Since this is such a massive subject I thought it best to approach the matter in small sections, lest we suffer from overload. I will not go into a lengthy autobiographical sketch of Augustine's life since we will spend many hours on the Confessions,which are in fact an autobiographical sketch.
Suffice it at the moment to say that Aurelius Augustinus was born AD 354 and died in 430. He lived his entire life (all but five years), in Roman North Africa. For the last 34 years of his life he was the bishop of a busy sea port, Hippo, now Annaba in Algeria. Augustine was not from a rich family and his back-ground was not one of high culture. He acquired his culture through his education and writings. He is the most widely read ancient author outside of the bible in Western Civilization.
A brief summary on his influence can be seen just by listing the debates that have been a part of this man's legacy:
1. The theology and philosophy of the medieval school-man and of the creators of the medieval university system were rooted in Augustine. When Peter Lombard compiled his Sentences (1155)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lombard to provide a basic textbook of theology, a very high proportion was drawn from Augustine. So too his contemporary Gratianhttp://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037773/Gratian citied many texts from Augustine making the West's principle handbook of cannon law.
2. The aspirations of Western mystics have never escaped his influence, above all because of the centrality of the love of God in his thinking. He first saw the paradox that love, which is in quest of personal happiness, necessarily implies some self-renunciation and the pain of being made what one is not.
3. The Reformation found its mainspring in criticizing medieval Catholic piety as resting more on human effort than on divine grace. The Counter-Reformation replied that one can affirm the sovereignty of God's grace without also denying the freedom of the will and the moral value (merit) of good conduct. Both sides in the controversy appealed on a huge scale to Augustine.
4. The eighteenth century found itself passionately divided between those who asserted the perfectibility of man and those who say human nature as held down by a dead weight of personal egotism, in other words what Augustine called original sin." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
The men of the Enlightenment believed the actual perfecting of man to be hindered by belief in original sin and disliked Augustine very much. There were displeased when the philosopher Kant, who so eloquently proclaimed the Enlightenment principle that one must dare to think for oneself, decisively assented to the belief that human nature is distorted by a radical evil.
5. In reaction against the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement identified the heart of religion with "feelings" rather than an intellectual argument. Augustine was not in the least anti intellectual, but he did not think that the intellect had the last word on matters. We owe to him the idea of the "heart" makes the determination, at least to a very large extent.
6. He was the most acute of all Christian Platonist and did much to lay the foundations for the synthesis between Christianity and classical theism steaming from Aristotle and Plato. Plotinus in the third century AD deeply influenced Augustine.
7. He saw more clearly than anyone before him (and for a long time after) that issues of supreme importance are raised by the problems of the relation of words to reality. (Words can only go so far). He was pioneer in the critical study on non-verbal communication.
As we shall see later, it will be Cicero, Mani, and Plato combined who will form the mind of Augustine. Finally, Christ will be interpreted in light of the above great thinkers.