Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Doctor of the Church
August 28 · d. 430
also known as Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine, Augustine the African, Augustine
Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was one of the most powerful minds of the ancient church and the most influential theologian in the history of the West. In the Reformation, both sides appealed to Augustine’s theology, the Reformers to his teaching on the utter freeness of salvation, the Romans emphasizing his strong Ecclesiological trust in the Church and its bishops. His Confessions, the searching story of his own conversion told as a prayer to God, and his City of God, written as Rome itself was falling, are among the foundational books of Western civilization. Bishop of Hippo in North Africa for thirty-five years, he shaped Christian thought on grace, sin, the Trinity, and the church for more than a thousand years after him.
Augustine was one of the most powerful minds of the ancient church, and for the first half of his life he used it to run away from God and seek his own fame and fortune. He was born in 354 in a small town of Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria, to a pagan father and a Christian mother. His mother Monica (remembered yesterday), prayed for him without ceasing. He was dazzlingly clever, and he knew it. He went to Carthage to study, took a mistress, fathered a son, and threw himself into ambition, pleasure, and a fashionable heresy that let him lay the blame for his sins on someone else. He wanted wisdom, and he wanted glory, and he wanted to be left alone, and for years he had all three. He was miserable.
He could not be satisfied. A book of Cicero's lit in him a hunger for truth that nothing he tried would fill; the heresy he had embraced began to look hollow; and his ambition carried him from Africa to Rome and then to Milan, where he heard the bishop Ambrose preach and found, to his surprise, that the faith of his mother was not the crude thing he had despised but had depths his philosophers had never reached. He came close, and could not make the leap. He was held back by the one sin he could not bear to give up, and he prayed the most honest prayer of his unconverted life: give me chastity, but not yet.
The crisis broke in a garden in Milan in the summer of 386. Torn in two and weeping under a fig tree, Augustine heard a child's voice from over the wall, singing a little chant: take up and read, take up and read. He took it for a command from God, opened the letters of Paul that lay beside him, and his eye fell on the words that told him to stop living for the flesh and to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. He read no further. In that instant, he wrote, a light of certainty flooded his heart and every shadow of doubt fled away. The long flight was over. The next Easter, Ambrose baptized him, with Monica, who had prayed thirty years for that hour, looking on.
He went home to Africa meaning to live quietly, and the church would not let him; they made him a priest, and then bishop of the harbor town of Hippo, and there he stayed for thirty-five years. He preached almost daily, judged the quarrels of his people, defended the faith against one error after another, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote: the Confessions, the most searching account of a human soul ever set down, addressed not to the reader but to God; the City of God, written while Rome itself was falling, to show that the true and lasting city is not any empire but the company of those who love God; and a hundred books more that would set the course of Western thought for a thousand years.
He died in 430, an old bishop, while the armies of the Vandals stood at the walls of his own city and the Roman world he had known was coming apart, and they say he spent his last days with the penitential psalms pinned where he could read them, weeping for his sins to the end. He had opened the story of his life with the sentence that is the truest thing he ever wrote, the sentence in which his whole long search at last came to rest: You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You. The restless heart had found its rest. Sixteen centuries later the church is still learning from the African bishop who ran from God with all his strength and was caught, and who turned and spent the rest of his life showing everyone else the way home.
Augustine is the best-documented person of Christian antiquity and one of the best-documented of the whole ancient world, by his own vast output and by a contemporary biographer. He left the Confessions, the City of God, On the Trinity, the Retractations in which he reviewed his own works, and nearly a hundred books besides, together with some three hundred letters and more than five hundred sermons; and his friend Possidius, who knew him for forty years, wrote his Life. He was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste, educated at Carthage, was a Manichaean hearer for some nine years, taught rhetoric at Rome and Milan, was converted in 386 and baptized at Easter 387, returned to Africa, was ordained priest at Hippo in 391 and bishop there in 395, and died during the Vandal siege of the city on 28 August 430.
His influence is almost impossible to overstate; Western theology has been called a series of footnotes to Augustine. He gave the West its enduring language for original sin and for grace, his reading of which shaped the medieval church and then, through Luther the Augustinian friar and Calvin the close student of his works, the Reformation that broke from it; he formulated the doctrine of the Trinity that the Latin church received, and the idea of the just war, and the vision of the two cities. The hardest parts of his legacy have been as consequential as the rest and remain contested: his late and severe doctrine of predestination, and his reluctant defense of using imperial force against the Donatist schismatics. Honest history holds the whole of him together, the penitent of the Confessions and the embattled old bishop alike, the most human and the most influential of the Fathers.
Augustine is commemorated on 28 August, the day of his death, the day after his mother Monica, across the Western calendars; he is a Doctor of the Church, and his liturgical color is white. His relics rest at Pavia in northern Italy, in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, where Dante imagined them and where they are venerated still. He is patron of theologians, of printers, of brewers, and of the many religious orders that follow the Rule of life he wrote for his clergy, the Augustinian canons and friars and the others who bear his name.
His monument is the mind of the Western church itself. No Christian thinker between Paul and Thomas Aquinas has shaped so much, and few in any age have been so widely read outside the academy, for the Confessions remain, sixteen centuries on, a book that ordinary readers pick up and recognize themselves in. In art Augustine appears as a bishop in cope and mitre, with a book and a pen for his writings, and very often with a flaming heart, sometimes pierced by an arrow, the emblem of the heart restless until it rests in God; the child with a shell on the seashore, trying to empty the ocean into a hole, is his too, the image of a mind that knew it could never contain the God it loved.
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The Confessions(Latin, c. 397-400)
Recommended: Henry Chadwick, Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)
The greatest spiritual autobiography ever written, and the door into Augustine; Chadwick's translation is the finest modern one, and the older Pilkington text is freely readable at New Advent.
Public domain: Confessions (New Advent, Pilkington translation)
Augustine of Hippo: A Biography(English, 1967)
Recommended: Peter Brown (University of California Press)
The standard life, by the historian who remade the study of late antiquity; learned, humane, and a masterpiece in its own right.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Further reading. The place to begin is always the Confessions itself, in Henry Chadwick's translation, listed above. The standard modern biography is Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo, also listed above, one of the great works of historical biography in English. The City of God is available in several good translations, and the whole vast corpus is being published in fresh English by New City Press in the Works of Saint Augustine.
Online resources. The Confessions, the City of God, and most of Augustine's works are freely readable in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers at New Advent and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
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British (Received Pronunciation): Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Augustine of Hippo special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.