St. Augustine of Hippo

The restless years

Augustine was born November 13, 354, at Thagaste in Roman North Africa, to Patricius, a pagan, and St. Monica, a Christian whose prayers would follow him for the next thirty-three years. Sent to Carthage at seventeen to study rhetoric, he did what gifted seventeen-year-olds do in big cities. He took a mistress, with whom he lived faithfully for about fifteen years and had a son, Adeodatus — facts he reports in the Confessions without varnish, and which should be handled the way he handled them: as the truth about a man God had not finished with.

At nineteen, reading Cicero’s Hortensius, he was set on fire for wisdom — and went looking for it in the wrong place. For roughly nine years he was a hearer among the Manichees, a sect offering a rationalist-sounding cosmology and a convenient doctrine that evil was not really his fault. The spell broke when the sect’s celebrated teacher Faustus turned out, on cross-examination, to be a charming lightweight. Augustine drifted through skepticism, moved to Rome to teach, and in 384 won the professorship of rhetoric in Milan — the imperial city, where his career could crest, and where, without his planning it, a bishop was waiting.

Milan, Ambrose, and the voice in the garden

Augustine went to hear Bishop Ambrose of Milan preach as a professional courtesy — one rhetorician auditing another — and stayed because the content kept landing. Ambrose read the Old Testament in a way that dissolved the Manichean objections Augustine had thought fatal, and the philosophical books of the Platonists cleared away his crude picture of God. By the summer of 386 the argument was over and Augustine knew it. What remained was the will. He wanted conversion the way an exhausted man wants to get up in the morning: genuinely, and not yet.

The end came in a garden in Milan, and he tells it in Book VIII of the Confessions. Torn apart by his own divided will, weeping under a fig tree, he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house chanting, over and over, “tolle lege, tolle lege” — “take up and read.” He could remember no children’s game with those words. Taking it as a command from God, he picked up the volume of St. Paul he had left with his friend Alypius and read the first passage his eyes fell on: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries — but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (Romans 13:13–14). He needed to read no further. “Instantly,” he writes, “as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.”

At the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptized Augustine, together with Adeodatus and Alypius — with Monica alive to see the answer to her seventeen years of prayer. She died months later at Ostia, as they waited to sail home to Africa, telling her son her work was complete.

Bishop of Hippo: the reluctant shepherd

Augustine returned to Africa intending a quiet life of prayer and study with friends. It lasted about three years. Visiting the port city of Hippo Regius in 391, he was recognized in church, and the congregation — in the direct fashion of the age — seized him and demanded his ordination on the spot. He wept through it, and obeyed. By 395 he was bishop of Hippo, and for the next thirty-five years the small city held one of the largest minds in history: preaching almost daily, judging disputes, answering letters from across the Mediterranean, and defending the faith through the great controversies of the age — against the Donatists on the Church, and against the Pelagians on grace.

It was the Pelagian battle that earned his title. Against the claim that human willpower can climb to God on its own, Augustine argued from Scripture and from his own biography — no one knew better than he that his conversion had been a rescue, not an achievement. The Church calls him the Doctor of Grace: the great teacher that everything, from first desire to final perseverance, is God’s gift.

The Confessions, the City of God, and the end

Around 397–400 Augustine wrote the Confessions — the first great autobiography in Western literature, and something stranger and better than autobiography: the whole story is told as one long prayer, a man narrating his own life to God in front of everyone. Sixteen centuries later it remains the book most likely to be pressed into a would-be convert’s hands. After Rome fell to Alaric in 410 and pagans blamed the Christians, he answered with The City of God, twenty-two books on the two cities — the earthly and the heavenly — that contend for every human heart until the end of time. His surviving output runs to some hundred books, hundreds of letters, and hundreds of sermons.

He died as his world did. In the spring of 430 the Vandals crossed into Africa and besieged Hippo; Augustine, seventy-five, remained with his people, had the penitential psalms written out and hung on his wall, and prayed them from his bed as the siege ground on outside. He died on August 28, 430 — the date the Church has kept as his feast ever since, one day after his mother’s. His relics rest in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia, Italy.

Feast day, patronages, and why brewers

St. Augustine’s feast is August 28, the anniversary of his death. He was among the first four Doctors of the Church named in 1298, and his influence on Catholic theology — on grace, the sacraments, the Trinity, the Church, and the interior life — is second to no other Father’s.

His patronages read like his résumé, with one wink. Theologians, obviously — he is their prince. Printers, by extension of the staggering literary output that medieval copyists and then early printers labored over. Converts and seekers, above all — anyone still mid-search. And brewers: a patronage tradition assigns him on the logic of his own misspent youth — the patron of the party crowd he once ran with, proof that the road out of the tavern can end in a mitre. The Church has a sense of humor, and Augustine, of all saints, would get the joke.

In Their Words

Prayers