once he had found a suitable fiancée, though the parting distressed him keenly and he converted before he could marry the fiancée. A restless student of philosophy, Augustine embraced, in turn, Manichaeism, skepticism, and the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus before he found in Christianity the “rule of faith” he craved. Meeting and befriending Ambrose, bishop of Milan, changed his life forever. Although initially drawn to the style of Ambrose’s preaching, Augustine soon found its content riveting—especially its elucidation of the Bible. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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