Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born on November 13, 354, in Thagaste, a town in North Africa that is now in Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a minor official who held to the old Roman religion, and his mother, Monica, was a devout Christian who prayed for her son throughout her life. He was a gifted boy, with a quick mind, and his family made sacrifices to send him to school. He studied rhetoric in Carthage, the great city of the region, and there he was swept up in the pleasures of student life.

In Carthage he took a mistress, with whom he lived for about fifteen years, and with whom he had a son named Adeodatus. He read a book by Cicero that stirred in him a love of wisdom, and he began a search for truth. He tried reading the Bible but found its style crude compared with the great Latin writers. He turned instead to Manichaeism, a religion that claimed to explain the problem of evil through a cosmic struggle between light and darkness. He remained a Manichean for about nine years, and then grew disillusioned when its teachers could not answer his questions.

He moved to Rome and then to Milan, where he took a post as a teacher of rhetoric at the imperial court. In Milan he heard the sermons of Bishop Ambrose, a learned and eloquent preacher, and he began to see that the Christian faith could be defended by reason. He also read the works of the Platonists, and they helped him to think of God as a spiritual being. But he could not break free from his old habits. He later wrote that he prayed for chastity, but not yet.

The turning point came in a garden in Milan in the summer of 386. He was in great anguish, weeping under a fig tree, when he heard a child's voice chanting a phrase that he took to mean take up and read. He picked up the book of Paul's letters and read the first passage he saw, which spoke of putting away the works of darkness and putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. In that moment, he said, light flooded his heart and doubt fled. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter in 387.

His mother, Monica, who had followed him to Italy, died soon after, at the port of Ostia, as they were preparing to return to Africa. He went back to Africa, sold his property and began to live a quiet life of study and prayer with some friends. In 391, during a visit to the city of Hippo, he was seized by the congregation and pressed to become a priest. He accepted, and in 395 he became bishop of Hippo, a post he held for the rest of his life.

He was a prolific writer. His Confessions, written around 397, is the story of his life told as a prayer to God, and it remains one of the most widely read books in the world. It contains the famous line that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. His great work, The City of God, written in the years after Rome was sacked by the Goths in 410, set out a vision of history as the story of two cities, one built on love of self and the other on love of God. He also wrote on the Trinity, on grace, on the nature of the church and on the Bible.

He spent much of his life in controversy. He argued against the Donatists, who held that the sacraments were invalid if given by unworthy ministers, and against Pelagius, who taught that human beings could earn salvation by their own effort. Against Pelagius he stressed the sovereignty of God's grace and the helplessness of the sinner. In the fight with the Donatists, he came to support the use of state force to bring them back into the church, a position that has been criticized by many. It was a failure of his, and it later gave cover to others who used coercion.

He died on August 28, 430, while the Vandals were besieging Hippo. He was seventy-five. He had asked for the penitential psalms to be written on the wall by his bed so that he could read them in his last days. His influence on the church has been immense, among Catholics and Protestants alike. His life shows that no one is too far gone for God, and that a restless heart finds peace only in Him.