August 28 - Augustin of Hippo, born November 13, 354 in Thagaste, the present Souk Ahras, Algeria, and died August 28, 430 in Hippo, is a Roman Christian philosopher and theologian of the upper class. Along with Ambrose of Milan, Jerome of Stridon and Gregory the Great, he is one of the four Fathers of the Western Church and one of the thirty-six Doctors of the Church.

The formation he received in Carthage was that of the Roman scholars of the time, even if his writings reveal a sensitivity and traits linked to his region of birth. Although he was a master of the Latin language and culture, he never really mastered Greek, which tended to increase the differences between Western and Eastern Christianity.

Born of a deeply pious mother, he first converted to philosophy before becoming a Manichean. He abandoned Manicheanism and did not convert to Christianity until quite late, in 386, after his meeting with Ambrose of Milan. After his conversion, he became bishop of Hippo and led a series of controversies, both oral and especially written, first against the Manicheans, then against the Donatists, and finally against Pelagianism. He leaves a considerable body of work, both in quantity and quality. Three of his books are particularly well known: The Confessions, The City of God and The Trinity.

On the theological and philosophical level, he is, following Ambrose of Milan, the main thinker who allowed Christianity to integrate part of the Greek and Roman heritage, generalizing an allegorical reading of the Scriptures linked to Neoplatonism. Still following Ambrose, a former high-ranking Roman official, he incorporated into Christianity part of the tradition of strength of the Roman Republic. He is the most influential thinker in the Western world until Thomas Aquinas who, eight centuries after Augustin, gives a more Aristotelian turn to Christianity. Despite this, his thought retained a great influence in the 17th century, when it was one of the sources of French classical literature and inspired the theodicy of Malebranche and Leibniz.

In the West, the theologian is the one who insists the most on divine transcendence, that is to say, for him, God's thoughts are not, in any way, the thoughts of men. According to him, the opposite belief constitutes precisely original sin.

Augustin also emphasizes reason understood as a means of approaching the truth of things - absolute truth not being of this world - from a perspective which includes a certain spiritual dimension. As a general rule, Augustinian thought is animated by a double movement, from the outside (the world) to the inside, the domain of an inner God of light; from the inferior (easy pleasures) to the superior (true self-realization).

In a way, what underlies the dynamics of his thought is synthesized by one of his most famous formulas from the Confessions: "Tu autem eras interior intimo meo and superior summo meo (But You were deeper than the depths of myself and higher than the very top of myself)".

In his theology, the weight of sin and the habit of sin is such that without divine grace man cannot save himself: this is the meaning of the struggle against Pelagianism, which supports the opposite. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestantism and Jansenism, which would take up his theses, would, like Augustine of his time, address themselves more to the active middle classes than to the aristocracy, which was usually more pelagian. In connection with his theology, he strongly distinguishes the world (linked to self-love), from the City of God (linked to the love of God), a term more Roman republic, which he prefers to that of the kingdom of God.

While he contributes strongly to bringing the concept of love (he loves to love) to the forefront in Christianity, he is accused of having transmitted to the West a strong mistrust of the flesh (a strong temptation in him). However, on the sin of the flesh, partly taken up by the Platonists and Neoplatonists who distinguish the soul from the body, seen as dragging humans down, he would have a rather moderate position in relation to Jerome of Stridon and Gregory of Nyssa.