THE LIFE OF ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO[1]

       Augustine was born in Tagaste, about fifty miles from Hippo in North Africa, in 354. His father, Patricius, was a minor Roman official who became a Christian only at the end of his life. His mother Monica, was deeply committed to the Catholic faith. Neither parent was a saint in the beginning; Monica became one in trying to bring her son to the Lord. Like many middle class parents, they were extremely interested in their son’s education.

       If his parents appear rather ordinary and perhaps disturbingly familiar, Augustine brings them quite remarkably to life in his writings. He praises his father for going beyond his means to supply what was necessary for his son’s studies. “But yet,” he says, “this same father did not trouble himself how I grew toward You, O Lord, nor how chaste I was, so long as I was skillful in speaking-however barren I was to Your telling. O Lord, who are the sole true and good Lord of my heart, which is your field.”

Monica, the Mother of Augustine

       Of Monica, Augustine tells us that she wept more for his spiritual death than most mothers weep for the bodily deaths of their children. “For she saw that I was dead by that faith and spirit which she had from You, and You heard her, O Lord.”

       Augustine also relates how a local bishop (St. Ambrosius) once turned away Monica’s pleas that he would have a talk with her son with this comment. “Go your way and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She accepted the answer, says Augustine, as though it were a voice from heaven.

       More than a few mothers have been able to identify with Monica, at least with the general outlines of her concerns. She had a wayward son who not only rejected the Church in which he had been enrolled as a catechumen, but was living a life which in many ways was a dissolute and immoral one. What a supreme irony it must have been for Monica when Augustine, at his mother's breast, tore himself from his mistress to prepare for marriage to a “pleasing maiden,” only to grow impatient with celibacy and take another concubine. Fortunately, God seems to have given Monica a lively intelligence and a sense of humor, as well as a remarkable degree of persistence.

Life of Shame

       From the ages of eighteen to twenty-seven, he lived a life which, he says, caused him much shame. “For in this lay my sin, that not in Him but in His creatures-myself and the rest– I sought for pleasures, honors and truths, falling thereby into sorrows, troubles and errors.” And  again, ”For no one is known to another as intimately as he is known to himself, and yet no one is so well known even to himself that he can be sure as to his own conduct on the morrow.”

       Augustine did earn a living, opening a school of rhetoric. In those days rhetoric was the study of philosophy, as well as skill in speaking, and this required Augustine to be familiar with the intellectual currents of his day and the writings of earlier times. He also become involved with the Manichaeism, a sect to which he gave decreasing allegiance over a period of nine years as it became apparent to him that its leaders were unable to provide satisfactory answers to his probing questions. Still, Manichaeism was a religion and, in its own way, a step closer to the faith. Equally to Milan, where he had won the post of professor of rhetoric, he was by now a professional success and a personal wreck. Unhappy with his lifestyle, dissatisfied with Manichaeism,” gnawed within.” as he put it, by a hunger, he could not explain, Augustine was a disturbed young man. But in choosing Milan, he had gone to precisely the right place.

Conversion

       It happened that Milan was the See city of a great bishop of the Catholic Church, Saint Ambrose. He was known throughout the world as a courageous leader and brilliant exponent of Catholic dogma. Augustine, with Monica at his side, went to hear Ambrose preach, at first only to listen to his eloquence. Yet he was led to a new understanding of the Bible and of the Christian faith by the bishop’s explanations. The Scriptures, which has seemed to him to be “oldwives’ tales,” now seemed to come alive. It was the beginning of the end of Augustine’s former self. Something was happening. His own words are the best account of what happened when he and his friend Alypius went to pray in a garden in Milan...and he was never the same again.

St. Augustine, Servant of the Church

       Then, as now, the Church suffered from a clergy shortage. In those days, talented persons were pressed into the service of the Church, frequently despite their heated or tearful objections. It happened in this way to Augustine while he was on a visit to Hippo. The aged bishop of Hippo, Valerius, was looking for an assistant, and both he and his people decided that they wanted Augustine. He at first declined the honor but finally accepted for the good of the Church. When the bishop died five years later, Augustine took his place. His life and those of many others would never be the same again.

       From 396 to 430, the man who now desired above all else “complete detachment from the tumult of transient things” was one of the busiest and most productive men in the world. Like any priest or bishop, he ministered to the spiritual needs of his people. He functioned as a civil magistrate at a time when this was part of the job of being bishop. He travelled to meetings and councils, some forty to fifty journeys in thirty-five years as bishop. He went to the metropolitan See in Carthage, a trip which took nine days, some twenty or thirty times. He was often gone from Hippo for four or five months at a time. He defended the Church. The record of his debates with Felix the Manichaean in the church at Hippo tells us that when the debate was over, Felix was converted. Above all, he kept up his extensive writings, which was his principal output, his main means for expounding the faith. In all, he produced over two hundred books and nearly a thousand sermons, letters, and other treatises.

