St. Augustine of Hippo, the great Doctor of the Latin Church was born at Thagaste in North Africa, in A.D. 354.  The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, he was brought up as  Christian, and at the age of sixteen went to Carthage to finish his education for the law.  In 375 on reading Cicero's Hortensius he became deeply interested in Philosophy.  He was converted to the Manichean religion, some of whose tenets he continued to hold after he had founded his own school of rhetoric at Rome, in 383.  At Milan he was offered a professorship and came under the influence both of Neoplatonism and of the preaching of St Ambrose.  After agonizing inward conflict he renounced all his unorthodox beliefs and was baptized in 387.  He now returned to Africa and formed his own community; but in 391 he was ordained priest against his wishes, as invading Vandals were besieging Hippo.
For thirty-four years St Augustine lived in community with his cathedral clergy.  His written output was vast; there survive 113 books and treatises, over 200 letters, and more than 500 sermons.  Two of his longest works, his Confessions  and City of God, have made an abiding mark not only on Christian theology but on the psychology and political philosophy of the West since the Dark Ages.  He died in 430 as invading Vandals were besieging Hippo.