St. AUGUSTINE

It's the birthday of the man who wrote the first great tell-all memoir: Saint Augustine, (books by this author) born in Tagaste, Numidia (354), a part of North Africa that is now Algeria. Though his mother was a Christian, and he'd grown up in the Christian Roman Empire, he'd spent much of his life dabbling in various pagan religions. He was living with a lower-class woman, having fathered a child out of wedlock, when he fell under the influence of Bishop Ambrose of Milan and suddenly converted to Christianity. He decided that he would abandon his secular life and devote himself to writing about Christian theology.
He was an extraordinarily prolific writer, publishing more than 90 books in his lifetime. But though he was widely read, he wasn't taken very seriously by other theologians. He couldn't read or write in Greek, which was the language of intellectuals, and he lived in a backwater part of the Roman Empire. His critics called him a "donkey protector," and said, "[He is] what passes for a philosopher with Africans."
Living on the edge of the empire, he was surrounded by renegade forms of Christianity. People who considered themselves Christians were also worshiping idols and consulting with fortune tellers. All these pagan influences were contributing to a huge diversity in Christian beliefs. Augustine became a famous theologian in part because he spoke out against this diversity, arguing that all Christian churches should follow the doctrine of the central church in Rome.
Augustine especially attacked the group of Christians known as Donatists, who believed that the only true Christians were those people who lived their lives completely free from sin. Augustine argued that no one could possibly be free from sin, because sinfulness is in the very nature of humans. He developed the idea of original sin, saying that all humans are born sinful because all humans are descended from Adam and Eve who committed the first sin.
Augustine used himself as an example of imperfection by writing The Confessions (c. 400), one of the first memoirs of Western literature. In that book, he described all the sins he had ever committed in the years of his life before his conversion, everything from crying over a fictional character in a poem, to stealing pears from a neighbor's tree, to his sexual fantasies and exploits.
In the last years of his life, Augustine was witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire. The city of Rome had already been captured by barbarians once, and Augustine's own city of Hippo was besieged by vandals. After his death, the city of Hippo was destroyed by the barbarians, but somehow Augustine's library survived. He'd spent his life defending Christianity against pagan influence, and his work went on to hold the Christian Church together throughout the medieval era. It is partially due to his writings that the Catholic Church did not break up into separate churches for almost a thousand years.