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Saint Augustine. The real life of St. Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine of the Catholics, lat. Sanctus Augustinus, Blessed Saint Augustine to the Orthodox, b. 13 November 354, Thagaste, Numidia – d. 28 August 430, Hippo Regius, in present-day Algeria) was a bishop, philosopher, theologian and doctor of the Church. He uses logical arguments to prove the Christian religion’s integrity in his writings.

Saint Augustine (sometimes called Aurelius Augustinus, following confusion with Aurelius of Carthage, his contemporary) is one of the Four Fathers of the Western Church, along with Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory the Great. He is one of the most important Christian theologians and philosophers whose works substantially altered European thought. His works form a bridge between ancient and medieval philosophy.

In his youth, he studied rhetoric. Impressed by Cicero’s “Hortensius,” he turned to philosophy. He followed first Manichaeism, then Scepticism, and finally Neoplatonism. After his conversion to Christianity (387) by Ambrosius of Milan, he became bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa in 396.

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Who was Saint Augustine?

Augustine was once possibly the best Christian truth seeker of Antiquity and exerted the most profound and lasting influence. Philosophers hold alternatively being involved by using their regularly progressive thoughts on language, skepticism and knowledge, will and emotions, freedom and determinism, and on the shape of human thinking and, finally, however, no longer least, by way of his way doing philosophy, which is—thought of direction dedicated to the fact of biblical revelation—surprisingly undogmatic and marked by way of a spirit of relentless inquiry.

Saint Augustine is a saint of the Catholic Church. His authority in theological things was universally popular in the Latin Middle Ages and remained surely uncontested until the nineteenth century in the Western Christian tradition.

The effect of his views on sin, grace, freedom, and sexuality on Western subculture can rarely be overrated. These views, deeply at variance with the historical philosophical and cultural tradition, provoked fierce criticism in Augustine’s lifetime. He has again been hostile from various (humanist, liberal, feminist) standpoints in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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What is Augustine best known for?

In his entire life, Augustine’s battles with his spirituality paralleled the historical shift from fading pagan antiquity to the Christian Middle Ages. On November 13, 354, Augustine was once born at Tagaste (modern Souk-Ahras, Algeria), the place he spent his early years.

St. Augustine is best known for being a Christian truth seeker and theologian who is fine recognized for his writings “The Confessions” and “The City of God.” Probably the most full-size Christian creator considering the authors of the New Testament, he is the writer of the e-book of Revelation. While Augustine used to be the most well-known and influential of the Latin Fathers of the Church, his lifestyle took vicinity at a time when the Roman Empire was in severe decline, and Christianity was once gaining the floor as a reputable faith in the Roman Empire.

The sermons of bishop Ambrose left a lasting impact on Augustine when he used to be in Milan. Around Ambrose lived a team whose individuals had been equally domestic as Platonists as Christians. They regarded Platonism as steady with and anticipatory of Christian thought. Augustine used to be persuaded to take such a role after studying some Platonic texts, most probably those of Plotinus and Porphyry and interacting with Christian Platonists at some point in his lifetime. It used to be the platonists’ spiritualistic metaphysics, as correct as their thought that evil used to be solely a deprivation of good, that outmoded Augustine’s prior Manichean materialism in his thinking.

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Key Verse related to Saint Augustine 

“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. Also, it has the feet to hasten the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. So it has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”

saint augustine

What is St Augustine the patron saint of?

Consistent with St. Augustine, we want not to pray for what we tend to need because God is already aware of what we need before we even ask. Instead, we got to pray, he suggests, to extend our want for God, then that we’d be able to receive what he’s getting ready to grant us.

St. Augustine of Hippo is the brewers’ patron due to his conversion from a former lifetime of loose living, including parties, entertainment, and worldly ambitions.

So his complete turnaround and conversion have been a concept to several who struggle with a selected vice or habit they long to break. Consistent with Possidius, one of the few miracles attributed to Augustine, the healing of associate unwell man occurred throughout the siege. Compatible with Possidius, Augustine spent his final days in prayer and repentance, requesting the penitential Psalms of David to persevere his walls so that he may browse them.

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How did St Augustine convert to Christianity?

Augustine of Hippo, additionally recognized as Saint Augustine, was once a philosopher and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. Now identified as St. Monica) he was once a Christian and raised as such.

According to biblical accounts, Augustine discovered the monastic order by reading the life of St Anthony, written by St Athanasius, which moved him to repentance. St. Augustin, in his late teenagers and 20s, struggled with sexual impurities and a variety of cutting-edge philosophies and later found God and converted to Christianity, notably with Manichaeism. The Lord spared his praying mom Monica (332—387), to see the conversion of her son to Christ—a year after his conversion in c. 386.

Augustine’s Confessions, written in Latin, was once completed in c. four hundred. It consists of the autobiography of his sin-plagued adolescence and his conversion to Christ.

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What makes St Augustine special?

Saint Augustine is undoubtedly the most influential figure in the history of Christianity, alongside Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul

Indeed, it is known that Augustine is unique because he used the analytic tools and ideological framework provided by these traditions to understand and then explain Christian theology.

This concept refers to the “fall of man” (Adam’s act of disobedience) articulated in Genesis 1, through which Adam and his seed inherited an inevitably corrupt and fallen human nature. A shadowy, little-explored version existed before his assessment.

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Primary Takeaways

  • His most well-known work, the Confessiones, is unique in the historical, literary way of life; however, it substantially influenced the present-day practice of a life of autobiography; it is an exciting piece of philosophy from a first-person perspective. Because of his significance for the philosophical lifestyle of the Middle Ages, he is frequently listed as the first medieval philosopher. 
  • From an Augustinian perspective, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with pagan thought that makes it objectionable in Christian theology; although practical, it is simply not a complete statement of truth. Original sin.
  • Also, Augustine’s writings reveal the unparalleled extent of his gifts. So as a living conscience of Orthodoxy, Augustine had to defend the excellent faith against all the heresies that were emerging in the Church of God at that time: the Manichees, the Donatists, and the Pelagians.

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Conclusion

Blessed Augustine was born on 13 November 354 in Tagaste, a small town in the African province of Numidia. His father was not a Christian and was baptized only on his deathbed, but his mother, Monica, was a fervent believer. Augustine studied first in Tagaste, then in Madaura and Carthage. Being very gifted, he opened a school of rhetoric in Carthage and then went on to Rome and Milan.

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Bible Trivia about Saint Augustine

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Bibliography

  • Augustine, S. (1876). The confessions. Clark.
  • Kenney, J. P. (2005). The mysticism of Saint Augustine: re-reading The confessions. Routledge.
  • Augustine, S. (1853). The Confessions of S. Augustine (Vol. 1). JH Parker.
  • Sheed, F. J. (1993). Augustine: Confessions. Indianapolis: Hacket.
  • Kligerman, C. (1957). A psychoanalytic study of the Confessions of St. Augustine. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association5(3), 469-484.