Thinkers Timeline

Augustine of Hippo was a Christian bishop, theologian, and writer in late Roman North Africa. He is one of the most influential Christian thinkers in history. His ideas shaped Western Christianity for over 1,500 years and continue to do so. He was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria. He died in 430 CE in Hippo Regius, a North African city now also in Algeria. He came from a mixed religious household. His father Patricius was a Roman pagan official who converted to Christianity only on his deathbed. His mother Monica was a devout Christian who pushed for her son's conversion for years. Augustine was a clever boy. He studied rhetoric in Carthage, the major North African city. He moved to Rome and then to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric. He took a long-term partner who is unnamed in his writings. They had a son together. He sent her away when his mother arranged a more socially advantageous marriage that he never made. As a young man he was attracted to Manichaeism, a religion that mixed Christian, Persian, and Buddhist elements. He spent nine years as a Manichaean. He found its answers eventually unsatisfying. In Milan, under the influence of Bishop Ambrose and his own reading of Plato and the New Testament, he converted to Christianity in 386. He was 31. His mother died shortly after, having seen what she had wanted. He returned to North Africa. He became a priest in 391, then bishop of Hippo in 395. He served as bishop for 35 years. He wrote constantly. His Confessions (around 400 CE) is one of the first major spiritual autobiographies. His City of God (begun 413) is a vast work of theology and political thought. He died as Vandal armies were besieging his city.

Khadija bint Khuwaylid was a successful Arabian merchant in 6th- and 7th-century Mecca. She is honoured in Islamic tradition as the first Muslim and as the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad. She was born around 555 CE in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Her family belonged to the Quraysh, the powerful tribe that controlled the city. Her father, Khuwaylid ibn Asad, was a respected merchant and tribal leader. After his death in battle, Khadija took over the family business. She built it up through her own skill until her trade caravans were among the largest in Arabia. Her caravans travelled between Mecca, Yemen in the south, and Syria in the north. People in Mecca called her al-Tahirah, meaning 'the Pure One', because of her honest dealings. She had been married twice before. Both husbands had died, and she had children from those marriages. By her late thirties she was a wealthy widow, running a major business in a male-dominated society. She refused many marriage offers from leading men of Mecca. In 595 CE, she heard about a young man named Muhammad who was known for his honesty. She hired him to lead one of her trade caravans to Syria. He returned with strong profits and a strong reputation. She then proposed marriage to him through a relative. He accepted. He was about 25; she was probably around 40, though some sources suggest 28. Their marriage lasted 25 years. She supported his religious mission until her death in 619 CE, the year Muhammad called the 'Year of Sorrow'.

Rabia of Basra was an early Sufi mystic and saint. Sufism is the mystical tradition within Islam. It emphasises the inner experience of God rather than only outward religious practice. Rabia is one of the most important early figures in this tradition. She lived in what is now southern Iraq. Her full name was Rabia al-Adawiyya al-Basri. 'Al-Basri' means 'from Basra'. She was probably born around 717 CE and died around 801 CE, living to nearly 80 years old. The exact dates are uncertain. Almost everything we know about her comes from later Sufi writers who collected and shaped stories about her over the following centuries. The traditional life story tells of great hardship. She was born the fourth daughter to a poor family in Basra. Her parents died when she was young, possibly in a famine. She was kidnapped or sold into slavery as a child. Her master treated her harshly. According to legend, he saw a light shining around her one night while she was at prayer. He freed her in awe. After her release, she lived alone in the desert for some years. Then she returned to Basra. She lived a life of severe poverty and constant prayer. She refused to marry, despite many proposals from important men. She said she belonged only to God. Disciples gathered around her. She taught a generation of Sufis. Her teaching focused on pure love of God, not love motivated by hope of paradise or fear of hell. Her grave was a place of pilgrimage for centuries. Modern scholars debate how much of the traditional story is reliable history.

