50 Fun Facts About Augustine of Hippo

Which fruit did the young Augustine of Hippo steal with friends, though he was neither hungry nor poor?

Pears were the loot, taken from a neighbourhood garden though he had better fruit at home. Augustine later wrote that they tempted him by neither colour nor flavour, and that the company of his accomplices was the real draw.

Which California beach city, famous for its pier, carries the name of the mother of Augustine of Hippo?

Santa Monica honours the devout Christian woman who raised Augustine. One account says a pair of local springs recalled the tears she shed over her son's impious early years.

Which US state has a city named for Augustine of Hippo because Spanish ships sighted land on his feast day?

Florida is home to St. Augustine, founded in 1565 and the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the contiguous United States. Its founder's fleet first saw the coast on 28 August.

Which virtue did the young Augustine of Hippo famously pray to receive, while asking God not to grant it yet?

Chastity was the gift he wanted postponed. Augustine recorded the insincere prayer himself, from the years when he kept a concubine and, by his own account, was a slave of lust.

Which language did Augustine of Hippo never master, after rebelling against a first teacher who beat his pupils?

Greek defeated him: his first teacher constantly beat the class, and the boy refused to study. By the time he saw he needed the language it was too late, and he gained only a smattering.

Which scientist was a friar and abbot in the religious order named after Augustine of Hippo?

Gregor Mendel grew his famous pea plants in the experimental garden of the Augustinian abbey in Brno, where he later became abbot. Born Johann, he took the name Gregor on joining the order.

Which pope became the first member of the Order of Saint Augustine to lead the Catholic Church?

Leo XIV, the Chicago-born pope elected in 2025, joined the Augustinians in 1977 and later served two six-year terms in Rome as the worldwide order's prior general.

Which singer-songwriter put a song about dreaming of St. Augustine on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding?

Bob Dylan pictured a martyred St. Augustine, which is poetic licence. The real bishop of Hippo was never martyred: he died of illness in his seventies.

Of which trade, alongside printers and theologians, is the once hard-living Augustine of Hippo a patron saint?

Brewers share him as a patron with printers and theologians, and believers also invoke him against sore eyes. His feast falls on 28 August, the day he died in 430.

Which work by Augustine of Hippo about his sinful youth and conversion is called the first Western autobiography?

Confessions runs to thirteen books in Latin: the first nine tell his life story and the last four turn to philosophy. He wrote it in his forties and lived three more decades.

In which modern country lie both Thagaste, the birthplace of Augustine of Hippo, and the old city of Hippo itself?

Algeria holds both sites: Thagaste is now the town of Souk Ahras, and Hippo Regius lies beside the port of Annaba. In his day the region was the Roman province of Numidia.

Which Protestant reformer was a friar of the order named for Augustine of Hippo before he broke with Rome?

Martin Luther entered St Augustine's Monastery in Erfurt in 1505 and threw himself into fasting, pilgrimage and long hours of prayer. Many Protestants later claimed the order's patron as a father of the Reformation.

Which French philosopher's famous proof of his own existence did Augustine of Hippo anticipate by twelve centuries?

René Descartes thanked a correspondent in 1640 for pointing him to the passage. Augustine had answered the sceptics by arguing that even to be mistaken, a person must first exist.

Which English cathedral city's first archbishop was a different St. Augustine, a monk sent from Rome in the 590s?

Canterbury's Augustine was a Benedictine prior chosen by Pope Gregory I to convert the kingdom of Kent. He landed in 597, more than 160 years after his namesake of Hippo died.

To which great North African port did Augustine of Hippo move at 17 to study, funded by a wealthy neighbour?

Carthage was beyond his family's means until a fellow townsman, Romanianus, paid his way. There he fell in with boastful young men, began a long love affair and read the dialogue that turned him to philosophy.

At which Christian festival's vigil was Augustine of Hippo baptized in 387, alongside his teenage son?

Easter Vigil fell on the night of 24–25 April that year. The next year the new convert sailed home to Africa, where he sold his inheritance and gave the money to the poor.

Which Germanic people were besieging Hippo when its bishop, Augustine, died inside the walls in 430?

