Augustine

Augustine was born in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and a Christian mother, taught rhetoric in Carthage, Rome and Milan, followed the Manichees and then the Platonists, and was converted in a Milanese garden in 386. As bishop of Hippo for thirty-five years he wrote against every rival teaching and died as the Vandals besieged the city. The Confessions is the first autobiography of an inner life; The City of God, written after the sack of Rome, set the earthly city against the heavenly and shaped Western thought about history, politics and grace for a thousand years.