A List of Augustine's Major Works (continued)
Chapter 1: Early Years
Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis was born on November 13, 354, in the municipium of Thagaste (present day Algeria) in Roman Africa to a middle-class family. He would become known as Augustine because the nomen Aurelius merely indicated he was a Roman citizen and was thus more of a surname than anything.
Few details are known about his parents, but his father Particius was a minor landowner of the curial class with little wealth and few social connections, although he was a member of several of his community's governance councils. While Particius was a pagan until late in life, Augustine's mother Monica was a pious Christian who invariably instilled in her son a reverence for "the name of Christ" from his early childhood.
Augustine and his mother, St. Monica
Although no reliable documents of Augustine's childhood survive, it is known he grew up between two Africas: the more Romanized coastal region, with its thriving port cities and cosmopolitan society, and the country-oriented, olive-growing interior that was less consciously dignified than proper Roman society. Born in the market town of Thagaste, nestled in a green valley surrounded by mountains and forests, the young boy apparently never saw the sea as a child, later writing how he imagined it "compared to a glass of water."
Years later, in The City of God, Augustine would write of the pagan societies he witnessed as a young boy: "When I was a young man, I used to go to their spectacles of sacrilege and their 'pagan' games, to watch the priests in their frenzies and listen to the music. I got a thrill out of the disgusting shows enacted in honor of their gods . . . looking back and forth from the virgin goddess to the crowd of whores, worshipping the one and reveling in the filthiness of the (GINS E o
Given his family background, Augustine was not among the higher classes of society, making him and his family dependent on the generosity of friends and more affluent landowners to provide financial resources, but fortunately he displayed uncommon intelligence and ambition from a very early age. As a child, it's believed that he attended primary school in his home city of Thagaste, which was part of the Roman Empire but thoroughly Catholic by the time he was born. Though the native language of Thagaste was Berber, an ancient language spoken by tribes of North Africa for centuries, he apparently never learned to speak it.
O'Donnell, James J. Augustine, a New Biography. Page 19.
Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli's portrait of Augustine at the school of Taghaste
At the age of 11, Augustine was sent to school at Madauros (near present-day Mdaourouch), a small Numidian city about 19 miles south of Thagaste, where he went through the usual secondary schooling. It was there that he became familiar with Latin literature, particularly
Virgil, learned Greek, and studied pagan beliefs and practices. He would discuss these studies in Chapter I of Confessions, as well as what he considered certain problems with the way studies were being taught, writing: "But why did I so much hate the Greek, which I studied as a boy? I do not yet fully know. For the Latin I loved; not what my first masters, but what the so-called grammarians taught me. For those first lessons, reading, writing and arithmetic, I thought as great a burden and penalty as any Greek. And yet whence was this too, but from the sin and vanity of this life, because I was flesh, and a breath that passeth away and cometh not again? For those first lessons were better certainly, because more certain; by them I obtained, and still retain, the power of reading what I find written, and myself writing what I will; whereas in the others, I was forced to learn the