Augustine was born in Roman North Africa to a Christian mother, Monica, and a pagan father. His youth was restless and brilliant: a careerist rhetorician, a long affair, fifteen years in the Manichean heresy. His mother prayed for him without ceasing. At Milan, hearing the preaching of Ambrose and reading Paul in a garden, he was converted at 31.
He became Bishop of Hippo and the greatest theologian of the Latin West. His Confessions — the first true autobiography — gives an intimate account of a soul's long path to God: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." His City of God answered the pagans who blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome, and laid out a theology of history that shaped medieval thought. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo, just as the Western Roman Empire was collapsing.