Hildegard of Bingen was a German nun, writer, composer, and healer. She was one of the most important thinkers in medieval Europe. She was born in 1098 in a small village in what is now western Germany. Her family were minor nobles. She was the tenth child. At that time, some families gave a child to the Church. This was called a 'tithe', a kind of gift. Hildegard was sent to a small group of religious women when she was about eight. She lived with an older woman called Jutta. Jutta taught her to read and write Latin. Hildegard spent almost her whole life in religious houses. She never travelled far in the usual sense. But her ideas travelled across Europe. From childhood, Hildegard said she saw bright lights. She called these visions. She thought they came from God. For many years she did not tell anyone. She was afraid people would laugh at her. When she was about 42, she finally began to write them down. Her first book, Scivias, took ten years to finish. The Pope himself read parts of it and said it was good work. After Jutta died, Hildegard became the leader of her small group. She then founded a new house for women at Rupertsberg, near the River Rhine. Later she founded a second house at Eibingen. She wrote books on God, on medicine, on plants, and on music. She composed many songs, which are still performed today. She wrote nearly 400 letters. Kings, popes, and abbots asked her for advice. She died on 17 September 1179, aged about 81. The Catholic Church made her a saint in 2012, over 800 years after her death.

Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), a religious figure known in Hebrew as Rambam and in Arabic as Musa ibn Maymun, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician whose work shaped Jewish thought for centuries and influenced Christian and Islamic philosophy as well. He was born in Córdoba, in the part of al-Andalus then under Almoravid rule, where the great intellectual flowering of Jewish and Islamic civilisation was at its height. His father was a rabbinic judge. When Maimonides was about ten years old, the city fell to the Almohads, a Berber dynasty whose rulers offered non-Muslims the choice of conversion, exile, or death. The family was forced into a decade of wandering through Spain and North Africa before settling in Fustat, near Cairo, around 1166. There Maimonides rose to become the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and physician to the court of Saladin. He wrote in Arabic (using Hebrew letters) and in Hebrew. His three major works changed Jewish intellectual life permanently. The Commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168, in Arabic) made rabbinic law accessible to wider audiences and included his famous Thirteen Principles of Faith. The Mishneh Torah (1170-1180, in Hebrew), his fourteen-volume code of Jewish law, organised the entire body of talmudic tradition into a single systematic presentation. The Guide for the Perplexed (completed around 1190, in Arabic) addressed those caught between traditional faith and Aristotelian philosophy, offering a sophisticated synthesis that remains one of the great works of medieval philosophy. He died in Fustat in 1204; tradition holds that his body was carried to Tiberias in the Galilee for burial, where his tomb is still visited. His influence on subsequent Jewish thought is difficult to overstate; the phrase from Moses to Moses there was none like Moses reflects the esteem in which later generations held him.

Eihei Dogen (1200-1253) was a Japanese Buddhist monk whose writings founded the Soto school of Zen Buddhism and produced one of the most original bodies of religious philosophical work in East Asian history. He was born in Kyoto into a high-ranking aristocratic family and reportedly lost both parents in early childhood — his father when he was two or three, his mother at seven or eight. These early losses are traditionally said to have awakened in him a deep awareness of impermanence that would shape his later teaching. At thirteen he entered the Tendai Buddhist monastic order on Mount Hiei, the great centre of Japanese Buddhist learning. He studied there for several years but grew dissatisfied with what he saw as the corruption and decline of Japanese Buddhism. Around 1223 he travelled to China, where he spent four years in Chan (Zen) monasteries seeking a genuine teacher. At Mount Tiantong he met Rujing, a rigorous Chan master in the Caodong (Soto) lineage, and under his teaching Dogen experienced the awakening he had been seeking. He returned to Japan in 1227 with Rujing's confirmation of his enlightenment and spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and establishing Soto Zen as a distinct tradition in Japan. He lived first at Kenninji in Kyoto, then founded Koshoji temple, and finally moved in 1243 to the remote mountains of Echizen Province, where he established Eiheiji — the monastery that remains the head temple of the Soto school. His magnum opus, the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), is a collection of ninety-five fascicles written over about twenty-two years, treating almost every aspect of Buddhist thought and practice with extraordinary philosophical depth and linguistic inventiveness. He wrote in Japanese rather than Chinese, a decision that made his work accessible to Japanese readers but also required him to invent much of the philosophical vocabulary he needed. He died at Kyoto in 1253 at age fifty-three. His influence on Japanese religion, aesthetics, and thought has been substantial; his international reception, particularly in the twentieth century, has made him one of the most studied Buddhist thinkers outside Asia.

