Augustine of Hippo · Philosophy Atlas

Intellectual setting

Augustine wrote as the Western Roman Empire was collapsing, completing "City of God" partly in response to pagan claims that Christianity had caused Rome's sack by the Visigoths in 410, and his mature theology of grace and predestination developed through his prolonged controversy with the Pelagians over the freedom of the human will after the Fall.

Key ideas

Evil as privation of good

Against Manichaean dualism, which held evil to be a positive substance opposed to good, Augustine argued that evil has no independent existence but is a privation or corruption of a good that God created, so that everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good.

The two cities

In "City of God," Augustine interpreted human history as the intertwined and ultimately separable history of two loves - the earthly city, built on love of self to the point of contempt for God, and the City of God, built on love of God to the point of contempt for self.

Legacy

Augustine became the most influential Latin Church Father, shaping medieval scholasticism through Aquinas, the Reformation through Luther and Calvin's reception of his theology of grace, and modern philosophy of mind through the influence of his account of time and interiority on thinkers from Descartes to Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.

Connections

Influenced Anselm of Canterbury (documented influence): Anselm works inside the Platonic-Augustinian tradition, taking from it the conception of God as the greatest and best of beings and the ranking of the eternal above the temporal that his arguments assume; the argument of the Proslogion is nevertheless his own.

Influenced Bonaventure (documented influence): The ascent of the Itinerarium follows the route Augustine first charted from the exterior world to the interior mind and beyond it, and Augustine was Bonaventure's favoured theological authority; whether that makes him an Augustinian rather than an independent thinker was argued over in the Neo-Thomistic revival.

Influenced by Cicero (documented influence): Augustine reports in the Confessions that Cicero's lost Hortensius set him on philosophy at eighteen, and Cicero remained his main source for the Hellenistic schools, Academic scepticism above all, which he later argued against.

Influenced by Plotinus (documented influence): The books of the Platonists that Augustine read are generally taken to include treatises of the Enneads, he names Plotinus in De beata vita, and Possidius reports him dying with a line of Plotinus on his lips; how much came through Porphyry instead was debated through the twentieth century.