The Vandals had crossed into Roman Africa and reached Hippo in the spring of 430. When they later burned the city, they left Augustine's cathedral and library untouched.

Which huge work did Augustine of Hippo write to console Christians after the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410?

The City of God answered pagans who blamed Christianity for Rome's fall. Across 22 books it argues that earthly empires pass while a heavenly city endures.

Which medieval friar cited Augustine of Hippo and Aristotle more than any other authors in his Summa Theologica?

Thomas Aquinas built on Augustine throughout, yet took a more optimistic view of fallen human nature, leaving reason and will their natural powers. Aristotle he called simply the philosopher.

What did Augustine of Hippo hear in Milan in 386 that prompted him to open Paul's letters at random?

A child's voice kept telling him to take up and read. The passage he landed on, from the letter to the Romans, told him to give up drunkenness and lust, and it settled his conversion.

Which bishop of Milan, whose sermons Augustine of Hippo first attended for their oratory, later baptized him?

Ambrose won him over as a friendly man before he did as a teacher. Augustine wrote that the bishop received him as a father would, and he came to be influenced by him even more than by his own mother.

Which dualist religion from Persia did Augustine of Hippo follow for about ten years as a lowly 'hearer'?

Manichaeism kept him for about a decade, though he never rose above auditor, its lowest rank. A disappointing meeting with Faustus, the sect's star bishop, began his drift away.

Which Roman wrote the Hortensius, the lost dialogue that gave the student Augustine of Hippo a thirst for philosophy?

Cicero wrote it in 45 BC as a call to the philosophical life. The book vanished after the sixth century, and sixteen of its surviving fragments are passages Augustine quoted.

Which subject did Augustine of Hippo teach in Rome and Milan until his conversion led him to give up the career?

Rhetoric, the craft of persuasive speech, won him the most visible academic post in the Latin world at only thirty. As a bishop he turned the same skills on thousands of sermons.

Which name did Augustine of Hippo give the son he fathered as a teenager?

Adeodatus, a name meaning gift from God, struck his contemporaries as extremely intelligent and was baptized on the same night as his father. He died at about sixteen, soon after the two returned to Africa.

Which reputedly British theologian did Augustine of Hippo attack for teaching that human nature is basically good?

Pelagius was cleared of heresy by a synod in 415, but Augustine kept writing against his view that people can choose the good unaided. The quarrel pushed Augustine to his starkest claims about human weakness.

Which breakaway African church did Augustine of Hippo oppose for insisting that sacraments need an unstained priest?

Donatists refused sacraments from clergy who had handed over holy books during persecution. Augustine answered that a sacrament's validity does not depend on the merit of the man who celebrates it.

Which doctrine about the ethics of state power counts Augustine of Hippo among its first Christian architects?

Just war theory grew from his view that Christians should personally be pacifists, yet that standing by when only force could stop a grave wrong would itself be a moral failure.

Which translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible ranks beside Augustine of Hippo among the four Great Latin Church Fathers?

Jerome shares the honour with Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great and the bishop who baptized Augustine. In 1298 Pope Boniface VIII confirmed Augustine as a Doctor of the Church.

Which order of friars, founded by a Castilian priest, took the Rule of Saint Augustine as its own in 1216?

Dominicans chose it because it suited a life built around preaching. Written in about the year 400, it is the oldest monastic rule in the Western Church and has goods held in common.

Which two-word term for humanity's inherited guilt from Adam was Augustine of Hippo the first author to use?

Original sin was his phrase, and he pressed it hardest in his quarrel with those who thought people could be good unaided. Eastern Orthodoxy never took up the idea that everyone carries Adam's guilt.

Which Asian country's oldest stone church, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is run by the Order of Saint Augustine?

The Philippines has San Agustin Church in Manila, completed in 1607 after two earlier churches on the site burned down. Augustinian friars built the first, of bamboo and nipa, in 1571.

Which Florentine frescoed Augustine of Hippo in his study for Ognissanti, the church where the painter lies buried?

Sandro Botticelli painted it in 1480 for his neighbours the Vespucci, the family of the explorer Amerigo. It is his earliest surviving fresco, and he lived within a short walk of the church all his life.

