(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
St. Augustine was born on November 13, 354 A.D. in Tagaste, Algeria.
His parents, Patricius and Monica, belonged to the financially
imperilled middle class. They were well enough off, and had educational
ambitions for their son, but they were too poor to finance those
ambitions themselves.
At the age of 17 the youth’s
talents made Carthage a necessary place to live. Not long after, his
father died and his mother was left with modest resources. Augustine
met a young woman in Carthage and had a son with her. This woman was
with Augustine for 10 years but we do not know her name. Eventually he
had to give her up for a society marriage in Milan where he writes “his
heart ran blood” with grief as she went off to Africa to enter a
convent. Their son was named Adeodatus, and he stayed with Augustine
until an early death took him in his late adolescence.
The zeal for philosophy led Augustine to join a religious cult from
Persia that had planted itself in the Roman world as a rival of
Christianity. It was called the cult of Manicheism. Augustine was
pulled between the conventional pleasures of an adolescence lived to
the full and the conventional demands of philosophy. For this reason,
Manicheism offered something refreshing and comforting. Augustine was
not to blame that he felt this way, the Manichees told him. Security
could be had without sacrifice, and guilt removed without atonement.
Some Manichee friends arranged an audition before the prefect of the
city of Rome, a pompous and inept pagan named Symmachus, who had been
asked to provide a professor of rhetoric for the imperial court at
Milan. Augustine received the job and headed north to take up his
position in late 384 A.D. At age thirty, Augustine had won the most
cherished academic chair in the Latin world and as a result gained
ready access to political careers. Augustine’s talents became clear by
later achievements. His fast climb to eminence as a professor proves
that if Augustine had stayed in the public life he could have achieved
advancement to very high political office.
Nonetheless, he gradually became convinced of the truth of the
Christian faith, though he was unable to break out of his “cruel
slavery” to lust. His prayers reflect this, “Lord, give me chastity...
but not yet.” He finally gives his life to God after “a long time.” One
day he was praying in the garden and he heard a child singing “Take and
read! Take and read!” Augustine opened the New Testament and read St.
Paul’s Letter to the Romans (13:12, 13). It reads, “Let us throw off
the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct
ourselves properly as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness; not
in sexual excess and lust; not in quarreling and jealousy. Rather put
on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the desires of the
flesh.” We learn that he is moved to a deep conversion. He told his
friend Alipius he had resolved to follow the Lord, and the two, both
converted, went to tell Monica the good news. The year was 386 A.D. He
was thirty-one. After seven months of preparation, Augustine was
baptized by St. Ambrose at the Easter vigil in 387 A.D.
James O’Donnell’s online article Elements of Christianity: Augustine,
tells us, “His elevation to the Bishopric of Hippo in 395 gave him full
powers to preach and teach in the church. Not long after, he
characterized the bishop’s life as one divided between looking after
his flock, snatching a little rest where he could, and meditating on
the scripture.”
Augustine returned to Africa at age
35 and settled down at Tagaste in 389 A.D. with a few friends to form a
monastery; where Augustine was happy. But Augustine was a talented
individual and years later, while on a visit to the coastal city of
Hippo Regius, he found himself virtually forced into the priesthood by
the local congregation who recognized his talent. The story goes that
he broke into tears as they laid hands on him in the church, as
Augustine had avoided cities that needed bishops for some time now and
lived in fear of just such a fate happening to him.
Augustine begins with the trinity for his beliefs. His period in the
history of the Church is critical as he lived at the end of the century
that had worked out the church’s basic trinity or trinitarian doctrines
which were established as Church doctrine at the ecumenical councils of
Nicea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, both covered in this course. It
was these councils that allowed Christians to have a universal
vocabulary in which what they believed about the trinity of God,
Christ, and the Spirit was clearly and concisely stated without error.
In 391 A.D. Augustine was called to the priesthood as an assistant to
Valerius, bishop of Hippo. In a house adjoining the church he again
established a place of monastic prayer, accompanied by St. Alipius, St.
Evodius, St. Possidius, and others. In the year 395 he was made bishop
and when Valerius died Augustine was made bishop of Hippo. Augustine
wrote about the Christian faith in his years as bishop. His works
included the Confessions in which he tells his story of conversion, and The City Of God, a philosophical analysis of the world’s history showing it to be guided by God.
Conscious of his duty, Augustine soon began to write four books on scriptural interpretation, which comes to us as his Christian Doctrine (395
A.D.) The first two books and part of the third were written 395/396
A.D. while the remainder was added c. 426/427. The main point that
Augustine makes in Christian Doctrine is that divine
revelation, the intervention in human affairs by a power preceding the
human being in reasoning, is the necessary prerequisite of Christian
theology. Perhaps when that revelation has dawned on humanity then the
doctrines of Christianity can be taken on the faith of a rational
faculty, the mind.
Augustine’s primary belief from
an ancient point of view was his insistence that communication is far
more important than elegance. To be stylish is one thing to be
intelligible is a greater thing. “What is the use of a perfect speech,”
he asks, “that the audience cannot follow, when there is no reason for
speaking at all if the people we are talking to do not understand us?”
(4.10.24) To hear the preacher but not the teacher that was the
problem, according to Augustine. He stated that late Roman education
had nothing to “say”, or that it said a lot of “nothing.” He advocated
a “diligent negligence,” and he was conscious of the lack of meaning in
education at this time. Augustine, as preacher, preferred a direct
style both artful and lucid. Augustine names the three levels of style.
They are the humble, the ordinary, and the elevated. These suggestions
were made to point out that there was more than one way to preach the
Word, and that pious, scholarly teachings fell on deaf ears in the
humble and the ordinary people.
In 426, he had his successor elected, hoping to find time to write. He
found little time, however, since soon thereafter the Vandals invaded
Africa. During the siege of Hippo, on August 28, 430, Augustine died of
old age. Shortly after his death the Vandals captured the city. Not
long after, they captured Carthage and established a kingdom that
lasted a century.
To this day Augustine is probably the most quoted of all the saints.