Saint Augustine of Hippo Catholic Saint

 

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Catholic Saint

st.Augustine of Hippo-Father of the Church_Doctor of the Church

Feast Day : August 28

 

 

Patronage: Augustinians; brewers, printers, theologians, Carthage

 

 

 

Also known as: Aurelius Augustinus, Doctor of Grace

 

 

Augustine of Hippo was one of the greatest figures in the Church. His philosophical and theological thought influenced Christianity and philosophy for at least 1,000 years. His early years were spent in sin, which he later chronicled with great frankness in his remarkable work, Confessions. Augustine was born November 13, 354, in Tagaste, North Africa. His mother, St. Monica, was Christian, and his father Patricius was a pagan, whom Monica eventually converted by her patience and good example. He was not baptized as an infant, but his mother enrolled him as a catechumen in the Catholic Church. He studied Latin and Greek grammar and literature in his boyhood, complaining about rough treatment by his schoolmasters. After his father died in 370, Augustine went to Carthage to study rhetoric as the first step to prepare for a public life. There he met a young woman at a church service, began to live with her and fathered a son named Adeodatus (“God’s gift”). With adolescence, he confides to God in Confessions, “both love and lust boiled within me, and swept my youthful immaturity over the precipice of evil desires to leave me half drowned in a whirlpool of abominable sins. . . .my soul was sick, and broke out in sores, whose itch I agonized to scratch with the rub of carnal things,” including stage plays, “with the mirror they held up to my own miseries and the fuel they poured on my flame.” Augustine was still making those judgments 20 years later.

 

But, during the years in Carthage, he was probably embroiled in tensions set in motion by conflicting explanations of the human condition by his mother and his father’s behavior (his father being guilty of marital infidelities) and religions. This tension was also at the base of the Manichaean religion, which Augustine joined in 373. The Manichees taught that there are two supreme gods, one good and one evil, and similarly two competing souls within the human person. For nine years he maintained interest in this cult. After his move to Rome in 383 to teach a better class of rhetoric students, he was the guest of a Manichee and socialized with many prominent members of the sect. The next year, 384, he won an appointment as a professor of rhetoric in Milan. Within two years he abandoned Manichaeanism and gradually came under the influence of his Christian mentors: Ambrose, the influential local bishop, and Simplicianus, a wise elderly former bishop. At the same time, he wanted to advance himself in position and possessions, so marriage seemed the next step. His mother had joined him and helped him to arrange a marriage to a girl who was not yet 12, so he agreed to wait two years. Augustine’s mistress of many years had to leave him as part of this marriage plan, which threw Augustine into emotional turmoil. “My heart which had held her very dear was broken and wounded and shed blood,” he wrote. “She went back to Africa, swearing that she would never know another man, and left with me the natural son I had of her. . . . I was simply a slave of lust.

 

So I took another woman, not of course as a wife; and thus my soul’s disease was kept alive as vigorously as ever.” He was tormented both by the loss of his former lover and the hopelessness for him of a life of continence, which ran in circles alongside his growing seriousness in reexamining Christianity. In Confessions, he tells how he experienced a striking conversion while in a garden, in which his selfdoubt was expelled and “the light of utter confidence shone in all my heart.” His mother was exultant. Augustine decided to give up his teaching position and was baptized along with his son Adeodatus and another close friend on Easter of 387. About a year later the group was at the port of Ostia on their way home to Africa when Monica died. She and Augustine had shared an ecstatic experience five days previously, after which she had told him that all her prayers had been answered in superabundance and she no longer hoped for anything in this world. When Augustine finally returned in 388 to Tagaste in North Africa, he set up a sort of monastery on his family land with his close friends. His son Adeodatus died within a year, aged 16. (In Confessions, Augustine reveals his love for his son, crediting God entirely for the boy’s many virtues and intelligence. He notes that his book De Magistro is a dialogue between the two, and “that all the ideas . . . put into his mouth were truly his, though he was but sixteen.”) Augustine soon gave away his possessions, and for the rest of his life lived simply as a monk in community with men. In 391 he was ordained a priest in Hippo by Bishop Valerius, who permitted Augustine to preach almost immediately.

