A Life, for his feast on the twenty-eighth day of August — III classis, with commemoration of St. Hermes, Martyr
In medio Ecclesiæ aperuit os eius: et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiæ et intellectus. “In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth: and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” — Introit of the Mass, from Ecclesiasticus 15:5
I. Tagaste
He was born on the thirteenth day of November, in the year of Our Lord 354, at Tagaste in Numidia — a small municipal town of Roman Africa, now Souk Ahras in Algeria — the son of Patricius, a town councillor of modest means and a pagan until nearly the end of his life, and of Monica, a Christian of Berber stock whose name the Church has joined forever to her son’s. The household was neither rich nor poor; it was ambitious, and it invested what it had in the boy’s education, for he was visibly the cleverest thing Tagaste had produced in living memory.
He tells us himself — and this is the singular privilege of his biographers, that the subject has written the deepest examination of his own life ever composed — that he was enrolled among the catechumens as a child, signed with the Cross and seasoned with salt, and that in a boyhood illness he begged for baptism; but the custom of the age deferred it, on the calculation that sins after baptism were graver, and the deferral nearly cost him his soul. He learned his letters at Tagaste, hated Greek, wept for Dido, and was beaten for playing ball; and at Madauros and then at Carthage he was trained as a rhetorician, which is to say, as a professional of persuasive speech in an empire where speech was the road to everything.
II. The long way down
At Carthage, sixteen years old and unsupervised, “a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears.” The facts are quickly told because he told them first, and against himself. He took a concubine, faithfully, and kept her for some fifteen years; she bore him a son, Adeodatus — “the gift of God,” a name that reads like an involuntary confession — in about 372. He fell in with the theatre and the games. And in his nineteenth year, reading Cicero’s Hortensius in the ordinary course of his studies, he was set on fire with the love of wisdom — and turned, seeking it, not to the Scriptures, whose style then seemed to him beneath Cicero’s, but to the Manichees.
For nine years he adhered to that sect as an auditor: a religion of two eternal principles, light and darkness, which flattered his intellect, excused his flesh, and answered the problem of evil by making God a victim rather than a judge. He believed it, taught it, and won others to it — a debt he spent much of his episcopate repaying. The disillusion came by degrees, and its instrument, characteristically, was intelligence: the celebrated Manichee bishop Faustus, awaited for years as the man who would resolve his difficulties, arrived at Carthage in 383 and proved to be an amiable man who could not answer them.
In that same year, deceiving his mother about the hour of his sailing — she followed him to the shore and he slipped away by night — he crossed to Rome to teach rhetoric, and in 384, by the patronage of the prefect Symmachus, obtained the public chair of rhetoric at Milan: the imperial city, the court, and the most conspicuous teaching post in the Latin world. He was thirty years of age, a professional success, a Manichee no longer, a sceptic of the New Academy for want of anything better, and profoundly unhappy.
III. Milan: Ambrose and the Platonists
At Milan he went to hear the bishop preach, as one professional listening to another’s technique. “I hung on his words attentively, but of the matter I was an uninterested and contemptuous onlooker.” The technique carried the matter in with it. Ambrose’s preaching dissolved the two great intellectual obstacles: he learned that the Catholic Church did not in fact teach the crude anthropomorphism the Manichees had mocked, and that the Old Testament, read spiritually — littera occidit, spiritus autem vivificat — was not the barbarous book he had despised. Monica, who had followed him across the sea, was now at his side; Ambrose she revered; and the marriage she arranged for her son required the dismissal of the mother of Adeodatus, who returned to Africa vowing to know no other man — an unnamed woman whose grief Augustine recorded and whose dignity the reader of the Confessions does not forget. He, meanwhile, unable to wait two years for the bride, took another mistress. He was, as he prayed in those years, perfectly candid: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo — “Give me chastity and continency, but not yet.”
Then came the books of the Platonists in Victorinus’s translation, which taught him to conceive of spiritual substance and of evil as privation, and so removed the last speculative barrier; and the counsel of the old priest Simplicianus, who told him of the conversion of Victorinus himself; and the visit of Ponticianus, who spoke of Antony of Egypt and of two court officials who had abandoned the world after reading his life. The unlettered were storming heaven, and the doctors of rhetoric were wallowing in flesh and blood.
