Ambrose, at the Easter Vigil in 387.
One of the most important moments on his path to conversion was when he heard a mysterious child’s voice summon him to “take and read” the Bible. Opening the Scriptures at random, fulfilling what he took to be a divine command, he came upon Saint Paul’s exhortation to the Romans about how the whole Gospel is aimed at making believers and shaping their behavior. In one of the most poignant and quoted passages of his autobiography, Augustine describes the beauty of finding the God who was with him throughout his meandering search, recognizing the peace God alone can give in response to our every longing.
One of the most important aspects of his conversion was the continual and persistent support of his mother, Saint Monica. Her greatest desire was to pass on the Faith to those she loved, and this became particularly obvious when Augustine was ill as a boy, and her husband forbade his baptism. Monica was able to see her husband enter the Church at the time of his death. She followed Augustine in his many travels before his conversion and constantly prayed for him. Of course, she knew that her son was ambling aimlessly in search of Christ, though he himself did not know it. But she offered him a mother’s patient love. Her spiritual strength and persistence became the foundation for Augustine’s faith when at last he converted. Some of the most moving portions of his Confessions speak of his relationship with his holy mother, especially his remembrance and prayer for her at the time of her death.
By his mid-thirties, Augustine had lost his mother and son to death, and he found himself back in his native north Africa. After selling all he had and giving the profits to the poor, he used his one remaining possession — the family home — as the location for a new religious community of like-minded men, even writing a rule that endures today as a basis for many religious congregations. Augustine was eventually ordained a priest and became famous as a preacher. Many of his sermons survive as some of the most treasured of his writings.
Augustine later became bishop at Hippo, near his home in northern Africa. In his exercise of that office, he came to be a model for all who share in that ministry. Bishops are to exercise the ministry of unity, and Augustine offers a model through the lens of teaching, which is one of the threefold tasks of any bishop. His was an integrated life, and he internalized the unity he sought to build because he believed what he read, taught what he believed, and practiced what he taught. This is all on display in the Confessions, which serves as part theological treatise, part philosophical lecture, and part prayer, all the while remaining within the context of a serious reflection on his own life.
The Confessions is not just a dry, linear enumeration of dates and events. Rather, the work is a spiritual autobiography, in which Augustine bares his soul to the reader, sharing the wisdom he learned along the road to his conversion. Augustine’s story gives hope to those who may have, as the song goes, “been looking for love in all the wrong places,” as he did for so many years. Augustine’s life illustrates that we will not be content with anything that keeps us from the God of love, peace, and truth. And he helps us recognize how God is constantly at work in our lives as a provident and loving Father.
Within Augustine, and in his writings, we encounter a reasonable and intelligent faith, one of depth and substance, springing from his interior relationship with God. In Augustine, faith and reason are in continual dialogue, mutually enriching and building off each other. The entirety of Augustine’s life and teaching evidences the importance of this dialogue.
This is found in all of his writings, from his commentaries on Scripture or the political scene of his day, to his catechism and his critiques of heresies of his time. His writings cover the gambit of theological topics, everything from astrology to sexuality. His arguments on topics like the Trinity, the just war theory, and the validity of the sacraments have stood the test of time and remain among the most cited of his works by theologians and philosophers in the West. His teachings on sin and grace were even held in high esteem by many of the Protestant reformers.
Toward the end of his life, the Roman Empire was disintegrating, and northern Africa was also attacked in his last months. It was reported that Augustine was responsible for a miraculous healing during the siege. The saint died in Hippo, in modern-day Algeria, in 430. After his death, the city was destroyed by fire, except for his residence, which housed his voluminous written works.
The process of canonization was not yet codified in the early Church when Augustine died, but his sanctity was ratified by acclaim of the people. In 1298, he was recognized as a Doctor of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII. He was one of the original four to be so distinguished, along with Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, and Saint Gregory the Great.
Introduction
By Joseph Pearce
If any single book can claim to be the quintessential Christian classic, it must be Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Apart from being a purely Christian classic, there is no doubt that it is one of the Great Books, those seminal works, both Christian and non-Christian, which form the very foundation of the Western canon. The Confessions sits comfortably beside the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. It is of their company. And yet there’s something about it that puts it in a class of its own, even in such an elite company. It contains philosophy, and yet it is unlike any other philosophical work. It grapples with questions of theology, but not in the same way that theologians normally do their grappling. It is autobiographical, but it is not merely an autobiography; it is, rather, the very archetype of autobiography, the first and the best of the genre, the standard by which all autobiography is measured. Furthermore, and this is perhaps the ultimate test, it is sublimely accessible and perennially applicable. It speaks to our age, as it spoke to Augustine’s own age, because it speaks to all ages. It cuts through the cant of intellectual fads and fashions, which do not partake of those truths that are truly essential to our understanding of ourselves, of each other, and of our place in the cosmos. Augustine is accessible and applicable because he is one of us. He suffers from the same temptations and succumbs to those temptations. He falls and does not always get up again, preferring to wallow in the gutter with his lusts and his unruly appetites. Yet, like us, he is restless until he rests in the truth, which can only be found in Christ and the Church he founded.
Unlike the other great philosophers, Augustine doesn’t seek in the Confessions to show us the truth purely objectively, by setting out the abstract concepts and proving his point with dispassionate and logical reasoning. He seeks to show us the objective truth through his subjective engagement with it and by the consequences of his failure to engage with it. And yet this subjective approach has objective power because, in putting himself in his own shoes, Augustine is putting himself in our shoes also. In describing himself, he is simultaneously describing us. He and we are one. We share the same humanity with all that it entails. In seeing him and his struggles, we see ourselves and our own struggles, and the struggles of those around us.
The perennial applicability of the Confessions was illustrated potently by Father David Meconi in his whimsical composition of a letter which he imagines the seventeen-year-old Augustine might have written from college to his long-suffering mother, Saint Monica. “Mom, I wish you could meet my new girlfriend,” Augustine writes. “We may have come from very different places, but we have taught each other some important lessons. We have been staying together for a year or so now, and want you to know that you are soon going to meet your grandson!”
In presenting the autobiographical facts of Augustine’s life in twenty-first-century idiom, Father Meconi allows us to see something of enduring relevance in the life Augustine lived and the life lessons he learned, even though he lived sixteen hundred years ago. Perhaps we were the college student who decided to “shack-up” with a girlfriend. Perhaps we got a girlfriend pregnant. Or perhaps we were the mother whose college-age son or daughter dropped the bombshell about their lifestyle choices. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! (The more things change, the more they remain the same.)
In the same letter, Father Meconi imagines Augustine telling his mother that he intends to switch majors from law to philosophy because he’s read some good books and wonders whether perhaps there is something or someone that attracts and moves people toward the truth. “But I don’t know,” he