(b Thagaste, 13 Nov 354; d Hippo, 28 Aug 430). Saint, churchman and scholar. He was perhaps the most influential figure in the history of Christian thought, rivalled only by Thomas Aquinas and possibly Origen. Born in North Africa to a pagan father and Christian mother, the sainted Monica, he studied rhetoric in Carthage where he lost his boyhood Christian faith. In 373 his reading of Cicero's Hortensius inspired him to pursue the life of a philosopher, which he experienced first as a devotee of Manicheism. He served as professor of liberal arts for several years in his native Thagaste, moving in 383 to Rome and then in 384 to Milan, as professor of rhetoric. In Milan he came under the influence of the Christian Neoplatonist Simplicianus and St Ambrose. He was led gradually through Neoplatonism to Christianity and, after a period of retreat at Cassiacum, was baptized on Easter Eve of 387. He returned to Thagaste in 388 to form a monastic community along with a number of friends. On a visit to Hippo in 391 he was acclaimed by the people and persuaded to accept ordination. He became bishop in 395 and spent the remainder of his life administering to the needs of his diocese, preaching and writing. He died at Hippo in 430 as the city was under siege by the Vandals.
With the exception of Nicetas of Remesiana's De bono psalmodiae, the only patristic work devoted entirely to the subject of music is Augustine's De musica, a treatise on music as a liberal art. It was originally intended as one of a series of works on the liberal arts; he completed a book on grammar and began studies on dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic and philosophy, but only De musica survives. The treatise is confined to two of the three branches of ancient musical theory – metrics and rhythmics; he announced his intention at one point to compose a treatise ‘de melo’, that is, the third of the musical sub-disciplines, the daunting mathematical science of harmonics. It is doubtful, however, that the philosophically inclined Augustine, even if he had possessed the mathematical expertise, would have had the patience to persevere in this effort. The De musica as it stands is a treatise in six books, the first five of which were completed in 387. These show far more of a preference for rhythmics than metrics, exploiting and even distorting the details of classical metrical theory in an effort to display the omnipresence of the basic temporal proportions. The sixth book, written in 391 after Augustine's conversion, is more frankly philosophical; it is a cosmology of sounding number in the tradition of Plato's Timaeus, and a Christian theology, ethics and aesthetics of number as well.
Of at least equal significance to music history as the De musica are Augustine's numerous remarks about music that are scattered throughout his vast literary output. There are, for example, approving references to music as a liberal art and stern animadversions against contemporary musical practice. But of greatest interest are the many references in his sermons, of which more than 700 are preserved (including the Enarrationes in psalmos), to the liturgical singing of psalms; on more than 150 occasions explicit mention is made of a particular psalm or psalm verse that had been sung in the service at which the sermon was preached. A wealth of detail about the psalmodic practice of Hippo and Carthage in the late 4th and early 5th centuries can be extracted from these remarks. Finally there is the famous passage in the Confessions where Augustine recalls how he was moved by the psalmody of Ambrose's Milanese church, but felt remorse over the pleasure he had experienced in hearing it. The passage is utterly unique for its time in its quasi-romantic psychological penetration, yet conventional in its ultimate endorsement of the orthodox patristic position that melodious psalmody is acceptable to the Christian church.
J. Quasten: Musik und Gesang in den Kulten der heidnischen Antike und christlichen Frühzeit (Münster, 1930/R; Eng. trans., 1983, as Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity)
W. Roetzer: Des heiligen Augustinus Schriften als liturgiegeschichtliche Quelle (Munich, 1930)
T. Gerold: Les pères de l'église et la musique (Strasbourg, 1931/R)
G. Pietzsch: Die Musik in Erziehungs- und Bildungsideal des ausgehenden Altertums und frühen Mittelalters (Halle, 1932/R)
E. de Bruyne: Études d'esthétique médiévale (Bruges, 1946)
R.C. Taliaferro, ed.: ‘De musica’, Writings of Saint Augustine, Fathers of the Church, ii (New York, 1947)
F. van der Meer: Augustinus de zielzorger (Utrecht, 1947; Eng. trans., 1961, as Augustine the Bishop)
W.G. Waite: The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony (New Haven, CT, 1954/R)
G.G. Willis: St Augustine's Lectionary (London, 1962)
G. Bonner: St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies (London, 1963, 2/1986)
L. Verheijen: La régle de saint Augustin (Paris, 1967)
A. Zwinggi: ‘Der Wortgottesdienst bei Augustinus’, Liturgisches Jb, xx (1970), 92–113, 129–40, 250–53
A. Nowak: ‘Die “numeri judicales” des Augustinus’, AMw, xxxii (1975), 196–207
P.-P. Verbraken: Etudes critiques sur les sermons authentiques de Saint Augustin (The Hague, 1976)
R.J. O'Connell: Art and the Christian Intelligence in St Augustine (Cambridge, MA, 1978)
J. Dyer: ‘Augustine and the “Hymni ante oblatium”: the Earliest Offertory Chants?’, Revue des études augustiniennes, xxvii (1981), 85–99
J. McKinnon: ‘The Fourth-Century Origins of the Gradual’, EMH, vii (1987), 91–106
J. McKinnon: Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987)
J. McKinnon: ‘Desert Monasticism and the Fourth-Century Psalmodic Movement’, ML, lxxv (1994), 505–21
J. McKinnon: ‘Liturgical Psalmody in the Sermons of St Augustine’, Three Worlds of Medieval Chant: Comparative Studies in Greek, Latin and Slavonic Liturgical Music for Kenneth Levy, ed. P. Jeffrey (forthcoming)
JAMES W. McKINNON