Augustine

Aurelius Augustinus was born in AD 354 at Thagaste in North Africa, in present-day Algeria, to a pagan father and a devout Christian mother, Monica. As a young man he followed his passions, was a Manichaean for nine years and taught rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan. At thirty-two, in a garden in Milan, he heard a child's voice chanting 'Take up and read', opened the Scriptures and was converted. He returned to Africa and for more than thirty years was bishop of Hippo, where he died in 430 as the Vandals besieged the city. He is the most influential thinker of Western Christianity, and shaped medieval theology, the Reformation and the Western idea of the self.