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In 1962, Pope John XXIII asked for religious orders in the United States to send 10% of their members to evangelize Latin America. He later specifically invited the Augustinians of the Midwest Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel, headquartered near Chicago, to care for missionary territory in Northern Peru. The Augustinians accepted the invitation and began their missionary service in 1964. Their primary assignment was to the newly created Prelature of Chulucanas, which was later erected to become the Diocese of Chulucanas. The Augustinians also began new service in the nation’s capital of Lima. As of May 2016, the Midwest Province of Augustinians had 76 Augustinians.The value set upon learning and science by the Augustinian friars is demonstrated by the care given to their missionary work, their libraries, and by the historic establishment of their own printing-press in their convent at Nuremberg (1479), as well as by the numerous learned individuals produced by the order.

The history of education makes frequent mention of Augustinians who distinguished themselves particularly as professors of philosophy and theology at the great universities of Salamanca, Coimbra, Alcalá, Padua, Pisa, Naples, Oxford, Paris, Vienna, Prague, Würzburg, Erfurt, Heidelberg, and Wittenberg, amongst others. Others taught successfully in the schools of the order, which controlled a number of secondary schools, colleges, and other educational institutions. In 1685 the Bishop of Würzburg, Johann Gottfried II, confided to the care of the Augustinians the parish and the gymnasium of Munnerstadt in Lower Franconia (Bavaria), a charge that they still retain; connected with the monastery of St. Michael in that place is a monastic school, while the seminary directed by the Augustinians forms another convent, that of St. Joseph. The order possesses altogether fifteen colleges, academies and seminaries in Italy, Spain and America. The chief institutions of this kind in Spain are that at Valladolid and that in the Escorial.

Martin de Hereda penetrated into the interior of China in 1577, to study Chinese literature with the intention of bringing it into Europe. Portuguese Augustinians served in the colonial port of Macau from 1586 until 1712.

A significant Augustinian missionary college was established at the former Spanish capital of Valladolid in 1759—and this house was exempted from the suppression of monastic houses in Spain c.1835, later becoming the centre of restoration for the order in Spain. In 1885 Filipino Augustinians took charge of the famous Escorial, and friars continue to administer it today. The modern Augustinian province of Spain was refounded in 1926—largely through Spanish and Filipino friars from the Philippines. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) ninety eight Augustinians were murdered—sixty five friars from the Escorial alone were executed. As of 2006 there were 177 Spanish Augustinian friars, with 23 in simple profession.The Augustinians were re-established in England in the 1860s with the creation of the priory, school and Church of St Monica in Hoxton Square, London, N1 (architect: E. W. Pugin) built 1864–66.Clare Priory – one of the houses dissolved by King Henry VIII – was re-acquired by the order in 1953, with help from the family who then owned it.

The chief house of the order remains the International College of St. Monica at Rome, Via S. Uffizio No. 1. It is also the residence of the general of the order (prior generalis) and of the curia generalis.

Towards the close of the sixteenth century, Aleixo de Menezes, Count of Cantanheda (d. 1617), a member of the order, appointed Archbishop of Goa in 1595, and of Braga in 1612, Primate of the East Indies, and several times Viceroy of India, sent several Augustinians as missionaries to Iran (Persia) while he himself laboured for the reunion of the Thomas Christians, especially at the Synod of Diamper, in 1599, and for the conversion of the Muslims and the non-Christians of Malabar.However, the Augustinians were re-established by Andrés G. Niño, Spanish Augustinian, named coordinator of the project by the General Chapter of the Order in 1971 …. (cf., Estudio Agustiniano, 45 (2010) 279-303) ……. and the Indian Augustinians took on further responsibilities in Kerala in 2005. The Indian delegation currently has 16 ordained friars and 8 in simple vows. The order is growing numerically in India.

Augustine of Hippo, first with some friends and afterward as bishop with his clergy, led a monastic community life. Regarding the use of property or possessions, Augustine did not make a virtue of poverty, but of sharing. Their manner of life led others to imitate them. Instructions for their guidance were found in several writings of Augustine, especially in De opere monachorum, mentioned in ancient codices of the eighth or ninth century as the “Rule of St. Augustine”. Between 430 and 570 this life-style was carried to Europe by monks and clergy fleeing the persecution of the Vandals.

In 1838, James Alipius Goold became the first Augustinian to arrive in the Australian colonies. Goold began his missionary work in Sydney under Archbishop John Bede Polding, becoming parish priest at Campbelltown. He went on in 1848 to become the founding bishop and first Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Melbourne. The first Australian priory was founded by Irish Augustinian friars at Echuca, Victoria, in 1886. Priories were established at Rochester in 1889 and Kyabram in 1903. Matthew Downing tried to calm the miners who were part of the Eureka Stockade in 1854.In 1905 James Edward Quigley, Archbishop of Chicago invited the Order to Chicago to start its first foundation west of the Appalachian Mountains. St. Rita of Cascia High School in Chicago was founded in 1909. Other parished were then established, as well as Cascia Hall Preparatory School in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1926 and Providence Catholic High Schoolin New Lenox, Illinois in 1962. In 1941, The Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel was split off to cover the central Us, leaving the east coast to the Villanova Province.

The delegates met in Rome on 1 March 1256, which resulted in a union. Lanfranc Septala of Milan, Prior of the Bonites, was appointed the first prior general of the newly constituted Order.