Which concept did Augustine of Hippo argue exists in the mind as memory, contemplation and expectation?

Time, he argued, is three kinds of present: memory of the past, contemplation of what is now, and expectation of the future. Bertrand Russell compared the analysis favourably with Kant's.

In which northern Italian city does the tomb of Augustine of Hippo share a church with the philosopher Boethius?

Pavia's church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro received the bones around 720, in the reign of the Lombard king Liutprand, to save them from Saracen raids. Boethius lies in the crypt below.

Which habit of the bishop of Milan did Augustine of Hippo record after often watching him at his books?

Reading silently struck Augustine enough to note that the bishop's eyes ran over the page while his tongue was at rest. Some think the real surprise was that he did it in front of visitors.

When did Patricius, the pagan father of Augustine of Hippo, finally convert to his wife's Christian faith?

On his deathbed, by the usual account: Augustine wrote that his mother won her husband over towards the very end of his life. The family name Aurelius suggests his ancestors were freedmen who gained Roman citizenship in 212.

Why was Augustine of Hippo let down by the students at the school he opened in Rome in 383?

They dodged his fees: by custom students paid on the last day of term, and many attended faithfully all term and then did not pay. He had left his previous school because the students there were unruly.

According to Augustine of Hippo's commentary on Genesis, how did God actually create everything in the universe?

All at once, he argued: the six days of Genesis are a logical framework, not a passage of time. He leaned on a verse in Sirach saying God created all things at once.

How did Augustine of Hippo define evil, in an account that many later Christian philosophers adopted?

An absence of good is all evil amounts to, he argued, an idea later named the privation theory. He likened flaws of the soul to illness, which is only a lack of bodily wellbeing.

Scholars generally agree that Augustine of Hippo's heavily Romanized family came from which North African people?

Berbers by descent, the family spoke only Latin at home as a matter of pride and dignity. Augustine still called himself an African in his writings.

At which port of ancient Rome did the mother of Augustine of Hippo die as they waited to sail home to Africa?

Ostia is where she died and was first buried. In the 6th century her body was moved to a hidden crypt in the town's church of St Aurea.

Which author of Eichmann in Jerusalem wrote her doctoral dissertation on love in Augustine of Hippo?

Hannah Arendt treated love of neighbour as the most fundamental of the three kinds of love she traced in Augustine. Her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.

Which Italian poet pulled a copy of Augustine of Hippo's autobiography from his pocket atop Mont Ventoux in 1336?

Petrarch always carried the little volume, and on the summit he read in it that people marvel at mountains and seas yet neglect themselves. He said nothing on the way back down.

Which Latin hymn of thanksgiving was long ascribed to Augustine of Hippo, though its true author is now uncertain?

Te Deum was traditionally credited to Augustine or to the bishop who baptized him, but scholars now treat the 4th-century hymn as anonymous. It is still sung to celebrate victories, peace treaties and royal births.

To which Mediterranean island were the bones of Augustine of Hippo first carried by bishops exiled from North Africa?

Sardinia's port of Cagliari kept the relics until about 720, when raids on the coast prompted a second move to the Italian mainland.

Which bishop of Calama, a friend for forty years, wrote a biography of Augustine of Hippo and listed his works?

Possidius was among the refugees inside Hippo during the final siege. His portrait is of a man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly and despised gossip.

Which 17th-century movement grew from a Dutch bishop's posthumous book on Augustine of Hippo titled Augustinus?

Jansenism took its name from Cornelius Jansen, who died in an epidemic in 1638 with his 1,300-page manuscript almost finished. Printed two years later, it stoked controversy across France.

Which philosopher opened Philosophical Investigations by quoting Augustine of Hippo's view that words name objects?

Ludwig Wittgenstein quoted the passage in order to criticise it, arguing instead that a word's meaning is its use in the language. The book appeared in 1953, after his death.

Which Egyptian hermit's life story, related by a fellow African, helped trigger Augustine of Hippo's conversion?

Anthony the Great had sold his property, given the money to the poor and withdrawn to the desert. His biography, by Athanasius, spread the monastic ideal across Western Europe in Latin translation.