IV. The garden
What followed, in August of 386, in a garden in Milan, he has told once for all in the eighth book of the Confessions, and it is Tier-1 testimony in the strictest sense: the event narrated by its only witness, against his own vanity. Flinging himself down under a fig tree, weeping, he heard from a neighbouring house a child’s voice chanting, as in a game, Tolle, lege; tolle, lege — “Take up and read.” He took up the volume of the Apostle, opened it, and read in silence the passage on which his eye first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities… but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences” (Rom. 13:13-14). “No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”
He resigned his chair, withdrew with his mother, his son, and his friends to the country house at Cassiciacum for a winter of philosophical retreat, and at the Easter Vigil of 387 — the night of the twenty-fourth to the twenty-fifth of April — was baptized by Ambrose at Milan, together with Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. The ancient tradition that the Te Deum was composed antiphonally by Ambrose and Augustine at that font is traditio pia of the most transparent kind — the hymn is now generally assigned to Nicetas of Remesiana — but it preserves, as such traditions do, a true judgment: that something was sung into the Church that night which has not stopped sounding.
That autumn, at Ostia on the Tiber, waiting for a ship to Africa, mother and son stood leaning in a window that looked on a garden and spoke together of the eternal life of the saints, ascending by degrees through all created things until they touched, “with the whole beat of the heart,” the region of unfailing plenty — and sighed, and returned to the sound of their own voices. Within days Monica fell ill. “Lay this body anywhere,” she told her sons; “this only I ask of you, that you make remembrance of me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be.” She died at Ostia in her fifty-sixth year, and he buried her there and wept for her at last, and asked the readers of his Confessions to remember Monica and Patricius at the altar — a request the Church has honoured on a scale beyond his imagining.
V. Return, ordination, and the see of Hippo
He returned to Africa in 388, sold his patrimony at Tagaste, gave the proceeds to the poor, and lived nearly three years with a few companions in prayer, fasting, study, and common poverty — the germ of everything the Christian West would later call a rule. In that interval Adeodatus, “the son of my sin,” a boy whose intelligence frightened his father, died in his seventeenth year.
In 391 he went to Hippo Regius, a port city on the African coast, to help found a monastery — carefully avoiding, he tells us, cities with vacant sees. The people of Hippo seized him in church, in the presence of the aged Greek bishop Valerius, and demanded his ordination; he wept, and was ordained a priest. Valerius, contrary to African custom, licensed him to preach in the bishop’s presence; in 395 or 396 he was consecrated coadjutor, and on Valerius’s death shortly after became bishop of Hippo, which he remained — refusing all translation to greater sees — for some thirty-five years, until his death.
He turned the episcopal house into a monastery of clergy, holding all property in common; from that house came, by Possidius’s count, ten bishops for the African church. The rule of life he gave to religious — traditionally drawn from his Letter 211 to a community of nuns, and adapted, with the Praeceptum, for men — became the Rule of St. Augustine, on which canons regular, Dominicans, Servites, and a great family of later institutes were built: the widest-serving monastic rule of the West after Benedict’s.
VI. The Doctor of Grace
The remaining decades are the theological history of the Latin Church in one man’s working life. Three wars, in sequence, each of which supplied the occasion of a permanent doctrine.
Against the Manichees, his old sect, he vindicated the goodness of creation, the unity of the two Testaments, and the nature of evil as privation of good — no substance, but a wound in substance.
Against the Donatists, the schism that had divided Africa for a century on the claim that sacraments conferred by unworthy ministers were void, he vindicated the objectivity of the sacraments — Christ, not the minister, is the true agent of baptism — and the catholicity of the Church, which is not a sect of the pure but a field of wheat and tares until the harvest. The long contest, which he began with public disputations and popular songs and closed at the great Conference of Carthage in 411, gave the Church her permanent sacramental theology; it also drew from him, in the phrase securus iudicat orbis terrarum — “the verdict of the whole world is beyond challenge” — the argument whose force, fourteen centuries later, an Oxford reader named Newman could not withstand.
Against Pelagius, who taught that man could keep the whole law by his natural powers and that grace was illumination and example rather than inward help, he fought from 412 to his last hour, and won for himself the title by which theology names him: Doctor gratiae, the Doctor of Grace. Adam’s sin wounded the race; the will, free to sin, cannot without grace rise to the good that saves; grace is not owed but given, prevenient, unmerited, operating before any merit and cooperating with every merit it creates; and the whole of salvation, from first faith to final perseverance, is the gift of God — Quid enim habes quod non accepisti? “What hast thou that thou hast not received?” (1 Cor. 4:7). The African councils of Carthage and Milevis condemned the new doctrine; Innocent I confirmed the condemnation from Rome — whence the sentence forever associated with his name, causa finita est (Sermo 131): the rescripts have come, the case is closed; would that the error were as quickly closed as the case. Zosimus wavered and then ratified; the Council of Ephesus in 431, a year after Augustine’s death, condemned Pelagianism to the universal Church.
