Confessions of St. Augustine

Saint Augustine, “one of the four great fathers of the Latin Church,” was born in what is now Algeria (North Africa), November, 354A. D.His mother was a devout Christian, but his father was unconverted at the time of Augustine’s birth. The piety of the mother finally won both father and son to the Christian faith.
Augustine’s early life, especially his youth, was characterized by sinful lapses into the evils of temptation, temptation to which he often yielded, for which weakness he has chastised himself mercilessly in hisConfessions. His self-condemned wickedness did not prevent his being a determined student, however, and he was carefully trained to become a teacher of rhetoric. At nineteen, his mind was stirred by Cicero’sHortensiusto seek the truth, but he wandered aimlessly about in the mazes of various schools of thought without adopting any one of them, good or bad. Manicheism (a religious philosophy in which goodness and light, identified with God, were in conflict with evil and chaos, identified with the powers of darkness) attracted Augustine, until he became an enthusiastic exponent of its doctrines. He hoped that his own dark path of sensuality might be directed to the light by the influence of this oriental system (Manicheism originated in Persia and had a bright coloring of eastern myth), but he had not acquired sufficient moral strength to enable him to attain his ideal of chastity and temperance. Because it did not lead him out of his evil ways, as he had hoped, Manicheism gradually weakened in its sway over him. Then, too, Augustine was well-versed in the exact sciences, and so found it impossible to coordinate the superstitions of Manicheism with known facts.