Saint Augustine of Hippo

His life was a passage through one storm after another. He was the unruly son who broke the heart of his gentle mother Monica for thirty years, a young man sunk in sensual pleasure and lost in the maze of heresy, until God’s grace “conquered” him and made him a towering pillar of faith, defending the Church as the Roman Empire collapsed.

No one in the history of the Church has told the story of his own life so carefully, honestly and painfully. Thanks to that, more than sixteen hundred years later, we can still sit beside Augustine and follow him step by step as he wanders off and comes home, as if reading a friend’s diary.

As he grew up, Augustine showed a sharp, brilliant mind. He loved Latin literature, especially the poetry of Virgil and the rhetoric of Cicero. Seeing their son’s talent, his parents scraped together the money to send him to Carthage — then the foremost center of culture and pleasure in North Africa — to study rhetoric.

In Carthage, the young student was quickly swept into the loose life of the big city. He lived with a woman, unmarried, for fifteen years and had a son, whom he named Adeodatus, meaning “Gift of God”.

Later, in his Confessions, Augustine spent many painful pages picking apart one sin of his youth, the theft of the pears: he and his friends climbed into a neighbor’s orchard, shook down a load of ripe pears and threw them to the pigs. He realized he had not stolen out of hunger or a craving for pears, but out of a sick pleasure in doing what was forbidden. That, he saw, is the heart of sin: the pride that wants to be its own master and defy the law of God. It was a teenager’s petty prank, yet decades later the old bishop still paused to analyze every hidden motive in it — as if that small detail shed the truest light on the fall of all humanity.

Learning that her son had fallen into heresy, Saint Monica was heartbroken and prayed for him day and night in tears. Once she went to a holy bishop to ask him to counsel her son, but the bishop only smiled and comforted her with words that later became a prophecy:

“The son of so many tears cannot be lost!”

In 384, thanks to his gift for public speaking, he was appointed imperial professor of rhetoric in Milan — the seat of power of the Western Roman Empire. Fame, money and a brilliant future lay wide open before the thirty-year-old.

At the same time, Saint Monica made her way across the sea to Milan to find her son. Seeing his mother’s holy, self-giving life and hearing from friends about the austere life of the monks in the Egyptian desert, Augustine was torn by a fierce inner war: his reason had fully recognized the truth of Christianity, but his will was still held back by the chains of sensual passion. At one point he prayed, half-heartedly:

“Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet!”

Taking it as the voice of God, Augustine sprang up, ran to the table where his friend Alypius was sitting, and opened the Letters of Saint Paul at random. The first passage his eyes fell on was chapter 13 of the letter to the Romans:

“Let us live decently as in the daytime, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in quarreling and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh!”

At the Easter Vigil of 387, in the cathedral of Milan, Saint Ambrose himself baptized Augustine together with his son Adeodatus and his close friend Alypius. Saint Monica’s tears of more than thirty years had borne the fruit of salvation.

In 395 he was ordained coadjutor bishop, and soon afterwards succeeded as Bishop of Hippo, serving for thirty-five years until his death.

His bishop’s house became a monastery where the priests lived together in poverty: eating at one table, owning nothing of their own, dressing plainly and opening the door every day to share food with the hungry poor. He was a devoted father: every day he preached God’s word to the faithful, sat from early morning until late at night hearing the people’s lawsuits, and at night lit his lamp to write books defending the faith. The church where he ministered — which the people then called the Basilica Pacis, the Basilica of Peace — and the ancient town of Hippo Regius still exist today as ruins: a stone-paved forum, public baths, a theater and even an ancient baptistery, scattered among wildflowers and olive trees on a wide stretch of land looking out to sea.

Against the Donatists: a rigorist schismatic movement in North Africa that held that the validity of the sacraments depended on the moral holiness of the minister. Augustine explained clearly that Christ Himself is the supreme minister of the sacraments; however imperfect or sinful the minister, the sacrament still bears fruit by the power of God, ex opere operato. He stressed the unity and charity of the universal Church.

Against the Pelagians: Pelagius held that people could reach salvation by their own free will without needing God’s grace. Augustine brought all his theology to bear to show that after original sin, human nature was deeply wounded; without the free grace of Christ going before and sustaining us, we are utterly powerless to do any good work for salvation. For this work he is honored as the “Doctor of Grace” (Doctor Gratiae).

He left the Church more than a thousand sermons, hundreds of letters and classic theological masterpieces. The “Confessions”, Confessiones: perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography ever written, in which he lays bare every sin of his life to make God’s boundless mercy shine out. “On the Trinity”, De Trinitate: a summit of theology exploring the mystery of the Holy Trinity through the spiritual image of the human person — memory, understanding and will. “The City of God”, De Civitate Dei: written after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410. He sets out a great philosophy of history: two cities have been built by two opposing loves — the “earthly city”, built on love of self to the point of contempt for God; and the “City of God”, built on love of God to the point of forgetting self. Every earthly empire will fall; only the City of God endures forever.

In the midst of that misery, the seventy-five-year-old bishop fell ill with a high fever. Knowing he would soon go home to the Father, he asked to have King David’s Penitential Psalms copied out in very large letters and fixed to the four walls around his bed. He lay there gazing at the penitential psalms, reading them over and over in tears of repentance. He asked everyone to leave him alone for his last ten days so that he could be wholly united with God.

Remarkably, after Hippo fell and was set on fire, his library with all his priceless works came through the flames intact. Nearly fifteen hundred years later, on the hill overlooking the ruins of Hippo Regius and the old foundations of the Basilica of Peace, a new basilica bearing his name was begun in 1881, completed in 1900 and consecrated in 1914. To this day, on the very African soil where he lived, taught and died under siege, its bell rings out every day, as if to say that the City of God he wrote about outlasts every ruin of history.

Pope Boniface VIII declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1298. The Church celebrates him on August 28 each year, the day after the feast of his mother, Saint Monica.