St. Augustine of Hippo

The restless seeker turned bishop whose Confessions and City of God shaped Western theology for a millennium and more.

St. Augustine of Hippo is one of the most important theologians in the history of the Church: a convert whose searching intellect and restless heart found their rest in God, and whose writings became a foundation of Western Christian thought.

Life

Born in 354 in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and his Christian mother St. Monica, Augustine pursued rhetoric, philosophy, and the Manichaean sect before a long interior struggle. Moved by the preaching of St. Ambrose in Milan and a sudden grace in a garden — "take up and read" — he was baptized in 387. He tells the story in his Confessions. Ordained and later made bishop of Hippo, he spent the rest of his life preaching, guiding his flock, and answering the controversies of his age, dying in 430 as the Vandals besieged his city.

What he taught

Augustine's thought grew out of the questions his own life had forced on him. Against the Manichaeans he insisted that evil is not a rival power but a privation, a good thing lacking what it ought to have, so that all that exists, insofar as it exists, is good. Against the Pelagians he defended the primacy of grace: the human will, wounded by original sin, cannot turn to God without God first drawing it, and even our freedom to love is itself a gift. His City of God, written as Rome fell, set the terms for Christian thinking about history and politics by distinguishing two "cities" — one built on love of self, the other on love of God — intermingled until the end of time. In the Confessions he gave the West its first great interior autobiography, praying his own story back to God: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Why he matters today

Augustine speaks to the seeker because he was one: a brilliant, divided man who tried pleasure, philosophy, and ambition before grace found him. His conversion was no clean break but a long, reluctant struggle, and he captured that divided heart in a prayer he later recalled with rueful honesty:

Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.

— Augustine, Confessions

He wanted God, and he did not want to let go of what kept him from God, and he knew it.

What finally moves people is not only his honesty but the beauty with which he tells it. Augustine writes as a poet of the restless soul: his Latin turns longing, memory, and grace into prose that still aches on the page, as when he cries, "Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new." A Doctor of the Church and patron of theologians and of converts, he remains a companion for anyone whose coming to faith has been more a long wrestling than a single step.

A prayer

O God, the light of every heart that sees you, the life of every soul that loves you, the strength of every mind that seeks you: grant me ever to seek you, and so to seek that I may find, and so to find that I may love you, and so to love that I may be freed from the sins from which you have redeemed me.

Amen.