Saint Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was born at Thagaste in Roman North Africa, now in Algeria, to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica. He studied and taught rhetoric in Carthage, Rome and Milan, spent nine years as a Manichaean and lived with a concubine who bore him a son, before his conversion to Christianity in 386 under the influence of Ambrose of Milan. Ordained in 391, he was bishop of Hippo for thirty-five years. His Confessions, City of God and On the Trinity shaped Western Christian thought on grace, sin, time and the self more than any writer after Paul. He died while the Vandals besieged his city.