Saint Augustine of Hippo

354-430

Tunisian orator and Christian bishop whose religious and philosophical views dominated Medieval thought and greatly influenced the development of Western science.

Augustine maintained that the universe was formed according to order, form, and number by an intelligent Creator and was thus intelligible. This reinforced the neo-Platonic belief in the mathematization of nature that later proved central to the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. Augustine's emphasis on the meaning and direction of human history prepared the way for developmental thinking—understanding things in terms of their origins and causal antecedents.