Professor DeWolf lectured for six hours on the theology of Augustine, the North African bishop who, after nearly thirty years of ribald womanizing, became the first great genius of comprehensive Christian theology. Augustine had made Christianity at least as respectable philosophically as Manicheanism, Neo-Platonism, and astrology, its chief rivals among Mediterranean intellectuals in the early fifth century A.D. His doctrines of church authority helped the Vatican survive the Middle Ages, the eight hundred years that followed the destruction of the Roman Empire.