Julian of Norwich was an English Christian mystic and theologian. She is thought to be the first woman to have written a book in English that has survived. She was born around 1342, probably in or near Norwich, England. Norwich at that time was one of the largest cities in England, a centre of trade and learning. Almost nothing is known about her early life. We do not even know her real name. The name Julian comes from the church of St Julian's in Norwich, where she later lived. In May 1373, when she was thirty years old, she became seriously ill. She thought she was going to die. While she lay close to death, she received a series of sixteen visions, which she called 'showings'. They came to her over the course of a day and night. She recovered from her illness and wrote down what she had seen. This first version is now called the Short Text. She then spent about twenty years thinking about what the visions meant. She became an anchoress. An anchoress was a woman who lived in a small cell attached to a church, dedicated to prayer and spiritual counsel. Her cell had a window onto the church so she could receive communion, and another window onto the street so she could speak with visitors. After two decades of reflection, she wrote a much longer version of her book, the Long Text. It is now called Revelations of Divine Love. She is known to have been alive as late as 1416, when she would have been about 74. She probably died not long after. She was famous enough in her lifetime that the pilgrim and writer Margery Kempe visited her for spiritual advice.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German friar, theologian, and biblical scholar whose objections to Catholic practice became the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation — a movement that reshaped European Christianity, politics, and culture, and whose effects continue to the present day. He was born at Eisleben in Saxony on 10 November 1483, the son of Hans Luder, a copper miner who eventually became a small mine owner, and Margarethe Luder. His father intended him for a legal career and sent him to study at the University of Erfurt, where he completed a master's degree in 1505. In July 1505, caught in a thunderstorm, he was thrown from his horse and vowed to Saint Anne that he would become a monk if she saved him. Two weeks later, against his father's wishes, he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. He was ordained priest in 1507, completed a doctorate in theology at Wittenberg in 1512, and was appointed professor of biblical studies at the new University of Wittenberg, where he remained for the rest of his life. His extensive study of scripture — particularly Paul's letter to the Romans — combined with his own spiritual struggles produced the theological breakthrough that would become the foundation of Protestant Christianity. On 31 October 1517, he sent a letter with his Ninety-Five Theses — academic propositions for debate, originally intended to challenge the sale of indulgences — to his archbishop; whether he actually nailed them to the church door at Wittenberg is uncertain. The theses spread rapidly through new printing technology, and what began as a scholarly dispute became a European crisis. In 1521 he refused to recant before the Diet of Worms, was excommunicated, and was sheltered at Wartburg Castle by his prince Frederick the Wise, where he translated the New Testament into German. He married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in 1525; they had six children. Over the following twenty-five years he wrote extensively — biblical commentaries, sermons, treatises, hymns, and the Small and Large Catechisms. He died in 1546 at Eisleben, the town of his birth. His legacy is deeply contested. He transformed European Christianity, made the Bible broadly accessible in German, and articulated principles that would shape modern ideas about conscience and authority. He also produced shockingly anti-Jewish writings in his later years that provided material for subsequent antisemitic use, and his political theology helped legitimise the brutal suppression of the 1524-1525 Peasants' War. Engaging honestly with Luther requires holding both dimensions of his legacy together.

Huldrych Zwingli was a Swiss priest and reformer. He is one of the three central figures of the Protestant Reformation, along with Martin Luther and John Calvin. He was born in 1484 in a small Alpine village in eastern Switzerland. He died in 1531, fighting in battle at the age of 47. Zwingli came from a prosperous farming family. He was a clever child and was sent away to study. He attended universities in Vienna and Basel, where he learned the new humanist scholarship of the early sixteenth century. He became a Catholic priest in 1506. In 1519 he became the main preacher at the great church in Zürich, then a small but proud city-state. Working independently of Luther in Germany, Zwingli began calling for major reforms in the Church. He led Zürich into a sweeping break with Rome. Under his guidance, Zürich removed statues and images from its churches. It banned the old Catholic Mass. It reorganised church and city government together. Zwingli died on the battlefield at Kappel in 1531, during a war between Protestant and Catholic Swiss cantons. He was killed as a chaplain carrying weapons. His death is one of the most striking facts about him.

