Paulinus of Nola and Ausonius, and has also studied the reception
OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS
ON CHRISTIAN TEACHING
AUGUSTINE was born in 354, the son of a Christian mother and a pagan father who farmed a few acres at Thagaste (now Souk-Ahras in eastern Algeria). Education at the hands of poor teachers could not hinder his acute mind from acquiring a mastery of classical Latin literature, especially that of Cicero and Virgil. He became a gifted teacher of literature and public speaking successively at Carthage, Rome, and Milan. At Carthage he met a woman by whom he had a son, and with whom he lived faithfully for fifteen years until at Milan she became a fatal block in the path of his secular career. A personal crisis followed. Already in Africa his religious quest took him to Manichee theosophy, then in Italy to scepticism and thence to the Neoplatonic mysticism of Plotinus. In July 386 in a Milan garden he resolved to abandon a secular career and the respectable marriage that would make this possible. Baptized by St Ambrose (387), he buried his widowed mother at Ostia and returned to North Africa (388). Against his will he was forced into ordination in 391 and five years later became bishop at Hippo (modern Annaba) for the remaining thirty-four years of his life. His many writings include the Confessions (397)—-which gives a detailed account of his mental and spiritual development from infancy to his early thirties—and the massive City of God, undertaken after the sack of Rome in 410. On Christian Teaching was begun shortly before the Confessions, but broken off in midstream and not completed until 427, three years before his death during the Vandal siege of his city (28 August 430).
R. P. H. GREEN was educated in High Wycombe and Oxford, and taught Latin in St Andrews University for many years before becoming Professor of Humanity (Latin) in Glasgow University in 1995. He has published books on Augustine's contemporaries Paulinus of Nola and Ausonius, and has also studied the reception of the classical poets Virgil and Horace in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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SAINT AUGUSTINE
On Christian Teaching
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
R. P. H. GREEN
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS