Augustine of Hippo: Faith, Time, and Evil

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) began his intellectual life far from Christian orthodoxy: after early enthusiasm for Cicero's Hortensius kindled a love of philosophy, he spent nine years among the Manichaeans, drawn to their promise of a rational explanation of good and evil through two competing cosmic principles. Disillusioned by the evasive answers of the Manichaean bishop Faustus, he drifted toward the Skepticism of the New Academy, which held that certain knowledge was unattainable. His early dialogue Against the Academics (386), written shortly after his conversion at Cassiciacum, systematically dismantles this skeptical position, arguing that even the skeptic cannot doubt the truths of mathematics or the bare fact of his own existence and thinking. Under the influence of Bishop Ambrose of Milan, whose allegorical reading of scripture dissolved the crude literalism that had repelled Augustine from the Bible, and through his encounter with 'the books of the Platonists' (Plotinus and Porphyry in Latin translations by Marius Victorinus), Augustine came to see reason and revelation as complementary rather than opposed. His mature formula, later echoed by Anselm, held that one believes in order to understand (crede ut intelligas): faith is not the abdication of reason but the starting point that orients and eventually satisfies it, an approach that shaped nearly a millennium of Christian philosophy.