Abstract:
In popular works, and even in handbooks of (church) history, it is often assumed that Augustine was converted from paganism
to Christianity. This perception is incorrect. Augustine (354-430) was a North African by birth. In all likelihood his mother Monnica was of Berber extraction, i.e. she originated from the indigenous black Berbers. She became a Catholic Christian (though with some touch of the Donatist Christianity prevalent in Augustine’s inland home town Thagaste). Augustine’s father Patricius was a conservative heathen and only baptised a
Catholic when Augustine was sixteen. Young Augustine thus grew up in a religiously very diverse environment. His school
education in Thagaste and nearby Madauros strengthened the pagan element. During his student years in Carthage Augustine became a member of the Gnostic-Christian Church
of Mani (216-276), the prophet from Babylon who established a new Church which expanded from present day Iraq until the Atlantic
and the Pacific. More than ten years Augustine was a member of the New Age-movement of his time. After a long
and intense spiritual journey came, in 386, his final conversion to Catholic (= orthodox) Christianity. The article aims to indicate that – both thetically and antithetically – all previous spiritual
factors had a lasting influence on the spirituality of the future doctor gratiae. During all these periods he sighed for true
knowledge of God: “how in my inmost being the very marrow of my soul did pant after You!” ( Conf. III,6,10).
