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Confessions of Saint Augustine of Hippo

Tim Bouffard

St. Augustine of Hippo

Born in the year 354 in what is now Algeria in North Africa

Mother was Saint Monica Considered one of the greatest Christian thinkers

of all time

Augustine

Baptism and Conversion

Augustine of Hippo was not always a devout Christian.

Augustine lived what some would call an immoral life filled with partying and sex.

Baptized in the year 387, over thirty years after his birth.

Devoted his life to the Church, became Bishop of Hippo.

Confessions

St. Augustine wrote many different works including The City of God, Confessions, On Christian Doctrine, Soliloquies, and Enchiridion.

Confessions is considered to be the first autobiography ever written and is a narrative about Augustine’s life before and after his conversion to Christianity and how exactly he came to change his ways.

13 books focusing on different aspects of Augustine’s life and his conversion.

Manuscript

Book 7

Book 7 focuses on how Augustine used Neoplatonism as a way to reconcile his long pursuit of philosophy with his newfound, serious faith in the Catholic Church.

Neoplatonism is the modern term for the school of mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd Century CE based on the teachings of Plato and other early Platonists namely Plotinus and Ammonius Saccas.

Neoplatonism

Contains practical and theoretical parts the first dealing with the high origin of the human soul showing how it was departed with the high origin of the human soul showing how it has departed from the first state.

The second shows the way by which the soul may again return to the Eternal and Supreme.

Connection

Augustine struggles with what exactly to think about God and religion. Augustine decides to reject the Neoplatonist view of God, a more limited, impotent being, at the age of thirty-one. Augustine struggles to create his own views on God which moves him towards a better understanding of God.