Augustine wrote two great works: the Confessions and The City of God.
In his Confessions, Augustine focused upon the events related to the first half of his life. In the work, Augustine shows that he actually received very little actual education in the discipline of philosophy. He was actually trained as a rhetorician.
The only philosophical work mentioned by Augustine was Cicero's Hortensius
Augustine's conversion to Christianity occurred primarily under the influence of the Platonists. Bishop Ambrose exposed him to the teachings of Plato during his time in Rome. Ambrose was a great Platonic philosopher and he greatly influenced Augustine to embrace the Christian faith, primarily due to Augustine's high regard for Ambrose's intellectual abilities.
Consequently, Augustine taught a form of "neo-Platonism" which enabled him to conceive of a cosmic hierarchy descending from an immaterial, eternal and intelligible God. Augustine's view of reality emerged from his understanding of a pyramidal three level hierarchy of Being at the top of which was God, in particular the Christian God, descending into the visible world of things, then into the bottom layer of reality which consisted of an invisible world of spirits, including the world of evil.
He was known as Augustine of Hippo. He was a Christian philosopher and a church father and was one of the chief sources of Christian thought in the West. His importance for Medieval and modern European philosophy is impossible to describe in a brief manner. He wrote voluminously and dialectically as a Christian theologian. He treated philosophical topics primarily only as they related to Theology or to the extent that they were corrected by Theology.