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, was a Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, reformer, and writer whose works on contemplative prayer are among the classics of Christian spiritual literature. She was born in Ávila, in central Spain, into a family of converted Jewish heritage on her father's side — a background that carried dangers in Inquisition Spain and may have shaped her guarded approach to certain topics in her writing. Her paternal grandfather had been condemned by the Inquisition for reverting to Judaism; her father had purchased a certificate of hidalgo nobility to escape the associated disabilities. Teresa grew up devout and imaginative, famously attempting as a child to run away with her brother to become martyrs in North Africa. At twenty she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Ávila, where she spent nearly three decades living under the relaxed observance that had developed in many Spanish convents — with private cells, social visits, and considerable laxity about the original Carmelite rule. A serious illness in her early years as a nun nearly killed her and left lasting physical problems. In her middle years, around 1554, a period of intense spiritual experiences began — visions, locutions, and states she called the prayer of quiet and the prayer of union. In 1562 she founded the Convent of Saint Joseph in Ávila on a strict reformed observance of the Carmelite rule, beginning what would become the Discalced Carmelite reform. Over the following twenty years she founded sixteen more convents across Spain, negotiating with bishops, royal officials, financial backers, and opposing Carmelites. She also wrote extensively: The Book of Her Life (1565), The Way of Perfection (written for her nuns), The Interior Castle (1577, her most mature work), and detailed letters. She travelled constantly, organised effectively, and wrote with a distinctive combination of deep contemplative experience and practical wisdom. She died at Alba de Tormes in 1582, was canonised in 1622, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970 — one of the first women to receive that recognition.

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was a Kongolese Christian prophetess and political leader. She founded the Antonian movement, which imagined Christianity in Kongolese terms. She was born around 1684 near the mountain of Kibangu, in the Kingdom of Kongo (in what is now northern Angola and the western Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her family was of Kongolese nobility, though not wealthy. She was baptised Beatriz, following the Catholic faith of the Kongolese kings, but her Kikongo name was Kimpa Vita. The Kingdom of Kongo in her time was in deep crisis. A civil war that had begun in 1665 was still going on. The ancient capital, São Salvador, lay abandoned. Rival families fought for the throne. The wars produced thousands of captives, many of whom were sold into the Atlantic slave trade. Kongo had been officially Christian since 1491, but the Italian Capuchin missionaries often dismissed local religious practices as witchcraft. As a young woman, Kimpa Vita was trained as a nganga marinda, a Kongolese religious medium who consulted the spirit world for community healing. In August 1704, when she was about 20, she fell seriously ill. She said she died and came back to life. Now, she said, she was possessed by Saint Anthony, the popular Italian Catholic saint. Through her, Saint Anthony preached. She led a remarkable movement that reoccupied São Salvador in 1705. She won thousands of followers, including peasants and some nobles. In 1706, she was captured by King Pedro IV with help from the Capuchin missionaries. A church tribunal condemned her. She was burned at the stake on 2 July 1706, aged about 22. Her infant son, born just weeks before her capture, was spared.

Simon Kimbangu was a Congolese religious leader and the founder of Kimbanguism, one of the largest African-initiated churches in the world. He was born on 12 September 1887 (some sources say 1889) in the village of Nkamba, in the Lower Congo region. The area was then part of the Congo Free State, later the Belgian Congo. His family were members of the Kongo people. Kimbangu was educated at a British Baptist Missionary Society school. He was baptised in 1915 and worked as a Baptist catechist, teaching others the Bible. He was married to Marie Mwilu, who would later become an important leader in her own right. For several years he worked in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), doing jobs including palm oil work. He tried to ignore what he described as a divine calling to preach and heal. In April 1921, he returned to Nkamba and began his public ministry. He preached, healed the sick, and was said to raise the dead. Thousands of people came to see him. His ministry lasted only about five months. In September 1921, Belgian colonial authorities arrested him. He was tried in a military court and sentenced to death in October 1921. The Belgian King Albert I commuted this to life imprisonment with 120 lashes. Kimbangu spent the next 30 years in prison in Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville), nearly 2,000 kilometres from his home. He died there on 12 October 1951.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and resister against Hitler. He was born in 1906 in Breslau, then in Germany, now Wrocław in Poland. His father was a leading psychiatrist; his mother homeschooled the children. The family was educated, musical, and largely secular. When the teenage Dietrich announced he would study theology, his family was surprised but supportive. He earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1927, aged just 21. He was a brilliant student. In 1930 he spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. There he attended an African American Baptist church in Harlem, sang gospel hymns, and read the social gospel of writers like Walter Rauschenbusch. The experience changed him. He returned to Germany convinced that Christian faith required real engagement with the world, especially with the suffering and oppressed. Hitler took power in January 1933. Two days later, Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk attacking the Nazi 'leader principle'. The broadcast was cut off. Over the next decade he became one of the founding voices of the Confessing Church, which resisted the Nazification of German Protestantism. He ran an underground seminary at Finkenwalde. He helped Jews escape to Switzerland. He joined the German military resistance through the Abwehr (military intelligence), where his brother-in-law worked. He knew of plots to kill Hitler. In April 1943 he was arrested. He spent nearly two years in Tegel prison in Berlin, writing constantly. After the failed July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, his deeper involvement was discovered. On 9 April 1945, two weeks before American troops liberated the camp, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was 39.

