Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/132

 96 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE was resisting a siege by the Vandals. Augustine had shared s A the secular life of his times before he became a tine, the Christian and a clergyman, and he was well ac- quainted with many of the leading men of the age. He had studied in the schools of rhetoric and had taught that subject at Milan; he was well versed in Latin culture; he had dabbled in his youth in Manichaeism, astrology, and Neo-Platonism, reading Plotinus in Latin translation, not in the original Greek, but being repelled at that time from the Christian Scriptures by the rude Latin of the copies which he tried to read. His life before he became a Christian had not been beyond reproach, as he had an illegitimate son and more than one mistress. We know so much about him chiefly because he talked so much about himself, being, like Petrarch and Rousseau later, one of those who have penned Confessions for the world's eye. In 388 he returned from Italy to Africa, and three years later was ordained a priest at Hippo without having passed through any of the lower orders. He introduced into Africa the practice of having all the clergy of a town live together as monks, although he did not write the rule followed by the later Augustinian Order. In 396 he was made bishop. The City of God is only one of his numerous writings. The City of God is divided into twenty-,two books, but these do not correspond to sharply defined logical divisions Argument of the thought, as the contents are not very well of the book arranged and there are many digressions. But the main points for us are as follows. The book opens with the assertion that Christianity is not responsible for the sack of Rome and that, on the contrary, its horrors were softened and worse atrocities were prevented by Christian influence upon the Goths. Soon leaving this unpleasant memory, however, Augustine launches forth into Roman history, which, he asserts, shows by many previous disas- ters that the old gods had not saved Rome from misfortune. Augustine persuaded a Spanish disciple of his, Orosius, to write a very distorted history of the world to bring out the game point, Augustine further makes many criticisms of