Saint Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born at Tagaste in Roman Africa on 13 November 354. ¹² His mother, Monica, was a fervent Christian whose influence on him Benedict XVI calls enormous. ¹ He studied grammar at Tagaste and Madaura, and from 370 rhetoric at Carthage.

At Carthage he read Cicero's Hortensius, and it woke something up. "The book changed my feelings," he wrote later; he longed for "the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour." ¹ He wanted truth from that moment on. It took him another sixteen years to accept where it was.

He became a Manichean, drawn by a system that seemed to reconcile reason with Christian faith, and was eventually disillusioned with it. ¹ He lived in ways he later described without excuse. He moved to Rome and then to Milan chasing a better teaching post, and got a prestigious one. ¹

Monica followed him. Her profile tells that half of the story: to Rome, then to Milan, after a grown man who did not want to be found.

In Milan he encountered Saint Ambrose, the bishop, whose allegorical reading of Scripture and grasp of Neo-Platonic philosophy dissolved the intellectual objections that had kept Augustine from the faith. ¹ The obstacle turned out to be a way of reading, not the text.

He was converted in August 386 and baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in Milan on 24 April 387. ¹ Monica died at Ostia later that same year, on the way home.

He returned to Africa intending to found a monastery and live quietly. Instead he was ordained a priest at Hippo in 391 and its bishop in 395, and spent the next thirty-five years preaching, judging disputes, and writing the works that shaped Western theology. ¹ He died at Hippo on 28 August 430, aged nearly seventy-six. ¹

Saint Augustine is the patron saint of converts, of theologians, and of printers. ² The first two are the same fact seen twice: he is the patron of people who came to the faith the hard way, and of people whose work is to think about it carefully.

The feast of Saint Augustine is celebrated on August 28, the day of his death. ¹² His mother Monica is remembered the day before, on August 27, which is not a coincidence.

Augustine wanted the truth from nineteen, when Cicero's Hortensius got hold of him, and he did not accept the faith until he was thirty-two. ¹ Wanting it and living as though you wanted it turn out to be different things, and he is honest about the gap in a way few writers since have managed.

His obstacles were real ones. Scripture looked crude to him until Ambrose showed him a better way to read it, and then the objection simply dissolved. ¹ People who have been told their questions are a failure of nerve can take some comfort there.

He gave the best years of his youth to a system he later judged false, and to a life he never defended. ¹ None of it disqualified him. Most of what he had to teach came out of it.

If you are the one being prayed for rather than the one praying, his half of the Monica story is the useful half. He was not persuaded. He was not grateful at the time. He came home anyway.