Like Plotinus, who inspired and influenced him most deeply, Augustine was himself a bridge between ancient and medieval thought. He was born at Tagaste in North Africa (near present-day Tripoli) during the final years of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He studied and taught rhetoric-'the art of persuasion'-in Carthage, Rome, and Milan, until he became a devout believer in Manicheism. This powerful Persian religion, the product of a strange mix of Christianity and Zoroastrianism by its Magian founder, Mani (Greek Manes, Latinized Manichaeus), teaches that the human struggle between good and evil is itself a cosmic manifestation of an eternal duel between angelic forces of light and demonic forces of darkness. Mani's unique marriage of Zoroastrian ideas caught young Augustine's fancy, especially the claim that Christ himself was an incarnation of the same immortal spirit as Buddha and Zarathustra. He believed that Christ was the original first soul of humanity created by the 'mother of light' as a guide in our cosmic ballet between light and darkness. No sooner did Augustine accept this teaching than he discovered the Skeptics and altogether dropped Manichaenism in favor of a new guiding light: doubt everything that can be doubted. But then he discovered Plotinus and became a devout neo-Platonist. To Plotinus' religious interpretation of Plato he added Zoroastrian and Manichean themes: the struggle between good and evil, sin and salvation, a philosophical tension that remained the focal point of his thought even after his final conversion to Christianity.
You may think that with so many "conversions," Augustine was wishy-washy or a pushover. He wasn't. The fact is that the most highly esteemed Roman lawyers noted him as an intellectual wizard for his abilities to train young lawyers in rhetoric which he delighted in using to plead the most unimaginably unpopular cases. He became the leading professor of rhetoric at the University of Milan until the year 387, when he suddenly converted to Christianity, returned to his birthplace in Africa, and devoted himself to building monasteries and writing philosophy. He was ordained as a priest in 391 and five years later appointed bishop of Hippo, a city near Carthage, where he remained for the rest of his life.