The Augustinian Delegation of Papua has operated since 1953. It presently contains five Dutch-born Augustinians and thirty-three Indonesian-born Augustinians. The order of friars and affiliated orders are growing in the Indonesian territories. However, American Augustinian friars returned to Japan in 1954, establishing their first priory in 1959 at Nagasaki. They then established priories in Fukuoka (1959), Nagoya (1964), and Tokyo (1968). As of 2006, there are seven American Augustinian friars and five Japanese Augustinian friars in Japan. In 1620 the Irish Province of the Augustinians was given pastoral charge of both England (where all houses had been forcibly closed) and Ireland. Around 1641, the order received permission to occupy monasteries of the Canons Regular, who were no longer in Ireland. Irish Augustinian students were sent to the Continent to study, and the Irish Augustinians continued their work in Ireland under the Penal laws. A number were executed—including William Tirry. In 1656, in response to the persecution at home, Pope Alexander VII established the Irish Augustinians in Rome in the church and priory of San Matteo in Merulana. Many Augustinians though remained in Ireland. Others left to work in America and after the 1830s to Australia. After the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the order began to re-organise more openly in Ireland. The Irish friars took the order back to England, establishing a priory at Hoxton, London in 1864. They further turned their attention to Nigeria, Australia, America and missionary work. The contemporary Irish order conducts parishes, a school in Dungarvan (founded 1874), a school in New Ross and special ministries in Ireland.The Order of St Augustine, which follows the Rule of St. Augustine, is also governed by its Constitutions, first drawn up by prior general Augustinus Novellus in 1298. The Constitutions have been periodically updated and revised. By 1947 the Augustinian mission counted 24,332 baptised Catholics as well as 3,250 preparing for baptism. They had established 20 major churches and 90 satellite churches. All foreign missionaries were expelled or imprisoned from 1953 by the Communist government. Chinese-born Augustinians were dispersed by government order and directed not to live the monastic life. Church officials were arrested, schools and other church institutions closed or confiscated by the State. Many priests, religious brothers and sisters, as well as leaders among the Christian laity were sent to labour camps. One of the last of the pre-Revolution Chinese Augustinians was the Dai. He died in 2003. The Augustinian friars were the first Christian missionaries to settle in the Philippines. They were led by navigator and Augustine friar Andrés de Urdaneta who, with four other friars, arrived at Cebu in 1565. San Agustín Church and Monastery in Manila was established in 1571 and became the centre of Augustinian efforts to evangelize the Philippines. The Augustinian Province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus of the Philippines was officially formed on December 31, 1575.The English Province of the friars founded their first house in Dublin some time around 1280. Dungarvan followed in 1290. For a considerable time the Augustinians of Ireland were all English, effectively serving the English settlers in Ireland. The Irish branch was relatively poor, but the fortunes of the Irish order changed in 1361 when Lionel, became viceroy of Ireland. He favoured the order, and soon established an Augustinian professor of theology based at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and the Irish order then grew significantly until the time of the English Reformation. The most important of these congregations of the “Regular Observance” were those of Lecceto, near Siena, established in 1385 and initially had 12 houses. The Lombardy Congregation (1430) had 56. The reform of Monte Ortono near Padua (1436) had 5 convents, the Regular Observants of the Blessed Virgin at Genoa (also called Our Lady of Consolation (c. 1470) had 25. The Congregation of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome was affiliated with Augstuinians in Ireland. The Augustinians followed the Portuguese flag in Africa and the Gulf behind the explorer and seafarer Vasco da Gama. Nikolaus Teschel (d. 1371), auxiliary Bishop of Ratisbon, where he died, with some brethren preached the Gospel in Africa. He had sailed from Lisbon in 1497, and arrived at Mozambique in March 1498. Portuguese Augustinians also arrived in Gold coast (now Ghana) in 1572 and started their missionary work, and also worked on the island of Sao Tome, in Warri (Nigeria), and in what is now known as Angola, in the Congo, in Equatorial Guinea, and in Gabon up until 1738. The Portuguese also took control of the port of Goa in India—giving the Augustinians a foothold there also. Besides the early Portuguese Augustinians, other Augustinian missionaries have since followed to Africa from America, Ireland, Belgium and Australia.They are also commonly known as the Augustinians or Austin friars, and were also historically known as the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine (Latin: Ordo eremitarum sancti Augustini; abbreviated OESA).

The presence of the province in the country was reduced to a Vicariate in 1926, the Augustinian Vicariate of the Philippines, and the provincial seat moved to Madrid. The province of the United States sent about sixty members to supply the vacancies in the Philippines. As the number of Filipino Augustinians increased, they requested the creation of a new Province. The Augustinian Province of Santo Niño de Cebu was canonically established on December 25, 1983. The Order in the 21st century still has responsibility for one of the oldest churches in the Philippines, the Basilica del Santo Niño de Cebu in Cebu. The Augustinian Recollects are also present in the Philippines.

While in early Medieval times the rule was overshadowed by other Rules, particularly that of St. Benedict, this system of life for cathedral clergy continued in various locations throughout Europe for centuries, and they became known as Canons regular (i.e. cathedral clergy living in community according to a rule). Augustine’s Rule appears again in practice in the eleventh century as a basis for the reform of monasteries and cathedral chapters.

In 1248 Richard de Clare, 6th Earl of Gloucester invited the Augustinians in Normandy to open their first English friary at Clare in Suffolk. In England and Ireland of the 14th century the Augustinian order had had over 800 friars, but these priories had declined to around 300 friars before the anti-clerical laws of the Reformation Parliament and the Act of Supremacy. The friaries were dispersed from 1538 in the dissolution of monasteries during the English Reformation. A partial List of monasteries dissolved by Henry VIII of England includes a number of Augustinian houses, including friaries at Leicester and Ludlow, in the Welsh Marches.Johannes Zachariae, an Augustinian monk of Eschwege, Provincial of the Order from 1419 to 1427 and professor of theology at the University of Erfurt, began a reform in 1492. The German, or Saxon, Reformed Congregation, recognized in 1493, comprised nearly all the important convents of the Augustinian Hermits in Germany. After the Reformation, German houses that remained in communion with Rome united with the Lombardic Congregation. There are no longer any officially designated observant houses or congregations in the Order of Saint Augustine in an official sense. At the head is the prior general. Currently, the prior general is Alejandro Moral, who was elected in September 2013 and re-elected in 2019. The prior general is elected every six years by the general chapter. The prior general is aided by six assistants and a secretary, also elected by the general chapter. These form the Curia Generalitia. Each province is governed by a provincial, each commissariate by a commissary general, each of the two congregations by a vicar-general, and every monastery by a prior (only the Czech monastery of Alt-Brunn, in Moravia, is under an abbot) and every college by a rector. The members of the order are divided into priests and brothers. The Augustinians, like most religious orders, have a cardinal protector. At the time of the Grand Union of 1256, some of the constituent congregations already had houses established north of the Alps. The Williamites had already expanded into Hungary. The Hermits of St. Augustine spread rapidly, partly because they did not radiate from a single parent monastery, and partly because, after conflicts in the previously existing congregations, the active life was finally adopted by the greater number of communities, following the example of the Friars Minor and the Dominicans. A few years after the reorganization of the Augustinian Order, Hermit monasteries sprang up in Germany, and Spain. Foundations were made in Mainz (1260), Zurich (1270), and Munich (1294). The first Augustinian houses in France were in the area of Provence. In 1274 the Fratres Saccati were dissolved and the Augustinians were given a number of their houses. By 1275 there were about a half dozen friaries stretching in a line along the southern coast. Eventually, France had four Augustinian provinces. The presence of the Augustinian Order can be dated securely in Venetian Candia to the early fourteenth century when they rebuilt the convent of San Salvatore in Heraklion. At the period of its greatest prosperity the order comprised 42 ecclesiastical provinces and 2 vicariates numbering 2000 monasteries and about 30,000 members.The choir and outdoor dress of the monks is of black woollen material, with long, wide sleeves, a black leather cincture and a long pointed capuche reaching to the cincture. The indoor dress consists of a black habit with capuche and cincture. In many Augustinian houses white is used in summer and also worn in public, usually in places where there were no Dominicans. Shoes and out of doors (prior to Vatican II) a black hat or biretta completed the habit.