       Among these many writings was the Confessions, an immensely popular book which has been read, meditated upon, and imitated by many generations. One of his greatest literary works, The City of God, was occasioned by the sacking of Rome by the armies in the year 410. This was a devastating blow to the ancient world. Many asserted that the great city had been destroyed because so many Romans had abandoned the pagan gods in favor of Christianity, which was powerless to protect them. Augustine set out to demolish that argument in a monumental book which appeared in installments over the next thirteen years. Its fundamental thesis is that the ultimate importance of a “city” is not measured by its temporal significance, for in fact there are only two cities which really matter.

       “And thus it came to pass.” He wrote, “that though there are very many and great nations all over the earth...yet there are no more than two kinds of human society, which we may justly call two cities... The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish each its kind, they live in peace after each its kind.”

       Augustine had expressed the most profound existential choice that can confront a human being. It is as valid now as ever. One must either place one’s trust in God, or place it elsewhere. On this issue, there is no middle ground.

       “I flung myself on the ground somehow under a fig tree and gave free rein to my tears; they streamed and flooded from my eyes, an acceptable sacrifice to you. And I kept saying to you, not perhaps in these words, but with this sense: And you, O Lord, how long? How long Lord? Will You be angry forever? Remember not our former iniquities. For I felt that it was these which were holding me fast…

       “I was asking myself these questions, weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or girl, I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain” Take it and read, take it and read’ At this I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these, but I could not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall….

       “So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for when I stood up to move away I had to put down the book containing Paul’s epistles. I seized it and opened it, and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell: Not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess, and lust, not in quarrelling and jealousy, Rather, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the desires of the flesh (Romans 13:13-14). I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”

Monica’s Death

       In the fall of the year 386, Augustine, having turned away totally from a life of sin, resigned his teaching position and began his preparation for baptism. Bishop Ambrose baptized him during the Easter vigil in 387, along with his son Adeodatus, then fifteen. On the way back to Africa, Augustine and his mother were delayed in Ostia, where Monica fell ill and died, perfectly happy and fully at peace.

Servant

       Having found the truth at last, Augustine, in characteristic fashion, sought to embrace it fully, Back in Tagaste, he shared a house with companions who, like himself, had turned away from the world. They observed rules of discipline and personal poverty, did manual work, and spent much of their time debating questions of the faith. Here was the nucleus of the fellowship perpetuated today in Augustinian communities throughout the world. It seemed to Augustine that his days of working and traveling were over. But God has a way of interfering with human plans, and in this respect Augustine’s life was no different from our own.

Monastic Ideal

       Augustine’s demanding responsibilities never induced him to abandon his monastic ideal. Until his last hour, he remained inflexibly a monk. As a priest, he founded a monastery on a portion of the church grounds given to him for this purpose by Bishop Valerius. As bishop, he turned his Episcopal residence into a monastery in which the members of his household lived the common life.

       The monastic ideal of Saint Augustine came to full fruition centuries later when numerous religious communities adopted his Rule sprang up. They became a powerful force in evangelization, preaching the Gospel to the poor in the cities, bringing the Good News to the New World, defending the true faith in the pulpits and in universities, taking the initiative in founding schools, orphanages, and hospitals, and doing other works of charity.

       In the year 430, four years after the City of God was completed, Augustine fell ill while a Vandal Horde laid siege to the gates of Hippo. He placed the penitential psalms of David near his bed and spent his final days in prayer, urging his brethren to preserve his library and his other works. The monastic foundations he established were eventually destroyed, but his spiritual heritage has become the world’s common property.

       To the world at large, Saint Augustine is known above all as the great thinker who powerfully influenced philosophy and theology, the thrust of the spirituality of the Latin Church, and the development of apostolic endeavors. The source from which he drew the great strength for his achievement should not be overlooked: his monastic ideal of contemplation and the search for God.

Humanity of Augustine

Another fact too easily overlooked is that the enduring appeal of Augustine does not lie only in his extraordinary intellectual and spiritual achievements, but also in his humanity. It may have been latter, in fact, which made the former possible, for it is said that grace builds on nature.

We have had saints who were sinners, but precious few have written about their past. How many saints have told us as he did about playing rotten tricks on his mother, about performing vile acts in the shadow of a church, about loving a son born out of wedlock, about breaking a heart when a love affair ended, about going to church not out of belief but to hear a good speaker, about praying to God to give him chastity..” But not yet? It is good for us to meditate on such things, and that is why the Church places saints like Augustine before us. Few can equal him in intellectual stature. All can match him in human frailty.  We must also remember that Augustine’s life of sin ended with his conversion. But his life for God was just beginning.

       Adeodatus (Gift of God). Augustine was himself a gift of God to the Catholic Church and to the whole of the civilized world. To men and women throughout the ages, he has seemed and relevant than have many of their contemporaries. He is the first great figure of the modern age, for entire currents of modern thought have germinated in the ground plowed and seeded by this saint, the great Doctor of the West. Adeodatus. Thanks be to God.

[1] Cfr. John E. ROTELLE, OSA: Lord, Let Me Know You: devotions to Saint Augustine of Hippo, Augustinian Press, Villanova, PA 1987.