Augustine of Hippo and the Confessions
A Numidian rhetorician who lived a famously dissolute youth, Augustine's conversion in a Milan garden in 386 produced the Confessions and the City of God — books that shaped Western Christianity for 1,500 years.
Aurelius Augustinus was born in 354 in Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica. He trained as a rhetorician, kept a long-term concubine, fathered a son, and spent nine years as a Manichaean before moving to Milan in 384 to teach rhetoric at the imperial court.
In Milan he came under the preaching of Ambrose and the influence of Neoplatonism. The crisis broke in a garden in 386: hearing a child's voice chanting "tolle, lege" ("take up and read"), he opened Paul's letter to the Romans at random and was undone. He was baptised at Easter 387, returned to North Africa, and was made bishop of Hippo Regius in 395.
His Confessions (c. 397–400), addressed directly to God, invented the modern spiritual autobiography. His City of God (413–426), written in response to the sack of Rome in 410, became the foundational work of Christian political theology. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged Hippo.