The province increased in the end of the 19th century as the Augustinians were driven out of many European countries, and in 1848 sought refuge in the USA. The Province of St. Thomas of Villanova was established in 1874. The Novitiate of Our Mother of Good Counsel Priory in New Hamburg, New York was canonically established on July 23, 1925 on the 200 acre estate of Isaac Untermyer. The location on the Hudson River was considered ideal for prayer, inner reflection, and vocational discernment. It remained in use for more than 50 years. But, as the number of men considering the religious declined, the Novitiate moved to New York, New York, then to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Racine, Wisconsin, and to its current location at the intersection of Upper Gulph Road and County Line Road in Wayne, Pennsylvania in the former home of the Colleran Family.As of 2006 there were 148 active Augustinian priories in Europe, including Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Ireland, England, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Spanish houses in the Philippines. This includes 1,031 friars in solemn vows, and 76 in simple vows. As of 2021, the German Province had eleven priories, and about 110 members. Worldwide there are nearly 2,800 Augustinian friars working in:

Despite a vigorous early Christian foundation in Nagasaki by Jesuits, Franciscans and Filipino Augustinians and the many 17th century Japanese Augustinian martyrs, the earlier Augustinian mission attempts eventually failed after the repression of Tokugawa Hidetada (ruled 1605–1623; second Tokugawa shogun of Japan) and the expulsion of Christians under Tokugawa Iemitsu (ruled 1623 to 1651; third Tokugawa shogun of Japan). The order has, in particular, spread internationally the veneration of the Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Good Counsel (Mater boni consilii). The Order of Saint Augustine holds the status of an NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) with the United Nations. The Holy See Observer requested that the representatives of the aid the work of the Holy See in studying the drafts of documents that the United Nations publishes on the occasion of major World Summits.In 1922, Bishop John Joseph Cantwell of the Diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego, asked the Order of Saint Augustine to establish a school for boys in the diocese. St. Augustine High School in San Diego, California (1922); followed by Villanova Preparatory School in Ojai, California (1925); and Cascia Hall Preparatory School in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1926). Members serve at three parishes, for schools and the Casa Hogar La Gloria Orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico.

The Order of Saint Augustine, (Latin: Ordo Fratrum Sancti Augustini) abbreviated OSA, is a religious mendicant order of the Catholic Church. It was founded in 1244 by bringing together several eremitical groups in the Tuscany region who were following the Rule of Saint Augustine, written by Saint Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century.The work of the Augustinians includes teaching, scientific study, parish and pastoral work and missions. Agostino Ciasca (d. 1902), titular Archbishop of Larissa and cardinal, established a special faculty for Oriental languages at the Roman Seminary, published an Arabic translation of Tatian’s “Diatessaron” and wrote “Bibliorum Fragmenta Copto-Sahidica”. The missionaries of the order have also given us valuable descriptive works on foreign countries and peoples.

The Augustinian have recently re-established friendly relations with Chinese educational organisations through school-placement programmes as well as through the University of the Incarnate Word Chinese campus founded by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. While there are Chinese Augustinian friars, there is not yet a priory in mainland China re-established.In 1331 Pope John XXII appointed the Augustinian Hermits guardians of the tomb of St. Augustine in the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro at Pavia. They were driven from there in 1700, and evacuated to Milan. Their priory was destroyed in 1799, the church desecrated, and the remains of St. Augustine were taken back to Pavia and placed in its cathedral. The church of S. Pietro was restored, and on 7 October 1900, the body of the saint and Doctor of the church was removed from the cathedral and replaced in San Pietro. The Augustinians were subsequently restored their old church of S. Pietro. In 1879 Spanish Augustinians from Manila (Elias Suarez and Agostino Villanueva) entered China to re-establish an Augustinian mission. In 1900 the order possessed the mission of Northern Hu-nan, China. The mission comprised about 3000 baptized Christians and 3500 catechumens in a population of 11 million. The order established the first of their Canadian houses at Tracadie, Nova Scotia, in Canada in 1938. It was founded by German Augustinians who had previously emigrated to the US. Among other Canadian foundations, the order also established Marylake Shrine of Our Lady of Grace and St. Thomas of Villanova College in King City, Ontario, near Toronto. The college was founded in 1999 in cooperation with the Order of Saint Augustine’s friars of Toronto and Marylake Augustinian Monastery. Augustinians continue to serve at Sacred Heart Parish, Delta, British Columbia.The Augustinian Friars were brought to Ciechanów (Poland) in 1358 by Duke Siemowit III. They experienced the most turbulent times during the Reformation. From the 17th century, the Augustinians’ pastoral presence was growing in the towns. The monastery – characterised by mild observance – was usually inhabited by 4 to 7 monks. It ceased to exist in 1864 when monasteries were dissolved.The rise of Filipino nationalism stoked antipathy toward the Spanish clergy. During the Philippine Revolution of 1896, six Augustinian priests were killed and about 200 imprisoned. By the beginning of 1900, 46 Calced and 120 Discalced Augustinians had been imprisoned. Many Spanish Augustinians were forced to leave the country for Spain or Latin America, repopulating the Augustinian houses in Spain and reinforcing Augustinian missionary work in South America.The order (from Mexico) arrived in Cuba in 1608. It was suppressed by force in 1842. From 1892 the province of the United States had care of St. Augustine’s College at Havana, Cuba, where there were 5 priests and 3 lay brothers in 1900 before they were expelled in 1961 by the government of Fidel Castro.

