Hippo in Five Ideas
the essentialsThe restless heart
“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” — Confessions I.1
Evil as privation
Evil is not a substance but a lack of good — answering his former Manichaean belief in two cosmic powers.
Si fallor, sum
If I am deceived, I exist — an anticipation of Descartes’ cogito by twelve centuries.
Time
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.” Time exists in the soul as memory, attention, expectation.
The two cities
The City of God and the earthly city, built by two loves — love of God to the contempt of self, and love of self to the contempt of God.
The Confessions — the story of a brilliant, restless young rhetorician, his mistress, his mother Monica, his years among the Manichaeans and Neoplatonists, and his conversion in a Milan garden on hearing a child’s voice chant tolle, lege (“take up and read”) — is the first great autobiography of inwardness in the West.
Curiosities
did you know?- He converted after hearing a child’s voice chanting ‘take up and read’.
- He died as the Vandals besieged his city, Hippo.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is evil a thing, or only the absence of good?
- Can you be good without wanting to be?
In Their Own Words
3 quotationsYou have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te
Context & when to use it
For spiritual longing, the God-shaped hole.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not.
Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.
Context & when to use it
For any concept we use easily but cannot define.
Grant me chastity and continence — but not yet.
da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo
Context & when to use it
For procrastination and weakness of will (akrasia), with humour.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalCredo ut intelligam
Origin. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion ch. 1 (1078), echoing Augustine. Anselm’s motto was “fides quaerens intellectum” — faith seeking understanding.
For faith as the starting point of reason, not its enemy — the opposite of Tertullian’s paradox.
Explore Next
related by shared connections
Jean-Paul Sartre
The face of French existentialism — existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, and hell is other people.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher with a hammer who announced the death of God, unmasked the genealogy of morality, and called for new values — the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, amor fati.
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā)
Persian polymath — physician, metaphysician, logician — whose Canon of Medicine was taught in Europe for 500 years and whose distinction between essence and existence reshaped philosophy in Islam and the Latin West.
What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?
Can reason know everything — or are there things the mind can never reach? From the Upanishads’ unknowable knower to Kant’s boundary and Wittgenstein’s silence.
Immanuel Kant
The philosopher who tried to end the war between rationalism and empiricism by asking what the mind itself contributes to experience — the “Copernican revolution” in philosophy.
David Hume
The great Scottish sceptic who showed that causation, the self, and induction cannot be justified by reason — and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.