 

Upon Valerius’s death in 396, Augustine became bishop of Hippo, and was to serve there for 35 years. He composed the Rule that the Augustinian Order follows to this day. In the 390s he started a convent for women following the Rule. He preached almost daily, and wrote incessantly: theological treatises, letters, polemics against heresies, the Confessions (finished in 400), and The City of God, written in installments between 413 and 426. He died on August 28, 430, while the city of Hippo was under siege by the Vandals. In 700, his remains were taken to the church of St. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, Italy. When Augustine was about 72, he sat down to review his writings and put them in chronological order, and was astounded at the quantity. His complete works, written in Latin, are about the size of an encyclopedia. Generations of scholars have consulted Augustine. The Confessions is not only his intimate spiritual autobiography, but it is also a presentation of the writer’s mystical experiences during his spiritual struggle to accept Christianity. However, it is not a mystical work in the sense of a contemplative introspection or poetic reflection; rather it is an expression of what has been called Augustine’s “mysticism of action.” The City of God is, in the words of Thomas Merton, “the autobiography of the Catholic Church.” When Rome was sacked by the Goths under Alaric in 410, many intellectuals made accusations that Christianity had debilitated the empire, exhausted and made it vulnerable to attack. The City of God is Augustine’s response.

 

His defense of Christian doctrine was informed by politics and history, full of direct references to pagan philosophers from Plato to his contemporaries. Augustine said that the fall of the earthly city of Rome was the inevitable result of the sinful wills of its rulers and citizens; at the same time the rise of the City of God (the Catholic Church) was a process that had begun before time and was infused with grace, personified by Jesus Christ. This concept of the two cities is eloquently summarized in a famous passage from Book XIV: “Two loves have built two cities: the love of self, which reaches even to contempt for God, the earthly City; and the love of God, which reaches even to contempt for self, the heavenly City. One glories in itself, the other in the Lord. One seeks its own glory amongst men; the greatest glory of the other is God, witness of its conscience. One, swollen with pride, uplifts its haughty head; the other cries out to God with the Psalmist: ‘Thou art my glory, it is Thou who dost lift up my head.’” Augustine shows in Books XI and XII how the good and bad angels had inaugurated the two cities on the basis of the two loves. Augustine believed that the soul by its nature is the equal of an angel’s, and any inferiority is due to sin. By emulating the ways of angels, humans have the capacity to change into angelic form and join the City of God. These and other views about the soul and the restoration of its original status are discussed in other works.

 

Augustine vigorously defended Catholicism against various heresies, stating that pagan religion and magic were inventions of the devil to tempt people away from Christianity. He said that error had no rights; therefore, heretics had no rights. The tension in the will that characterized Augustine’s early life became the base of his theology, which, because of his great influence, became the core of Christian doctrine. It is in his later works that Augustine becomes more philosophically theological. His references to mystical experience appear in Confessions and in The City of God. In the latter, he said of experiences of the supernatural: “When . . . we hear with the inner ear some part of the speech of God, we approximate to the angels. But in this work I need not labor to give an account of the ways in which God speaks. For either the unchangeable Truth speaks directly to the mind of the rational creature in some indescribable way, or speaks through the changeable creature, either presenting spiritual images to our spirit, or bodily voices to our bodily sense.” Augustine usually is acknowledged to be second only to St. Paul in influence on Christianity. His writings established the theological foundation for medieval Christianity, and much later influenced the dualistic philosophy of Ren Descartes. Roman Catholic religious orders and congregations called Augustinians trace a spiritual lineage to Augustine, but date their actual origins only from the 10th and later centuries. The young Martin Luther (1483–1546) was an Augustinian.