Augustine was a North African intellectual who initially resisted Christianity. Despite the intentions of his mother, Monica, to foster his conversion to Christianity, he affiliated with the Gnostic sect of Manichaeism. Gnosticism influenced some forms of early Christianity with its rejection of the material world. Key to Gnosticism was the search for the personal knowledge or gnosis that would assure salvation into heavenly or transcendent realms. The Manichean version of Gnosticism posited an eternal cosmic tension between the powers of a transcendent good and the material forces of evil. Augustine eventually recognized the limits of these early spiritual explorations and became less satisfied with their stark mythic polarities. Seeking a more complex and sophisticated worldview, he became disposed to Christianity. This was especially the case when he became a teacher of rhetoric at the Imperial Court in Milan and was influenced by the Christian preacher, Ambrose. His conversion to Christianity occurred in a remarkable experience in which he heard a child's voice telling him to take and read. After he took up the Bible and read Paul's Epistle to the Romans on the transformation of believers after accepting Christ, he converted. Because of his intelligence and mature judgment, Augustine eventually became bishop of the North African city of Hippo. It was during these years that he composed the two works that have had such a major influence on Christianity in western civilization. The Confessions is the first such spiritual biography in the West describing the inner psychological journey of conversion. The City of God is a response to the charge of Roman intellectuals that the fall of Rome was due to the Christian turn from civic piety and from commitment to the Roman gods. In the City of God, Augustine presents his major insight, namely, that Christianity endures as the City of God, while such cities of man, as Rome, repeatedly collapse. In his theological writings as a whole, Augustine presents an ambivalent attitude towards the natural world. For example, in the Confessions, Augustine reflects upon his spiritual journey and the role he senses that nature played in his transformation. He writes, "And there I made search for Thee, and in a deformed manner I cast myself upon the things of Thy creation, which yet thou hadst made fair. Those things withheld me from Thee, which yet, if they had not there being in Thee would not be at all." Several influences from the Hebraic Bible and Hellenic philosophy are evident in this statement from Augustine that continued in the Christian tradition. From the Bible, Augustine acknowledges that all creation comes from God. Augustine, on the other hand, transmits Hellenic thought in his observation that the divine designs reality and brings forth plenitude in the natural world. These are key ideas, than they're transmitted of the design of the world and the plenitude of the world. Similarly, he observes from a biblical view that things of creation cannot be evil in themselves. However, from the Hellenic and Gnostic perspective, he sees that lower forms of matter than the human, they can become hindrances and obstacles. Most importantly, Augustine's creative thinking distinguished between nature and the way humans dispose themselves to the natural world, that's the key, thus the loveliness and beauty of creation can so allure humans that they give themselves into their lustful desires. In doing so, he feels that they move away from a natural tendency towards participation in the transcendent divine. Here, there is an inherent ambivalence that characterizes Augustine's commentaries on the natural world. We see, on the other hand also, there is evidence of his lyrical praise for creation. Augustine writes, "Ask the loveliness of the earth, ask the loveliness of the sea, ask the loveliness of the wide, airy spaces, ask the loveliness of the sky, ask the order of the stars, ask the sun making the daylight with its beam, ask the moon tempering the darkness of the night that follows, ask the living things which move in the waters, which tarry on the land, which fly in the air, ask all these things, and they will all answer thee, lo, see, we are lovely. Their loveliness is their confession. And these lovely but mutable things, who has made them, save beauty immutable?" It's a powerful expression of Augustine's appreciation and participation in the creation as a pathway that opens to the divine.