Mahmoud Mohamed Taha was a Sudanese Islamic reformer, political thinker, civil engineer, and Sufi mystic, known to his followers as Ustadh ('the teacher') Mahmoud. He developed one of the most ambitious twentieth-century reinterpretations of Islam, which he called the Second Message of Islam. He was executed for apostasy by the Sudanese government in January 1985. He was 76. He was born in 1909 in a village near Rufa'a, on the eastern bank of the Blue Nile about 150 km south of Khartoum. His family came from a Sufi religious tradition linked to the Qadiriyya order. He was educated at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (later the University of Khartoum), graduating as a civil engineer in 1936. He worked briefly for Sudan Railways, then started his own engineering business in Rufa'a. His political life began with the founding of the Sudanese Republican Party in October 1945, an anti-monarchical, pro-independence movement seeking a Sudanese republic free of British-Egyptian colonial rule. He was imprisoned twice in 1946 by the British colonial administration, the second time for two years. During his second imprisonment and in a subsequent period of religious seclusion (khalwa) at his home in Rufa'a from 1948 to 1951, he developed the theological vision that would shape the rest of his life. He emerged from seclusion to lead a small but committed movement called the Republican Brotherhood, distinct from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood despite the similar name. He published his masterwork The Second Message of Islam in 1967. As President Gaafar Nimeiri's regime imposed Sharia law in Sudan from 1983, Taha distributed pamphlets opposing the move. He was arrested on 5 January 1985, tried for apostasy in a hasty proceeding he refused to recognise, and publicly hanged on 18 January 1985.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, teacher, poet, and peace activist. He is one of the most important Buddhist teachers of the modern world. Many readers in the West first met Buddhist ideas through his books. He was born in 1926 in central Vietnam, in what was then a French colony. He became a monk at the age of 16. He took the religious name Thich Nhat Hanh. 'Thich' is the religious surname taken by all Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns, after the family name of the Buddha. He studied Buddhism in Vietnam and later studied comparative religion at Princeton University in the United States. During the Vietnam War (1955-1975), he founded a movement called Engaged Buddhism. Monks, nuns, and lay people worked to help villagers caught in the war. They rebuilt destroyed villages, set up schools, and cared for refugees. They refused to take sides between the Communist North and the American-backed South. Both sides treated this as betrayal. In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh travelled to America to ask the United States to end the war. He met Martin Luther King Jr., who later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vietnamese government refused to let him return home. He lived in exile for 39 years. He founded a monastery in southern France called Plum Village in 1982. From there he wrote over 100 books and travelled the world teaching mindfulness. In 2018 he returned to Vietnam to die in the temple where he had become a monk. He died there in 2022, aged 95.

Hans Küng was a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian. A theologian is a scholar who studies the meaning and history of religion. He was born in 1928 in Sursee, a small town in central Switzerland. He died in 2021 in Tübingen, Germany, at the age of 93. Küng studied for the priesthood in Rome and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1954. From 1960 he was a professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1962 the Pope chose him as one of the youngest expert advisers at the Second Vatican Council. This was a great meeting of Catholic bishops that aimed to bring the Church into the modern world. Küng was one of the most famous and controversial Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He challenged the official teaching that the Pope could not be wrong on matters of faith and morals. He also criticised compulsory celibacy for priests and the ban on women priests. In 1979 the Vatican withdrew his licence to teach as a Catholic theologian. He kept his post at Tübingen and remained a Catholic priest. In his later years he led a global project on shared ethics across religions.