Augustine of Hippo

Augustine (354–430) was born at Thagaste in Roman North Africa and taught rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan. After years as a Manichaean and a reader of the Platonists, he was baptized by Ambrose at Milan in 387. He returned to Africa, was ordained priest at Hippo Regius and became its bishop in 395 or 396, an office he held until his death during the Vandal siege of the city.

No Latin writer shaped medieval theology more. His accounts of grace, original sin, the Trinity, the two cities and the knowledge of God were the common inheritance of the scholastics, who quoted him more often than any other Father; the controversies over grace argued in this library, from Prosper to Báñez, are disputes about how to read him. He has been counted among the Doctors of the Church since 1298.

The library holds the Confessions, the City of God, On the Trinity and On the Catechising of the Uninstructed. The Confessions is the usual first reading; On the Trinity is the work the scholastics drew on most when they treated the divine persons.