Life and Legacy
St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was born to a pagan father and a Christian mother. After a rather wild adolescence, he began to work out his own intellectual and religious beliefs by means of trying on a number of ideas: to name a few, he was highly influenced by various strands of Platonism; he wrestled with Manichaeism and skepticism; and, finally, he embraced Christianity. As Augustine noted in his Confessions – the first western religious autobiography – his heart was restless until it found rest in God. St. Ambrose baptized Augustine in the year 387, and Augustine later organized a monastery that eventually became established in Hippo, where he was made bishop in 396.
While he impacted the Western Church much more than the Eastern Church, Augustine, for better or for worse, is undisputedly one of the most influential theologians of all time. With regard to the history of doctrine, he is perhaps most well known for his ideas about original sin and just war theory,...
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Carlin, N. (2020). Augustine. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_56
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