After an extensive period of expansion in India from the 15th century the Portuguese Augustinians had not only established the order but also provided sixteen Indian bishops between 1579 and 1840. The order subsequently disappeared in India, cut off from its usual governance after the suppression of Portuguese monasteries in 1838, and the friars were forced to become secular priests. The order had failed successfully to establish an autonomous indigenous Indian foundation.As of 2006, there were more than 30 other Augustinian priories in Nigeria, Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Algeria, with over 85 friars. There are also Augustinians working in the Republic of Benin, Togo, Madagascar, Guinea and Burkina Faso.

In the fourteenth century, owing to various causes such as the mitigation of the rule—either by permission of the pope, or through a lessening of fervour, but chiefly because of the Plague and the Great Western Schism—discipline became relaxed in the Augustinian monasteries; and so reformers emerged who were anxious to restore it. These reformers were themselves Augustinians and instituted several reformed groups. The new governmental groupings were called “congregations” to distinguish them from the already-established geographical provinces. Each had its own vicar-general (vicarius-generalis), but he was under the control of the general of the order. In one country there could be two types of Augustinian houses, the conventual and the observants.

Since the re-unification of the former colonies of Macau and Hong-Kong with the central Chinese government and further developments in government religious policy, Catholicism in China—including clergy, Catholic bishops, and a Cardinal—once again exists openly alongside the members of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and their co-religionists in the continuing underground Church.Alexander IV freed the order from the jurisdiction of the bishops; Pope Pius V placed the Augustinians among the mendicant orders and ranked them fourth after the Carmelites. Since the end of the 13th century the sacristan of the Papal Palace was always to be an Augustinian friar. This privilege was ratified by Pope Alexander VI and granted to the Order forever by a bull issued in 1497. The holder of the office was Rector of the Vatican parish (of which the chapel of St. Paul is the parish church). To his office also belonged the duty of preserving in his oratory a consecrated Host, which had to be renewed weekly and kept in readiness in case of the pope’s illness, when it was the privilege of the papal sacristan to administer the last sacraments to the pope. The sacristan had always to accompany the pope when he traveled, and during a conclave it was he who celebrated Mass and administered the sacraments. As of 2009, Augustinian friars, still perform the duties of papal sacristans, but the appointment of an Augustinian as bishop-sacristan lapsed under Pope John Paul II with the retirement of Petrus Canisius Van Lierde in 1991. In papal Rome the Augustinian friars always filled one of the Chairs of the Sapienza University, and one of the consultorships in the Congregation of Rites.

On 15 July 1255, Pope Alexander IV issued the bull Cum quaedam salubria to command a number of religious groupings to gather for the purpose of being amalgamated into a new Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine. Those summoned included the Williamites; several unspecified houses of the Order of St. Augustine, established chiefly in Italy, including those in Tuscany, with Cardinal Annibaldi as protector; the Bonites, so called from their founder, Blessed John Buoni, a member of the Buonuomini family, and named after bishop John the Good; and the Brittinians (Brictinians), so called from their oldest foundation near Fano, in the Marche district of Ancona.

In the year 2000 in Central and South America, the Augustinians remain established in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela as well three Peruvian Vicariates of Iquitos, Apurímac and Chulucanas, and the Province of Peru. There are currently 814 friars in Latin America.

After the Reformation Parliament that began in 1529, the Augustinian houses in Leinster, Munster, Dublin, Dungarvan and Drogheda were soon suppressed. The houses in Ardnaree, Ballinrobe, Ballyhaunis, Banada and Murrisk managed to remain functioning until 1610. By decree in 1542 the English parliament had allowed the Augustinian community at Dunmore in County Galway, Ireland to continue. After 1610 the Dunmore community was the only surviving foundation, probably because Lord Bermingham’s ancestors had founded the House.Spanish Augustinians first went to Peru in 1551. From there they went to Ecuador in 1573, and from Ecuador in 1575 to Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Panama and Venezuela. The order founded the Ecuadorean University of Quito in 1586. Augustinians also entered Argentina via Chile between 1617 and 1626. Political events in these countries prevented the order from prospering and hindered the success of its undertakings. The order had considerable property confiscated by the Argentinian government under the secularisation laws in the 19th century, and were entirely suppressed for 24 years until 1901 when they returned. In the Prefecture Apostolic of San León de Amazonas, in June, 1904, Bernardo Calle, the lay brother Miguel Vilajoli, and more than 70 Christians were murdered at a then recently erected mission station, Huabico, in Upper Maranon and the station itself was destroyed. The Augustinian Province of the Netherlands later also founded houses in Bolivia from 1930.

The first Augustinian friars came to Poland in 1342, and settled at Kraków in southern Poland. They had been invited there from Bohemia by a Polish king, Kazimierz the Great. The Augustinian Friars were brought to Ciechanów in 1358 by Duke Siemowit III. Isaiah Boner was a delegate of the Polish community during some Provincial Chapters of the Province of Bavaria. In 1438, he was elected a province inspector and in 1452 as vicar general assisted the prior general during the Provincial Chapter that was held in Ratisbon, Germany. One of the key moments for the Polish Augustinians in the sixteenth century happened on 31 December 1547. At that time the prior general, Jerome Seripando O.S.A., separated the Polish Augustinians from the Province of Bavaria, which had suffered ill effects of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The Polish Province was placed under the invocation of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary.Villanova University in Pennsylvania was founded in 1843; Merrimack College in Massachusetts in 1947. The following high schools were also established: Malvern Preparatory School in Pennsylvania (1842); Augustinian Academy, Staten Island, NY (1899 – closed in 1969). Monsignor Bonner High School in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania (1953); Archbishop John Carroll High School (1958), Washington, DC; St. Augustine College Preparatory School in Richland, New Jersey (1959); Austin Preparatory School in Reading, Massachusetts (1961). When four Sisters of St Rita, a community aggregated to the Augustines, completed their missionary assignment in Bolivia, they found they could not return to Germany due to the impending outbreak of World War II. Instead, they went to the novitiate to work for the priests and seminarians. They later continued this ministry in Racine. The order presently serves in parishes, at St Augustine’s College (New South Wales) and Villanova College, Brisbane. They have a special ministry to the Aboriginal community, and work with migrants and refugees in Thailand. They are also training a few Vietnamese Augustinians to serve in their own country. They also sponsor Augustine Volunteers Australia (AVA). As of 2021 there were 7 Augustinian priories in Australia.

