Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born in 354 in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa, and died in 430 as bishop of Hippo Regius. Trained as a rhetorician and drawn in turn through Manichaeism, scepticism, and Neoplatonism, he underwent a dramatic conversion to Christianity in Milan in 386 under the influence of Ambrose and the Platonist books.

His autobiographical Confessions (c. 397-400), often called the first Western autobiography, narrates this turning as an interior journey, and his vast later output — above all On the Trinity and The City of God — made him the most formative theologian of the Latin West.

For a mind-power lineage, Augustine matters chiefly as the great Western architect of interiority. His counsel “do not go outward; return within yourself; in the inner man dwells truth” turned the search for God inward, and his sense of God as interior intimo meo — “more inward to me than my innermost self” — gave the West its enduring vocabulary for a divine presence at the ground of the soul.

His probing of memory, time, and will in the Confessions opened the self as a vast interior landscape to be explored, a move that echoes through medieval mysticism into modern psychology and the contemplative traditions that locate the sacred within.