VII. The works
Possidius, his friend and first biographer, said that no one man could read everything Augustine wrote; the surviving corpus — some hundred books, with the sermons and letters in their hundreds — bears him out. Three summits:
The Confessions (c. 397–401), the first and never-surpassed autobiography of a soul, written not to men but to God in the second person, whose opening sentence is the thesis of his whole theology and of every restless life since: Fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te — “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rest in Thee.”
The De Trinitate (399–c. 419), twenty years in the writing, the fountainhead of Latin Trinitarian theology: the divine processions, the psychological analogy of memory, understanding, and will, and the doctrine of the Holy Ghost as the mutual Love of Father and Son proceeding from both — the deep root, in the Latin tradition, of the Filioque.
The De Civitate Dei (413–426), begun when the news came that Alaric had sacked Rome and the pagans blamed the Christians: twenty-two books which answer a newspaper controversy with a theology of history — two cities, built by two loves, the love of self unto contempt of God and the love of God unto contempt of self — and which taught the West, precisely as the West’s political order was collapsing, that no earthly city is the City of God.
And at the end, the Retractationes (426–427): the old bishop rereading his entire output in order, correcting himself in public, book by book — an act of intellectual humility without precedent or successor in ancient literature.
One legend must be mentioned because it will be asked after: the child on the seashore, ladling the sea into a hole in the sand, who tells the Doctor pondering the Trinity that he will sooner finish his task than Augustine his. It is nowhere in the ancient sources; it appears in the later Middle Ages and belongs frankly to traditio pia. It is retained here, so labeled, because it compresses into an image what Augustine himself said in argument: Si comprehendis, non est Deus — if thou comprehend it, it is not God.
VIII. The death of the bishop
He died as the world he had explained was ending. In 429 the Vandals under Genseric crossed from Spain into Africa; in the summer of 430 they invested Hippo itself, crowded with refugees, its bishop seventy-five years old and still at work. Possidius, who was in the city and in the room, relates that in his final illness Augustine had the four penitential psalms of David written out and fixed to the wall opposite his bed, and read them lying there, weeping abundantly; that he asked to be left alone save when the physicians came or food was brought, and gave the time to prayer; and that he made no will, “for the poor man of God had nothing to leave.” He had often said, quoting a fellow bishop, that even praiseworthy Christians ought not to leave this life without worthy penance.
He died on the twenty-eighth of August, 430, in the third month of the siege, in full possession of his faculties, in the presence of his brethren. The library he left to the church of Hippo, and it was preserved; the city fell and burned the following year, but the books — this is Providence with a visible signature — survived.
IX. Cultus, translations, and the commemoration of St. Hermes
His body was buried at Hippo. In the years of the Vandal persecution the Catholic bishops of Africa, exiled to Sardinia, carried the relics with them to Cagliari — the tradition associates the translation with St. Fulgentius of Ruspe and his companions, about the beginning of the sixth century. Two centuries later, when Saracen raids threatened Sardinia, Liutprand, King of the Lombards, ransomed the body at great price and translated it, about the year 722, to Pavia, to the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where it rests to this day beneath the white marble Arca of the fourteenth century — a fact recorded, near the event, by St. Bede. The heart of the man who wrote cor nostrum inquietum rests, by one of history’s plain ironies, in a church whose name means “St. Peter in a Ceiling of Gold.”
He was venerated as a Doctor from antiquity, and when Boniface VIII in 1298 gave formal liturgical rank to the four great Doctors of the Latin Church — Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome — his place was already immemorial. His feast is kept on the twenty-eighth of August, his dies natalis, with the Mass In medio Ecclesiæ of a Doctor and a proper Collect; the reformed calendar keeps the same day, and his mother precedes him on the twenty-seventh in that calendar, as she followed him in life.