In 1904 members of the order belonging to the Philippine province established the University of San Agustin in Iloilo City, Philippines. In 1968 friars of the Philippine province re-established the Augustinian presence on the Indian subcontinent.

The Augustinian friars came into being as part of the mendicant movement of the 13th century, a new form of religious life which sought to bring the religious ideals of the monastic life into an urban setting which allowed the religious to serve the needs of the people in an apostolic capacity. In 1243 the Tuscan hermits petitioned Pope Innocent IV to unite them all as one group. Innocent IV issued the bull Incumbit Nobis on 16 December 1243, an essentially pastoral letter which exhorted these hermits to adopt “the Rule and way of life of the Blessed Augustine,” and to elect a prior general. The bull also appointed Cardinal Riccardo Annibaldi as their supervisor and legal guide.

Through these years, Augustine had carefully built for himself a reputation as a writer throughout Africa and beyond. His careful cultivation of selected correspondents had made his name known in Gaul, Spain, Italy, and the Middle East, and his books were widely circulated throughout the Mediterranean world. In his last years he compiled a careful catalog of his books, annotating them with bristling defensiveness to deter charges of inconsistency. He had opponents, many of them heated in their attacks on him, but he usually retained their respect by the power and effectiveness of his writing.St. Augustine was the bishop of Hippo (now Annaba, Algeria) from 396 to 430. A renowned theologian and prolific writer, he was also a skilled preacher and rhetorician. He is one of the Latin Fathers of the Church and, in Roman Catholicism, is formally recognized as a doctor of the church.Augustine is remarkable for what he did and extraordinary for what he wrote. If none of his written works had survived, he would still have been a figure to be reckoned with, but his stature would have been more nearly that of some of his contemporaries. However, more than five million words of his writings survive, virtually all displaying the strength and sharpness of his mind (and some limitations of range and learning) and some possessing the rare power to attract and hold the attention of readers in both his day and ours. His distinctive theological style shaped Latin Christianity in a way surpassed only by Scripture itself. His work continues to hold contemporary relevance, in part because of his membership in a religious group that was dominant in the West in his time and remains so today.St. Augustine is perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. He adapted Classical thought to Christian teaching and created a powerful theological system of lasting influence. He also shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much of medieval and modern Christian thought.

His fame notwithstanding, Augustine died with his local legacy dimmed by foreign conquest. When he was a young man, it was inconceivable that the Pax Romana could fall, but in his last year he found himself and his fellow citizens of Hippo prisoners to a siege laid by a motley army of invaders who had swept into Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. Called the Vandals by contemporaries, the attacking forces comprised a mixed group of “barbarians” and adventurers searching for a home. Hippo fell shortly after Augustine’s death and Carthage not long after. The Vandals, holders to a more fiercely particularist version of the Christian creed than any of those Augustine had lived with in Africa, would rule in Africa for a century, until Roman forces sent from Constantinople invaded again and overthrew their regime. But Augustine’s legacy in his homeland was effectively terminated with his lifetime. A revival of orthodox Christianity in the 6th century under the patronage of Constantinople was brought to an end in the 7th century with the Islamic invasions that permanently removed North Africa from the sphere of Christian influence until the thin Christianization of French colonialism in the 19th century.

More than five million words of St. Augustine’s writings survive, ranging from sermons to theological treatises. Of these, two have had particularly lasting influence: The City of God and Confessions. The former is a philosophical defense of Christianity that outlines a new way to understand human society, and the latter is largely a spiritual self-examination.

Even then, approaching his 60th year, Augustine found a last great challenge for himself. Taking offense at the implications of the teachings of a traveling society preacher named Pelagius, Augustine gradually worked himself up to a polemical fever over ideas that Pelagius may or may not have espoused. Other churchmen of the time were perplexed and reacted with some caution to Augustine, but he persisted, even reviving the battle against austere monks and dignified bishops through the 420s. Pelagius and his disciple Celestius were finally excommunicated in 418, having been condemned by two councils of African bishops in 416 and again at Carthage in 418. At the time of his death, Augustine was engaged in a literary polemic with the last and most urbane of his opponents, the Italian bishop Julian of Eclanum, who continued to assert the Pelagian view.Made a “presbyter” (roughly, a priest, but with less authority than modern clergy of that title) at Hippo in 391, Augustine became bishop there in 395 or 396 and spent the rest of his life in that office. Hippo was a trading city, without the wealth and culture of Carthage or Rome, and Augustine was never entirely at home there. He would travel to Carthage for several months of the year to pursue ecclesiastical business in an environment more welcoming to his talents than that of his adopted home city. For the next 20 years, from the 390s to the 410s, he was preoccupied with the struggle to make his own brand of Christianity prevail over all others in Africa. The native African Christian tradition had fallen afoul of the Christian emperors who succeeded Constantine (reigned 305–337) and was reviled as schismatic; it was branded with the name of Donatism after Donatus, one of its early leaders. Augustine and his chief colleague in the official church, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage, fought a canny and relentless campaign against it with their books, with their recruitment of support among church leaders, and with careful appeal to Roman officialdom. In 411 the reigning emperor sent an official representative to Carthage to settle the quarrel. A public debate held in three sessions during June 1–8 and attended by hundreds of bishops on each side ended with a ruling in favour of the official church. The ensuing legal restrictions on Donatism decided the struggle in favour of Augustine’s party. Augustine survived in his books. His habit of cataloging them served his surviving collaborators well. Somehow, essentially the whole of Augustine’s literary oeuvre survived and escaped Africa intact. The story was told that his mortal remains went to Sardinia and thence to Pavia (Italy), where a shrine concentrates reverence on what is said to be those remains. Whatever the truth of the story, some organized withdrawal to Sardinia on the part of Augustine’s followers, bearing his body and his books, is not impossible and remains the best surmise.

