Monica was honored for her forbearance in marriage to an undisciplined, often cruel pagan man. Augustine's father suffers by comparison to Augustine's mother, but rather than suggest that she should have left his father because of his mistreatment, Monica's quiet example of patient endurance is praised by her son. Augustine's turning towards his mother was seen, through hindsight, as the major development of his life, but he went through several stages of spiritual development, first paganism, and then a cultish version of Christianity called Manichaeism, which was later characterized as a heretical view of the world as evil, as opposed to the goodness of heaven. It also involved a number of highly elaborate eating practices. Augustine was particularly vehement in his later denunciations of the Manicheans and other Christian heretics when he became a bishop in North Africa, very likely because of his own past affiliation with them. Augustine was never a full initiate in the most elite circles of the Manicheans, but ironically he adopted, at least according to Brown, their hierarchical split between the laity and the priesthood and the education priests received, that would characterize formal Catholicism and the education and learning of the clergy.

Before his conversion, Augustine lived a full (he would later say sinning) life as a typical Roman man. Without telling his mother (significantly) Augustine went to Rome to teach Latin, deciding he was better suited to be a scholar than a lawyer. He kept a mistress. The Roman Empire was falling into turmoil at the time. The fourth century was not the Roman Empire of antiquity rather it "was facing the strain of perpetual warfare... Taxation had doubled, even trebled, within living memory. The poor were victimized by an insane inflation. The rich defended themselves by unparalleled accumulations of property. The Emperor himself became a remote and...

Ambrose was literate in both Greek and Latin and in all the Greek, Latin, and pagan authors of note, a man who was better-versed in both Christian and pagan antiquity, and more learned than Augustine, which humbled the scholarly Augustine and made Augustine see the arrogance of his past rejection of Christian teachings. Eventually, Augustine came to see paganism as inferior to Christianity. He returned to the simplicity of Christian teachings and to his mother's influence, and significantly his conversion narrative involves the voice of a child urging Augustine to look at a passage of the Bible. Childish simplicity and an appreciation of the text mark the moment of Augustine's full turning way from his old life.
Augustine's emphasis on the fallen nature of the human soul, and his idea that salvation came through studying the Bible as a text and God's grace alone was later to become highly influential in the renegade monk Martin Luther's version of Christianity. Augustine's influence thus spans beyond Catholicism itself, and his brand of Christianity was in some ways uniquely his own, even though he became a canonized author. Brown treats Augustine's intellectual wrangling with other canonized writers such as Jerome with equal vigor as he does Augustine's denunciation of heretics. A full portrait emerges not only of the man, but of antiquity in Africa as well as in Rome, as does the contentious nature and controversies of Early Christianity. Brown's biography is a compelling portrait of an age as well as a saint and theologian.

Works Cited

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2000.