This course week, which centers on Augustine's Confessions, is a brief interlude between the much larger units on "Rome at the Apex" and the Florentine unit coming up. Augustine's importance as a bridge between Plato and antiquity on the one hand, and the medieval, Christian world on the other justifies including him. But we'll let the philosophers teaching this course tell you more about that.

What we can do is tell you a little about Augustine's historical context. In 354, Augustine was born in North Africa (now Algeria), part of the Roman Empire. Although Christians then enjoyed a privileged religious status in the Empire, it would not become the only legal religion of the empire until Emperor Theodosius decreed it 392. (Even then it did not become everyone's faith). The youthful Augustine himself turned away from the Christianity of his mother Monica, finding himself attracted to Manichean and Neo-Platonist thought (see Chadwick's introduction). Interestingly, it was Augustine's Neo-Platonism which ultimately helped convince him of the truth of Christianity. In this respect, it played a role in his conversion to that religion in 386, although Augustine attributed his actual conversion to God's grace alone.

Augustine's conversion to Christianity is symbolic of the whole empire's turning toward Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. In some respects, it was a radical break with the pagan past, a turn in a different direction (Christians, for example, eventually got rid of the most violent amphitheatrical spectacles). In other ways, Christianity proved quite compatible with the mood and orientation of late Roman paganism, including Neo-Platonism. It succeeded in part precisely because it could give compelling intellectual and moral answers to the problems confronting the uncertain citizens of a declining empire.

At the time of Augustine's boyhood, the (Western) Roman Empire had enjoyed a relatively long period of stability (from roughly 270 to 370), which thankfully followed the economic and political catastrophes of the third century (180 - 270). By the time Augustine reached adulthood, however, the (Western) Roman Empire was slipping into irreversible decline. By 410, the situation had deteriorated so much that Rome was pillaged by the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe. Most parts of the Western Empire (and some parts of the Eastern Empire) were settled by large groups of Germanic and other tribespeople with little loyalty to Rome and even less familiarity with its customs. Some of them - like the Vandals - were widely feared for their brutality. It was the Vandals, in fact, who in 430 besieged the North African town of Hippo as Augustine, the town's bishop, lay dying. Augustine did not live to see Hippo taken by the Vandals. But in this respect, too, Augustine lived at the threshold of two worlds, in which the ancient Roman world was being transformed into what are now called the Middle Ages. Augustine's vision of the good life would have to be practiced in a world that was already very different from the world in which he had been born.

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