Originally published at crisis magazine
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.
Perhaps the first and most obvious thing to be said about St. Augustine, the span of whose life was close to eighty years—from A.D. 354 to 430—is that he was one of only a handful of truly foundational figures of the Christian West. Not only does he stand in the company of men like Benedict, who ignited a great monastic fire in the West, or Gregory the Great, who kept it blazing while caring for plague victims in a city overrun with barbarian tribes, but that, on the strength of his own accomplishments, which are too numerous to cite at the moment, he easily surpasses even these giants. The sheer impact of Augustine upon the life of the Church, of the emerging medieval world he had a hand in shaping, has never been equaled.
So much of his thought, like that of St. Paul or St. John, has sunk so deeply into the consciousness of Christian thought and sensibility, the insights on which so much of our understanding of God and the