Augustine’s career, however, ran aground in Milan. After only two years there, he resigned his teaching post and, after some soul-searching and apparent idleness, made his way back to his native town of Tagaste. There he passed the time as a cultured squire, looking after his family property, raising the son, Adeodatus, left him by his long-term lover (her name is unknown) taken from the lower classes, and continuing his literary pastimes. The death of that son while still an adolescent left Augustine with no obligation to hand on the family property, and so he disposed of it and found himself, at age 36, literally pressed into service against his will as a junior clergyman in the coastal city of Hippo, north of Tagaste.Augustine was born in Tagaste, a modest Roman community in a river valley 40 miles (64 km) from the Mediterranean coast in Africa, near the point where the veneer of Roman civilization thinned out in the highlands of Numidia. Augustine’s parents were of the respectable class of Roman society, free to live on the work of others, but their means were sometimes straitened. They managed, sometimes on borrowed money, to acquire a first-class education for Augustine, and, although he had at least one brother and one sister, he seems to have been the only child sent off to be educated. He studied first in Tagaste, then in the nearby university town of Madauros, and finally at Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa. After a brief stint teaching in Tagaste, he returned to Carthage to teach rhetoric, the premier science for the Roman gentleman, and he was evidently very good at it.

Augustine’s educational background and cultural milieu trained him for the art of rhetoric: declaring the power of the self through speech that differentiated the speaker from his fellows and swayed the crowd to follow his views. That Augustine’s training and natural talent coincided is best seen in an episode when he was in his early 60s and found himself quelling by force of personality and words an incipient riot while visiting the town of Caesarea Mauretanensis. The style of the rhetorician carried over in his ecclesiastical persona throughout his career. He was never without controversies to fight, usually with others of his own religion. In his years of rustication and early in his time at Hippo, he wrote book after book attacking Manichaeism, a Christian sect he had joined in his late teens and left 10 years later when it became impolitic to remain with them.

While still at Carthage, he wrote a short philosophical book aimed at displaying his own merits and advancing his career; unfortunately, it is lost. At the age of 28, restless and ambitious, Augustine left Africa in 383 to make his career in Rome. He taught there briefly before landing a plum appointment as imperial professor of rhetoric at Milan. The customary residence of the emperor at the time, Milan was the de facto capital of the Western Roman Empire and the place where careers were best made. Augustine tells us that he, and the many family members with him, expected no less than a provincial governorship as the eventual—and lucrative—reward for his merits.His teaching on coercion has “embarrassed his modern defenders and vexed his modern detractors,” because it is seen as making him appear “to generations of religious liberals as le prince et patriarche de persecuteurs.” Yet Brown asserts that, at the same time, Augustine becomes “an eloquent advocate of the ideal of corrective punishment” and reformation of the wrongdoer. Russell says Augustine’s theory of coercion “was not crafted from dogma, but in response to a unique historical situation” and is, therefore, context-dependent, while others see it as inconsistent with his other teachings.During the Reformation, theologians such as John Calvin accepted amillennialism. Augustine taught that the eternal fate of the soul is determined at death, and that purgatorial fires of the intermediate state purify only those who died in communion with the Church. His teaching provided fuel for later theology.Although Augustine’s anti-Pelagian defense of original sin was confirmed at numerous councils, i.e. Carthage (418), Ephesus (431), Orange (529), Trent (1546) and by popes, i.e. Pope Innocent I (401–417) and Pope Zosimus (417–418), his inherited guilt eternally damning infants was omitted by these councils and popes. Anselm of Canterbury established in his Cur Deus Homo the definition that was followed by the great 13th-century Schoolmen, namely that Original Sin is the “privation of the righteousness which every man ought to possess,” thus separating it from concupiscence, with which some of Augustine’s disciples had identified it, as later did Luther and Calvin. In 1567, Pope Pius V condemned the identification of Original Sin with concupiscence.

Augustine has influenced many modern-day theologians and authors such as John Piper. Hannah Arendt, an influential 20th-century political theorist, wrote her doctoral dissertation in philosophy on Augustine, and continued to rely on his thought throughout her career. Ludwig Wittgenstein extensively quotes Augustine in Philosophical Investigations for his approach to language, both admiringly, and as a sparring partner to develop his own ideas, including an extensive opening passage from the Confessions. Contemporary linguists have argued that Augustine has significantly influenced the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, who did not ‘invent’ the modern discipline of semiotics, but rather built upon Aristotelian and Neoplatonic knowledge from the Middle Ages, via an Augustinian connection: “as for the constitution of Saussurian semiotic theory, the importance of the Augustinian thought contribution (correlated to the Stoic one) has also been recognized. Saussure did not do anything but reform an ancient theory in Europe, according to the modern conceptual exigencies.”English pop/rock musician, singer and songwriter Sting wrote a song related to Saint Augustine entitled “Saint Augustine in Hell” which was part of his fourth solo studio album Ten Summoner’s Tales released in March 1993. Much of Augustine’s later life was recorded by his friend Possidius, bishop of Calama (present-day Guelma, Algeria), in his Sancti Augustini Vita. During this latter part of Augustine’s life, he helped lead a large community of Christians against different political and religious factors which had major influence on his writings. Possidius admired Augustine as a man of powerful intellect and a stirring orator who took every opportunity to defend Christianity against its detractors. Possidius also described Augustine’s personal traits in detail, drawing a portrait of a man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence in the financial stewardship of his see. At the age of 17, through the generosity of his fellow citizen Romanianus, Augustine went to Carthage to continue his education in rhetoric, though it was above the financial means of his family. In spite of the good warnings of his mother, as a youth Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a time, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits. The need to gain their acceptance encouraged inexperienced boys like Augustine to seek or make up stories about sexual experiences. Despite multiple claims to the contrary, it has been suggested that Augustine’s actual sexual experiences were likely with members of the opposite sex only.At about the age of 17, Augustine began a relationship with a young woman in Carthage. Though his mother wanted him to marry a person of his class, the woman remained his lover. He was warned by his mother to avoid fornication (sex outside marriage), but Augustine persisted in the relationship for over fifteen years, and the woman gave birth to his son Adeodatus (372–388), which means “Gift from God”, who was viewed as extremely intelligent by his contemporaries. In 385, Augustine ended his relationship with his lover in order to prepare to marry a teenaged heiress. By th
e time he was able to marry her, however, he had decided to become a Christian priest and the marriage did not happen.

