owever, he adopted Manichaeism, a Christian heresy claiming to provide a rational Christianity on the basis of a purified text of Scripture. Nine years later, his association with the Manichees ended in disillusionment; and it was in a religiously detached state that Augustine arrived in Milan. There he discovered, through a chance reading of some books of Neoplatonism, a form of philosophy that seemed compatible with Christian belief. At the same time, he found that he was at last able to give up the ambitions for public success that had previously prevented him from embracing the philosophic life. The result was the dramatic conversion that led Augustine to devote his life to the pursuit of truth, which he now identified with Christianity. With a small group of friends, he returned to North Africa and, in Thagaste, established a religious community dedicated to the intellectual quest for God. Later Life and InfluenceAugustine's ordination, unexpectedly forced upon him by popular acclamation during a visit to Hippo in 391, brought about a fundamental change in his life and thought. It redirected his attention from the philosophic Christianity he had discovered in Milan to the turbulent, popular Christianity of North Africa's cities and towns. His subsequent career as priest and bishop was to be dominated by controversy and debate. Especially important were his struggles with the Donatists and with Pelagianism. The Donatists promoted a Christian separatist movement, maintaining that only they were the true church and that, as a result, only their Sacraments were valid. Augustine's counterattack emphasized unity, not division, as the mark of true Christianity and insisted that the validity of the sacraments depended on Christ himself, not on any human group or institution. Pelagianism, an early 5th-century Christian reform movement, held that no person could be excused from meeting the full demand of God's law. In doing so, it stressed t...
