The Life
Augustine was born in 354 in the small Roman city of Thagaste in North Africa. His mother Saint Monica was a devout Christian; his father was a pagan. Augustine was given the best classical education available, but as a young man he fell into a long concubinage, fathered an illegitimate son, joined the Manichaean sect for nine years, and pursued an ambitious career as a teacher of rhetoric. His mother prayed for him with tears for many years. He moved from Carthage to Rome to Milan, where in 386 he heard Saint Ambrose preach, was converted in the famous garden scene (“Take up and read”), and was baptized at Easter 387. After his mother’s death at Ostia, he returned to Africa, was made a priest by popular acclamation in 391, and became bishop of Hippo in 395. He served as bishop for thirty-five years, wrote the Confessions, the City of God, and a thousand other works, and reposed in 430 as the Vandals besieged his city. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on June 15 as “Blessed Augustine.”
Monica was a devout Christian married to a pagan. Her son Augustine showed brilliant intellectual promise from his earliest years, but as he grew up he wandered far from the Faith. He took a concubine. He had an illegitimate son. He joined the Manichaean sect for nine years. He pursued worldly success at Carthage, Rome, and Milan. Through all of these years his mother prayed for him without ceasing. She wept for him daily. She fasted for him. She sought out priests and bishops to dispute with him; one of them refused, telling her, “Go on your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should be lost.” Monica took the words as a prophecy. She held to it for many more years, until at last she saw her son baptized in the Milan baptistery in 387.
In the late summer of 386, Augustine was sitting in the garden of his lodging at Milan, deeply troubled in soul. He had been struggling for months with the call to abandon his old life and become a Christian. He could not bring himself to make the break. He wept. He paced. He cried out to the Lord in despair at his own weakness. As he sat under a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice from the next garden chant in a sing-song way: “Take up and read, take up and read.” He took it as a sign from heaven. He picked up the Letters of Saint Paul that lay beside him and read the first verse his eye fell on: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh.” In that single moment the conversion of his soul was complete. He went at once to tell his mother Monica. She wept for joy.
After Augustine’s baptism in 387 and his mother’s death at Ostia, he returned to Africa intending to live the rest of his life in quiet contemplation at his ancestral estate at Thagaste. He had founded a small monastic community there with a few like-minded friends. In 391 he visited the coastal city of Hippo Regius on a pious errand. The local bishop Valerius was preaching that day on the desperate need of the church for more priests. The congregation, knowing of Augustine’s presence and reputation, seized him on the spot and brought him forward for ordination. Augustine wept bitterly. He had not wanted the priesthood. He accepted the call as the will of God. He was ordained a priest at Hippo in 391, made coadjutor bishop in 395, and became sole bishop of Hippo when Valerius reposed shortly afterward. He would serve as bishop for thirty-five years.
During his thirty-five years as bishop of Hippo, Augustine wrote at an extraordinary rate. His student Possidius counted some 1,030 separate works in his library after his death. The most famous are the Confessions (composed 397–400, the first Western Christian autobiography, addressed as a long prayer to God), the City of God (composed 413–426, the great theological response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410), the De Trinitate (composed 400–420, the foundational Western treatise on the Trinity), and a stream of sermons, letters, and polemical works against the Manichaean, Donatist, and Pelagian sects. He preached daily. He answered hundreds of letters. He worked, by his own account, until he could no longer hold a pen. The theological tradition of the Latin Christian West owes much of its foundational shape to his work.
After Augustine’s baptism at Milan, he and his mother Monica prepared to return to Africa. They traveled south to Ostia (the port of Rome) to take ship. While they were waiting at Ostia, Monica fell ill. A few days before her death, mother and son were sitting at a window overlooking the inner garden of the inn, watching the Tiber flow toward the sea. They began to talk together about the things of God — about the eternal life that awaits the saints, about the deep contemplation of God himself. As they talked, both of them experienced together a deep mystical moment in which the eternal kingdom seemed for an instant to open before them. Augustine recorded the moment in Book IX of the Confessions. It is one of the deepest descriptions of mystical experience in the entire Western Christian tradition. Soon afterward Monica reposed in peace. She had seen her son saved.
In 429 the Vandal armies of Genseric crossed from Spain to North Africa. They moved rapidly across the African provinces, sacking cities and laying siege to those that resisted. By the summer of 430 they had reached Hippo. The city was besieged. Augustine, by then nearly seventy-six and in failing health, refused to flee. He stayed with his flock. He had the seven penitential psalms hung on the walls of his cell so that he could read them and weep over his own sins continually. He prayed for the Christian community of Africa as the Vandal siege closed in. He reposed in peace on August 28, 430, surrounded by his clergy. The Vandals captured Hippo shortly afterward and burned much of the city, but they spared his cathedral and the great library of his works.
The verse from Saint Paul that converted Augustine in the garden at Milan was Romans 13:14. He had been struggling for months to break with his old life. He could not bring himself to do it. He picked up the Letters of Paul, opened them at random at the child’s prompting, and his eye fell on this single verse. It went straight to where he had been resisting. “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ” — the call to clothe oneself in Christ as a new garment, to leave behind the old way of life, to take up the new identity given in baptism. “Make not provision for the flesh” — the call to break with the bodily attachments that had been holding him back. The single verse pierced him. The conversion of his soul was complete. The verse has continued to convert Christian souls for sixteen centuries.
The Eastern Orthodox tradition has had a complicated relationship with Augustine. He is commemorated on June 15 in the Orthodox Synaxarion (added by Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite in 1819 and adopted in Russia in the nineteenth century). The Orthodox liturgical hymn for his feast names him “a bright vessel of the divine Spirit and revealer of the city of God.” At the same time, certain elements of his theology — particularly his doctrine of original sin (which goes beyond the Eastern patristic consensus), his treatment of grace and predestination, and his Triadology (which provided some of the foundation for the later Western addition of the filioque to the Nicene Creed) — are not received in the Eastern tradition without significant reservations. The Orthodox Church therefore typically calls him “Blessed Augustine” rather than “Saint Augustine,” acknowledging his sanctity and theological importance while reserving qualified theological judgment.
Augustine gives the Christian Church a particular gift: the proof that no human soul is too far gone to be reached by the Lord’s grace. He had spent his youth in moral and intellectual confusion. He had taken a concubine. He had fathered an illegitimate son. He had joined a heretical sect for nine years. He had pursued worldly success across half the empire. He had resisted his mother’s tears and his own conscience for many years. The Lord reached him anyway. The restless heart that he describes in the opening of the Confessions is the heart of every human being: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.” Augustine shows us, in his own life, what it looks like for that restless heart to find its rest at last in Christ. May the same grace reach our own restless hearts and the restless hearts of those we love.