Augustine of Hippo
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50 free Augustine of Hippo trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Augustine of Hippo lived one of the best-documented lives of the ancient world, largely because he wrote it down himself. Born in Roman North Africa in 354, he was a gifted, ambitious and far from saintly young man before a dramatic change of heart turned him into a priest, a bishop and the most influential thinker of the Latin Church. This quiz gathers the fun facts behind the saint: the teenage theft he never forgot, the mother who followed him across the sea, the rival movements he argued with, and the surprising places his name turns up today, from American place names to pop songs and a monastery garden that changed science. Every answer comes with a short explanation. The questions start easy and get harder, so they suit students, confirmation classes, parish quiz nights and anyone curious about a restless mind who shaped sixteen centuries of thought.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fruit did the young Augustine of Hippo steal with friends, though he was neither hungry nor poor?
Pears
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.
Q 02Which California beach city, famous for its pier, carries the name of the mother of Augustine of Hippo?
Santa Monica
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.
Q 03Which US state has a city named for Augustine of Hippo because Spanish ships sighted land on his feast day?
Florida
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.
Q 04Which virtue did the young Augustine of Hippo famously pray to receive, while asking God not to grant it yet?
Chastity
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.
Q 05Which language did Augustine of Hippo never master, after rebelling against a first teacher who beat his pupils?
Greek
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.
Q 06Which scientist was a friar and abbot in the religious order named after Augustine of Hippo?
Gregor Mendel
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.
Q 07Which pope became the first member of the Order of Saint Augustine to lead the Catholic Church?
Leo XIV
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.
Q 08Which singer-songwriter put a song about dreaming of St. Augustine on his 1967 album John Wesley Harding?
Bob Dylan
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.
Q 09Of which trade, alongside printers and theologians, is the once hard-living Augustine of Hippo a patron saint?
Brewers
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.
Q 10Which work by Augustine of Hippo about his sinful youth and conversion is called the first Western autobiography?
Confessions
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.
Q 11In which modern country lie both Thagaste, the birthplace of Augustine of Hippo, and the old city of Hippo itself?
Algeria
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.
Q 12Which Protestant reformer was a friar of the order named for Augustine of Hippo before he broke with Rome?
Martin Luther
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.
Q 13Which French philosopher's famous proof of his own existence did Augustine of Hippo anticipate by twelve centuries?
Q 21Which bishop of Milan, whose sermons Augustine of Hippo first attended for their oratory, later baptized him?
Ambrose
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.
Q 22Which dualist religion from Persia did Augustine of Hippo follow for about ten years as a lowly 'hearer'?
Manichaeism
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.
Q 23Which Roman wrote the Hortensius, the lost dialogue that gave the student Augustine of Hippo a thirst for philosophy?
Cicero
René Descartes
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.
Q 14Which English cathedral city's first archbishop was a different St. Augustine, a monk sent from Rome in the 590s?
Canterbury
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.
Q 15To which great North African port did Augustine of Hippo move at 17 to study, funded by a wealthy neighbour?
Carthage
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.
Q 16At which Christian festival's vigil was Augustine of Hippo baptized in 387, alongside his teenage son?
Easter
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.
Q 17Which Germanic people were besieging Hippo when its bishop, Augustine, died inside the walls in 430?
Vandals
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.
Q 18Which huge work did Augustine of Hippo write to console Christians after the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410?
The City of God
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.
Q 19Which medieval friar cited Augustine of Hippo and Aristotle more than any other authors in his Summa Theologica?
Thomas Aquinas
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.
Q 20What did Augustine of Hippo hear in Milan in 386 that prompted him to open Paul's letters at random?
A child's voice
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.
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.
Q 24Which subject did Augustine of Hippo teach in Rome and Milan until his conversion led him to give up the career?
Rhetoric
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.
Q 25Which name did Augustine of Hippo give the son he fathered as a teenager?
Adeodatus
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.
Q 26Which reputedly British theologian did Augustine of Hippo attack for teaching that human nature is basically good?
Pelagius
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.
Q 27Which breakaway African church did Augustine of Hippo oppose for insisting that sacraments need an unstained priest?
Donatists
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.
Q 28Which doctrine about the ethics of state power counts Augustine of Hippo among its first Christian architects?
Just war theory
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.
Q 29Which translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible ranks beside Augustine of Hippo among the four Great Latin Church Fathers?
Jerome
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.
Q 30Which order of friars, founded by a Castilian priest, took the Rule of Saint Augustine as its own in 1216?
Dominicans
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.