Naomh An Lae - Saint Of The Day

St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) bishop and doctor of the Church

"You
have made us for yourself, O Lord and our heart is restless until it
rests in you." This quotation from the beginning of the Confessions of Saint Augustine sums up the intellectual and spiritual journey of this extraordinary man. 

A Berber with Roman citizenship


Augustine, a Roman
African, was born in 354 in Tagaste, North Africa, to a pagan father
named Patricius and a Christian mother named Monica. He may have been a
Berber by race but his family name, Aurelius, suggests his family had
Roman citizenship from the Edict of Caracalla in 212. 

Teenage years: Latin literature and a hedonistic lifestyle

At
11, Augustine was sent to school at Madaurus, where he became familiar
with Latin literature, came home for two years and then went to study
rhetoric in Carthage. At Carthage he got into a hedonistic lifestyle. "I
came to Carthage, and all around me in my ears were the activities of
impure loves. I was not yet in love, but I loved the idea of love" (Confessions
3:51). He began a relationship that lasted thirteen years with a young
woman whom he never names: she became his concubine. "It was a sweet
thing to be loved, and more sweet still when I was able to enjoy the
body of a woman" (Confessions 3:51). She gave birth to his son Adeodatus, who died when was about eighteen.

Teaching grammar and rhetoric at Tagaste, Carthage, Rome and Milan

After
teaching grammar at Tagaste (373-4), Augustine moved to Carthage where
he conducted a school of rhetoric for the next nine years (374-383) and
then went to Rome. where an introduction to the prefect of the City of
Rome, Symmachus, eventually secured him the post of professor of
rhetoric at the imperial court at Milan in 384. Although he was
interested in Manichaeism, this began to change at Milan, where he
became interested in Neoplatonism. His mother Monica had followed him
there, persuaded him to put away his concubine and was pressuring him to
become a Christian. But it was the bishop of Milan, Ambrose, who had
most influence over Augustine. Ambrose was a master of rhetoric like
Augustine himself, but older and more experienced.

Conversion

He was influenced by reading the life
of Saint Anthony of the Desert, who when he read "Go, sell all you have,
and give to the poor, and come and follow me", did just that. While
experiencing the pulls and tugs of this crisis, Augustine was sitting
one day in a garden and heard the voice of a child repeating a chant: Tolle, lege! Tolle, lege! "Take
up and read! Take up and read!" Interpreted this as a call from God to
take up the Bible, he did so and read from the passage in Romans
13:13-14: "Let us live decently as people do in the daytime: no drunken
orgies, no promiscuity or licentiousness, and no wrangling or jealousy.
Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ; forget about satisfying your
bodies with all their cravings." He did not need to read any further. A
light of serenity pierced his darkness and all doubt melted away from
him (Confessions 8:29).

Baptism and return to Africa

Augustine
then formed a lay community near Milan at Cassiciacum. His friend
Alypius whom he knew from Tagaste was also a member and both along with
Adeodatus were baptised by Ambrose at Easter 387. In August 387 Alypius
was in the company of Augustine, Monica, Adeodatus, Navigius (the
brother of Augustine) and Evodius (a North African companion) when they
travelled to the port of Ostia with the intention of sailing back to
North Africa to establish a lay community at Tagaste. Monica, however,
died at Ostia on the way and was buried there.

Bishop of Hippo

Augustine
and Alypius lived a community life for a while at Tagaste (388-391).
His friend Possidius, who later wrote a life of Augustine, was also a
member of that community and later bishop of Calama. But this community
life ended unexpectedly when Augustine was pressed into priesthood by
the aging bishop and community at Hippo. Five years later he became
bishop of Hippo. Alypius too became a priest and became bishop of
Tagaste, where he remained till his death in 430. Augustine lived a
monastic or community life at the episcopal residence in Hippo.

Synods, sermons, writings, and letters

The next
thirty years were turbulent for the Church: the Vandals were destroying
the Latin culture; the city of Rome was losing its influence; and there
were controversies with the heresies of Donatism and Pelagianism in the
Church of North Africa. Bishop Augustine spent a lot of time attending
synods and meetings of bishops in Carthage and other cities of North
Africa. He also wrote many letters both within and outside Africa. The
range of his writings is vast: the two best known works are his Confessions, an account of his own path to God and The City of God, which was occasioned by the fall of Rome to Alaric and the Visigoths in 410. But there are also Expositions on the Psalms, and works On the Trinity, On Grace and Free Will, On Original Sin and a host of others.

Death 

Augustine was seventy-six when the Vandals
came through Gaul and Spain to North Africa and were at the gate of the
city of Hippo as he lay dying inside and they took it over as their
capital after he died. His mortal remains were taken first to Sardinia
and then to Pavia in Lombardy, northern Italy, where they can still be
seen today. Along with Saints Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great he
is regarded as one of the four doctors of the Western Church.

Influence

The vastness of his theological work
and the fact that it was catalogued and preserved has meant that every
generation of Christian thinking has been able to be in dialogue with
the issues he treated right up to the present day. Pope Benedict, who in
1953 wrote his doctoral thesis on "The People and the House of God in
Augustine's Doctrine of the Church", dedicated three catecheses on Augustine and his spirituality at his Wednesday audiences in January 2008 that are well worth reading.