With him the Missal commemorates St. Hermes, Martyr — and the commemoration is a lesson in tiers all by itself. Of Hermes the documentary record is ancient and excellent as to the cult: his name and deposition on the Via Salaria Vetus stand in the Depositio Martyrum of the year 354 — the very year of Augustine’s birth — and the Martyrologium Hieronymianum confirms him; his tomb in the cemetery of Basilla was adorned by Pope Damasus and visited by the itineraries of the pilgrims. He was therefore a real and eminent Roman martyr, probably of the persecutions of the third or early fourth century. Of his passio — which makes him prefect of Rome, converted and martyred under Trajan with Pope St. Alexander I — the acts are late and legendary. The Church’s instinct in joining the two men on one day rewards attention: the greatest arguer the Church has ever possessed, and a man of whom nothing survives but the fact that he died rather than deny; and the second witness is not the lesser one.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That no one is lost while a mother prays. Monica wept for him seventeen years, followed him over the sea he crossed to escape her, and was told by a bishop tired of her importuning that “the son of these tears cannot perish.” Every parent of a wandering child holds this feast, and tomorrow’s calendar in the reformed books, as a personal possession; the traditional calendar keeps her in May, but she is present in every line of her son’s Mass.
That the intellect is a road to God, and pride its one impassable obstruction. Augustine tried everything the mind could offer — rhetoric, Manichaeism, scepticism, Platonism — and each in turn carried him a stage before failing. What finally converted him was not an argument but the removal of the will’s resistance to arguments he had already conceded: he did not lack proof; he lacked chastity, and knew it. The order of his conversion — first the mind through Ambrose and the Platonists, then the will in the garden — is a permanent map of how educated men come, and fail to come, to the faith.
That grace does everything, and therefore hope is never irrational. The Doctor of Grace is himself the prime exhibit of the doctrine. The Collect of his feast asks God, with an audacity the saint would have approved, for “the effect of Thy accustomed mercy” — consuetae misericordiae… effectum — as though mercy were, in God, a habit; and in Augustine’s theology it is precisely that: not an exception wrung from justice, but the settled disposition of the Giver toward those to whom He has already given the confidence to hope.
Practice
Examine. Da mihi castitatem, sed noli modo — where am I asking God for a virtue while privately scheduling its arrival? Name the one attachment whose surrender I keep postponing; that is the fig tree in my own garden.
Do. Take up and read: fifteen minutes today in the Confessions — Book VIII for the conversion, or Book IX for Monica and Ostia — read slowly and aloud if possible, as he would have read it. Parents of children away from the Faith: one decade of the Rosary for them, with Monica’s seventeen years in mind.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Adesto supplicationibus nostris, omnipotens Deus: et, quibus fiduciam sperandae pietatis indulges; intercedente beato Augustino, Confessore tuo atque Pontifice, consuetae misericordiae tribue benignus effectum.
“Attend to our supplications, O almighty God: and to those to whom Thou grantest confidence to hope in Thy loving-kindness, mercifully grant, by the intercession of blessed Augustine, Thy Confessor and Bishop, the effect of Thine accustomed mercy.”
And the commemoration of St. Hermes:
Deus, qui beatum Hermetem Martyrem tuum virtute constantiae in passione roborasti: ex eius nobis imitatione tribue; pro amore tuo prospera mundi despicere, et nulla eius adversa formidare.
“O God, who didst strengthen blessed Hermes Thy Martyr with the virtue of constancy in suffering: grant us, in imitation of him, to despise the prosperity of this world for love of Thee, and to fear none of its adversities.”
Devote. The aspiration of the Confessions, said slowly through the day: Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. Or St. Augustine’s own prayer from the Soliloquies: Noverim me, noverim te — “May I know myself; may I know Thee.”
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the theology of grace — Augustine against Pelagius, and how St. Thomas receives and orders the Augustinian inheritance — and the psychological analogy of the Trinity. The Church History path treats the fall of Roman Africa, the Donatist schism, and the two cities as a reading of all history. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the great converts, and with Monica among the interceding mothers.
Sancte Augustine, Doctor gratiae, ora pro nobis. Sancta Monica, mater lacrimarum, ora pro filiis errantibus.
Sources consulted: St. Augustine, Confessiones (CCSL 27, ed. Verheijen), Retractationes (CCSL 57), De Trinitate (CCSL 50–50A), De Civitate Dei (CCSL 47–48), Sermo 131 (PL 38); Possidius, Vita Augustini (PL 32); the Depositio Martyrum of 354 and the Martyrologium Hieronymianum for St. Hermes; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), s.vv. “St. Augustine of Hippo,” “St. Hermes”; the Roman Martyrology for 28 August. Patristic loci given at book and chapter level; direct quotations from the Confessions follow the traditional English rendering after Pusey.