03 — Bishop of Hippo
Augustine’s thirty-five years as a churchman: pressed into ordination as a priest at Hippo Regius in 391 and consecrated its bishop in 395/396, he spent the rest of his life as a working pastor — preaching, judging disputes, writing letters, governing a fractious African diocese — and as the author of the City of God, the vast apologia he began after the Gothic sack of Rome in 410, which set the earthly city against the City of God and gave the Latin West its theology of history.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)
The retired philosopher who returned to Africa in 388 became, against his own intention, one of the hardest-working bishops of the ancient Church. This section treats Augustine the churchman in two aspects: the daily pastor and preacher of Hippo — the man of the sermons, the letters, the bishop’s court, and the monastic clergy-house — and the author of his second great masterpiece, the City of God, written across more than a decade in answer to the pagan charge that Rome fell because it had abandoned its gods.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Pastor and Preacher | The forced ordination of 391 and consecration of 395/396; Hippo Regius; the monastic clergy-house; the daily life of preaching, the bishop’s tribunal (audientia episcopalis), and the immense body of sermons and letters; Augustine as a working bishop. |
| The City of God | De Civitate Dei (413–426/427), written after the 410 sack of Rome; the answer to the pagan accusation; the two cities — the City of God and the earthly city, formed by two loves; the theology of history it founded. |
See Also
- The Garden at Milan — the conversion that preceded the episcopate
- Against the Donatists — the schism that consumed his early episcopate
- The Vast Corpus — the sermons and letters of the pastoral years
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church Augustine served
References
- Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. 1887.
- Possidius. The Life of Saint Augustine. Trans. in F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954.
- Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.