The primary ‘proof text’ of what Augustine thought concerning coercion is from Letter 93, written in 408, as a reply to bishop Vincentius, of Cartenna (Mauretania, North Africa). This letter shows that both practical and biblical reasons led Augustine to defend the legitimacy of coercion. He confesses that he changed his mind because of “the ineffectiveness of dialogue and the proven efficacy of laws.” He had been worried about false conversions if force was used, but “now,” he says, “it seems imperial persecution is working.” Many Donatists had converted. “Fear had made them reflect, and made them docile.” Augustine continued to assert that coercion could not directly convert someone, but concluded it could make a person ready to be reasoned with.Augustine originally believed in premillennialism, namely that Christ would establish a literal 1,000-year kingdom prior to the general resurrection, but later rejected the belief, viewing it as carnal. During the medieval period, the Catholic Church built its system of eschatology on Augustinian amillennialism, where Christ rules the earth spiritually through his triumphant church.

Augustine took the view that, if a literal interpretation contradicts science and humans’ God-given reason, the biblical text should be interpreted metaphorically. While each passage of Scripture has a literal sense, this “literal sense” does not always mean the Scriptures are mere history; at times they are rather an extended metaphor.

Augustine taught that the sin of Adam and Eve was either an act of foolishness (insipientia) followed by pride and disobedience to God or that pride came first. The first couple disobeyed God, who had told them not to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17). The tree was a symbol of the order of creation. Self-centeredness made Adam and Eve eat of it, thus failing to acknowledge and respect the world as it was created by God, with its hierarchy of beings and values. Scholars generally agree that Augustine and his family were Berbers, an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, but were heavily Romanized, speaking only Latin at home as a matter of pride and dignity. In his writings, Augustine leaves some information as to the consciousness of his African heritage, at least geographically and perhaps ethnically. For example, he refers to Apuleius as “the most notorious of us Africans,” to Ponticianus as “a country man of ours, insofar as being African,” and to Faustus of Mileve as “an African Gentleman”. Augustine also posed the problem of other minds throughout different works, most famously perhaps in On the Trinity (VIII.6.9), and developed what has come to be a standard solution: the argument from analogy to other minds. In contrast to Plato and other earlier philosophers, Augustine recognized the centrality of testimony to human knowledge, and argued that what others tell us can provide knowledge even if we do not have independent reasons to believe their testimonial reports.Augustine’s ecclesiology was more fully developed in City of God. There he conceives of the church as a heavenly city or kingdom, ruled by love, which will ultimately triumph over all earthly empires which are self-indulgent and ruled by pride. Augustine followed Cyprian in teaching that bishops and priests of the Church are the successors of the Apostles, and their authority in the Church is God-given.Jean Bethke Elshtain in Augustine and the Limits of Politics tried to associate Augustine with Arendt in their concept of evil: “Augustine did not see evil as glamorously demonic but rather as absence of good, something which paradoxically is really nothing. Arendt … envisioned even the extreme evil which produced the Holocaust as merely banal [in Eichmann in Jerusalem].” Augustine’s philosophical legacy continues to influence contemporary critical theory through the contributions and inheritors of these 20th-century figures. Seen from a historical perspective, there are three main perspectives on the political thought of Augustine: first, political Augustinianism; second, Augustinian political theology; and third, Augustinian political theory.Initially, the two elements were in perfect harmony. After the fall of humanity they are now experiencing dramatic combat between one another. They are two categorically different things. The body is a three-dimensional object composed of the four elements, whereas the soul has no spatial dimensions. Soul is a kind of substance, participating in reason, fit for ruling the body.

He later wrote an account of his conversion in his Confessions (Latin: Confessiones), which has since become a classic of Christian theology and a key text in the history of autobiography. This work is an outpouring of thanksgiving and penitence. Although it is written as an account of his life, the Confessions also talks about the nature of time, causality, free will, and other important philosophical topics. The following is taken from that work:Against certain Christian movements, some of which rejected the use of Hebrew Scripture, Augustine countered that God had chosen the Jews as a special people, and he considered the scattering of Jewish people by the Roman Empire to be a fulfilment of prophecy. He rejected homicidal attitudes, quoting part of the same prophecy, namely “Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Thy law” (Psalm 59:11). Augustine, who believed Jewish people would be converted to Christianity at “the end of time”, argued God had allowed them to survive their dispersion as a warning to Christians; as such, he argued, they should be permitted to dwell in Christian lands. The sentiment sometimes attributed to Augustine that Christians should let the Jews “survive but not thrive” (it is repeated by author James Carroll in his book Constantine’s Sword, for example) is apocryphal and is not found in any of his writings.

John Riggs argued that Augustine held that Christ is really present in the elements of the Eucharist, but not in a bodily manner, because his body remains in Heaven.Augustine is considered an influential figure in the history of education. A work early in Augustine’s writings is De Magistro (On the Teacher), which contains insights into education. His ideas changed as he found better directions or better ways of expressing his ideas. In the last years of his life, Augustine wrote his Retractationes (Retractations), reviewing his writings and improving specific texts. Henry Chadwick believes an accurate translation of “retractationes” may be “reconsiderations”. Reconsiderations can be seen as an overarching theme of the way Augustine learned. Augustine’s understanding of the search for understanding, meaning, and truth as a restless journey leaves room for doubt, development, and change. Although Augustine did not develop an independent Mariology, his statements on Mary surpass in number and depth those of other early writers. Even before the Council of Ephesus, he defended the Ever-Virgin Mary as the Mother of God, believing her to be “full of grace” (following earlier Latin writers such as Jerome) on account of her sexual integrity and innocence. Likewise, he affirmed that the Virgin Mary “conceived as virgin, gave birth as virgin and stayed virgin forever”. Augustine’s family name, Aurelius, suggests his father’s ancestors were freedmen of the gens Aurelia given full Roman citizenship by the Edict of Caracalla in 212. Augustine’s family had been Roman, from a legal standpoint, for at least a century when he was born. It is assumed that his mother, Monica, was of Berber origin, on the basis of her name, but as his family were honestiores, an upper class of citizens known as honorable men, Augustine’s first language was likely Latin.

Maria Antonia Walpurgis revised the five-part Jesuit drama into a two-part oratorio liberty in which she limits the subject to the conversion of Augustine and his submission to the will of God. To this was added the figure of the mother, Monica, so as to let the transformation appear by experience rather than the dramatic artifice of deus ex machina.The Augustinians were expelled from Pavia in 1700, taking refuge in Milan with the relics of Augustine, and the disassembled Arca, which were removed to the cathedral there. San Pietro fell into disrepair, but was finally rebuilt in the 1870s, under the urging of Agostino Gaetano Riboldi, and reconsecrated in 1896 when the relics of Augustine and the shrine were once again reinstalled.

