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Brief Lives

Augustine (354-430)

Hilarius Bogbinder on the philosophical life of a key figure of the Catholic Church.

Augustine was a saint. Not, mind you, merely because the Catholic Church bestowed the epithet upon him (which they did), but because he was, well, a good guy mostly. Thus it is reported that the Bishop of Hippo (as he was) “used the church chest to emancipate slaves oppressed in bad households” (Augustine, Henry Chadwick, p.110, 2001). And who could not be moved by the sensitive tenderness of his almost poetic prose in his Epistolae (Letters)? Few write more compassionately about how we “move towards God not by walking but by loving.

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