According to Tilley, after the persecution ended, those who had apostatized wanted to return to their positions in the church. The North African Christians, (the rigorists who became known as Donatists), refused to accept them. Catholics were more tolerant and wanted to wipe the slate clean. For the next 75 years, both parties existed, often directly alongside each other, with a double line of bishops for the same cities. Competition for the loyalty of the people included multiple new churches and violence. No one is exactly sure when the Circumcellions and the Donatists allied, but for decades, they fomented protests and street violence, accosted travellers and attacked random Catholics without warning, often doing serious and unprovoked bodily harm such as beating people with clubs, cutting off their hands and feet, and gouging out eyes.The view that not only human soul but also senses were influenced by the fall of Adam and Eve was prevalent in Augustine’s time among the Fathers of the Church. It is clear the reason for Augustine’s distancing from the affairs of the flesh was different from that of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist who taught that only through disdain for fleshly desire could one reach the ultimate state of mankind. Augustine taught the redemption, i.e. transformation and purification, of the body in the resurrection.Included in Augustine’s earlier theodicy is the claim God created humans and angels as rational beings possessing free will. Free will was not intended for sin, meaning it is not equally predisposed to both good and evil. A will defiled by sin is not considered as “free” as it once was because it is bound by material things, which could be lost or be difficult to part with, resulting in unhappiness. Sin impairs free will, while grace restores it. Only a will that was once free can be subjected to sin’s corruption. After 412, Augustine changed his theology, teaching that humanity had no free will to believe in Christ but only a free will to sin: “I in fact strove on behalf of the free choice of the human ‘will,’ but God’s grace conquered” (Retract. 2.1).

Augustine of Hippo (/ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/ aw-GUST-in, US also /ˈɔːɡəstiːn/ AW-gə-steen; Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.Manichaean friends introduced him to the prefect of the City of Rome, Symmachus, who had been asked by the imperial court at Milan to provide a rhetoric professor. Augustine won the job and headed north to take his position in Milan in late 384. Thirty years old, he had won the most visible academic position in the Latin world at a time when such posts gave ready access to political careers.

In both his philosophical and theological reasoning, Augustine was greatly influenced by Stoicism, Platonism and Neoplatonism, particularly by the work of Plotinus, author of the Enneads, probably through the mediation of Porphyry and Victorinus (as Pierre Hadot has argued). Some Neoplatonic concepts are still visible in Augustine’s early writings. His early and influential writing on the human will, a central topic in ethics, would become a focus for later philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. He was also influenced by the works of Virgil (known for his teaching on language), and Cicero (known for his teaching on argument).Augustine was, from the beginning, a brilliant student, with an eager intellectual curiosity, but he never mastered Greek – his first Greek teacher was a brutal man who constantly beat his students, and Augustine rebelled and refused to study. By the time he realized he needed to know Greek, it was too late; and although he acquired a smattering of the language, he was never eloquent with it. He did however, become a master of Latin. Augustine censured those who try to prevent the creation of offspring when engaging in sexual relations, saying that though they may be nominally married they are not really, but are using that designation as a cloak for turpitude. When they allow their unwanted children to die of exposure, they unmask their sin. Sometimes they use drugs to produce sterility, or other means to try to destroy the fetus before they are born. Their marriage is not wedlock but debauchery. The concept of Church invisible was advocated by Augustine as part of his refutation of the Donatist sect, though he, as other Church Fathers before him, saw the invisible Church and visible Church as one and the same thing, unlike the later Protestant reformers who did not identify the Catholic Church as the true church. He was strongly influenced by the Platonist belief that true reality is invisible and that, if the visible reflects the invisible, it does so only partially and imperfectly (see Theory of Forms). Others question whether Augustine really held to some form of an “invisible true Church” concept.

According to Mar Marcos, Augustine made use of several biblical examples to legitimize coercion, but the primary analogy in Letter 93 and in Letter 185, is the parable of the Great Feast in Luke 14.15–24 and its statement compel them to come in. Russell says, Augustine uses the Latin term cogo, instead of the compello of the Vulgate, since to Augustine, cogo meant to “gather together” or “collect” and was not simply “compel by physical force.”

Augustine was born in 354 in the municipium of Thagaste (now Souk Ahras, Algeria) in the Roman province of Numidia. His mother, Monica or Monnica, was a devout Christian; his father Patricius was a pagan who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. He had a brother named Navigius and a sister whose name is lost but is conventionally remembered as Perpetua.Augustine also does not envision original sin as causing structural changes in the universe, and even suggests that the bodies of Adam and Eve were already created mortal before the Fall.

Augustine was one of the most prolific Latin authors in terms of surviving works, and the list of his works consists of more than one hundred separate titles. They include apologetic works against the heresies of the Arians, Donatists, Manichaeans and Pelagians; texts on Christian doctrine, notably De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine); exegetical works such as commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms and Paul’s Letter to the Romans; many sermons and letters; and the Retractationes, a review of his earlier works which he wrote near the end of his life.Augustine held that “the timing of the infusion of the soul was a mystery known to God alone”. However, he considered procreation as “one of the goods of marriage; abortion figured as a means, along with drugs which cause sterility, of frustrating this good. It lay along a continuum which included infanticide as an instance of ‘lustful cruelty’ or ‘cruel lust.’ Augustine called the use of means to avoid the birth of a child an ‘evil work:’ a reference to either abortion or contraception or both.”Augustine asserted Christians should be pacifists as a personal, philosophical stance. However, peacefulness in the face of a grave wrong that could only be stopped by violence would be a sin. Defence of one’s self or others could be a necessity, especially when authorized by a legitimate authority. While not breaking down the conditions necessary for war to be just, Augustine coined the phrase in his work The City of God. In essence, the pursuit of peace must include the option of fighting for its long-term preservation. Such a war could not be pre-emptive, but defensive, to restore peace. Thomas Aquinas, centuries later, used the authority of Augustine’s arguments in an attempt to define the conditions under which a war could be just.

In late August of 386, at the age of 31, having heard of Ponticianus’s and his friends’ first reading of the life of Anthony of the Desert, Augustine converted to Christianity. As Augustine later told it, his conversion was prompted by hearing a child’s voice say “take up and read” (Latin: tolle, lege). Resorting to the sortes biblicae, he opened a book of St. Paul’s writings (codex apostoli, 8.12.29) at random and read Romans 13: 13–14: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.