Augustine of Hippo Biography and Books

Aurelius Augustinus was born on 13 November 354 in Thagaste, an unremarkable inland town of Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a modest landowner, a pagan of quick temper who received baptism only at the very end of his life. His mother, Monica, was a Christian of stubborn, weeping faith, and it is her prayers, more than any teacher or book, that shape the story of her son. Between them they produced a boy of dazzling ability and dangerous appetite, and they scraped together money they did not have to send him away to school — first to nearby Madauros, and then, at seventeen, to Carthage.

Augustine would spend the next thirty years telling the story of what happened to him, and he told it as a prayer. The Confessions, written when he was in his forties, is addressed not to the reader but to God, and its opening page contains the sentence that has become the truest summary of his life and of every restless life since.

Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

— Augustine of Hippo

A cauldron of unholy loves

Long before Carthage there was a pear tree. Augustine devotes several pages of the Confessions to a boyhood night when he and a gang of friends stripped a neighbour's pear tree and flung the fruit to the pigs. The pears were poor, he had better at home, and he did not even want them. That was exactly the point. I loved mine own fault, he wrote, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. A trivial theft became a window onto the whole mystery of evil: a heart delighting in the forbidden simply because it is forbidden.

Carthage enlarged the appetite. His first line for the city has never been bettered.

To Carthage I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.

— Augustine of Hippo

He was clever, ambitious, and hungry for applause, and he took a woman into his house — he never names her in the Confessions — with whom he lived faithfully for well over a decade. She bore him a son, and he called the boy Adeodatus, "given by God," a name of startling grace from a young man then running as fast as he could from the Giver. In his nineteenth year, two years after his father's death, an assigned text broke over him: Cicero's Hortensius, an exhortation to philosophy. It ruined him for lesser things. "Every vain hope at once became worthless to me," he wrote, "and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom." He turned to the Scriptures, found their Latin crude beside Cicero, and turned away again.

Instead he fell in with the Manichees, an austere dualist sect that flattered his intellect by promising knowledge without the humiliation of faith, and that conveniently located the source of evil somewhere outside his own will. He remained among their "hearers" for almost nine years, from his nineteenth year to his twenty-eighth — years he later described without flinching as wallowing in a deep pit.

The son of these tears

All that time his mother prayed. Augustine says she wept for him more than mothers weep for the bodily death of their children, because she could see the death he was actually dying. She was given a dream: standing on a wooden rule, grieving, she was met by a shining young man who asked why she wept, and who told her to look — and there, standing on the same rule beside her, was her son. She held that dream for nine years while nothing visibly changed.

Disillusioned at last with the Manichees — their celebrated teacher Faustus proved charming and empty when Augustine finally put his questions to him — he decided in 383 to advance his career in Rome. Monica followed him to the harbour and refused to be left behind. He lied to her, said he was seeing a friend off, and sailed by night while she was at prayer. From Rome he secured, in 384, the prestigious chair of rhetoric in Milan, then the seat of the imperial court. He had climbed almost as high as ambition could carry a provincial boy. He had never been more miserable.

Milan

Two things began quietly to work on him there. The first was Ambrose, Milan's formidable bishop, who received the young professor kindly. Augustine came for the style and stayed for the substance: Ambrose read the Old Testament in a way that showed him the Scriptures he had dismissed were deeper, not shallower, than Cicero. The second was a handful of Platonist books, which broke the Manichaean spell by teaching him to conceive of God and the soul as spiritual realities rather than as some rarefied stuff.

His mind moved. His will did not. Monica, now with him in Milan, arranged a respectable marriage, and the woman he had lived with for fifteen years was sent back to Africa — "torn from my side," he wrote, "my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding." She vowed never to know another man and left their son behind. Augustine, unable to wait the two years until his betrothed came of age, promptly took another. He records it without excuse; it is one of the passages that makes the Confessions so hard and so trustworthy. He wanted God, and he wanted everything else, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he prayed the prayer he later remembered with shame.

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

— Augustine of Hippo

The garden

The crisis broke in the late summer of 386. Augustine, hearing of others who had simply given everything up, was thrown into a storm of self-loathing. He fled into the garden of the house he shared with his friend Alypius, threw himself down under a fig tree, and wept — asking himself, again and again, how long he would go on saying tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Then, from a neighbouring house, he heard a child's voice — boy or girl, he could not tell — chanting a little singsong over and over: Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. Take up and read; take up and read. He could not remember any children's game with such words. He stopped crying, got up, and went back to where Alypius sat with the volume of Paul's letters. He opened it and read the first passage his eyes fell on, from Romans 13: "not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence." He read no further, and needed none. "Instantly," he wrote, "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." Alypius read the next line — him that is weak in the faith, receive — and applied it to himself. The two men went indoors and told Monica.

Baptism, and the graves along the way

Augustine resigned his chair and withdrew that autumn to a friend's country villa at Cassiciacum with his mother, his son, and a few companions, writing his first dialogues and testing the new faith against everything he had learned. At the Easter Vigil of 387 he was baptised by Ambrose, together with Alypius and with Adeodatus, who was "not quite fifteen" and whose brilliance frightened his father. Augustine put the boy's own words into a dialogue, The Teacher, and wrote of him simply: "I had no part in that boy, but the sin."

On the journey home, at the port of Ostia, mother and son leaned together at a window over a garden and talked their way upward — past the sun and stars, past their own minds — until for one instant they touched the Wisdom in which all things are made, and then fell back into the noise of speech. Days later Monica took a fever. Asked where she should be buried, she said: "Lay this body any where; let not the care for that any way disquiet you: this only I request, that you would remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be." She died in her fifty-sixth year and his thirty-third. He closed her eyes, forced back his tears in public, and afterwards wept alone — and then wept at having wept. Within two or three years Adeodatus, too, was dead, still in his teens.

Bishop of Hippo

Back in Thagaste, Augustine sold his inheritance and gathered a small household to live in prayer, study, and shared poverty. He wanted nothing public. But in 391, visiting the port city of Hippo Regius, he was standing in the congregation when the people laid hands on him and pressed him on the old bishop, Valerius, for ordination. Augustine wept — not, his friend and biographer Possidius insists, from wounded pride, but because he saw what the care of a church would cost him. Around 395 he was consecrated as Valerius's coadjutor, and on the old man's death shortly afterwards he became bishop of Hippo, an office he held for some thirty-five years.

It was an ordinary provincial charge and he gave it everything: preaching constantly, settling lawsuits between neighbours, writing letters across the empire, keeping a frugal table and an open one, living with his clergy under a common rule. Hundreds of his sermons and letters survive. From this unremarkable harbour town he became the most influential theologian the Western Church has produced. Around 397 he began the Confessions. After Alaric's Goths sacked Rome in 410, he laboured for more than a decade over The City of God, tracing all of history as the story of two cities built by two loves. Near the end of his life he went back over everything he had written and published the Retractations, correcting himself in public — a scholar's act of penitence.

Two long controversies consumed him. Against the Donatists, an African party who held that the Church must consist of the pure and that sacraments from unworthy hands were void, he argued that the Church in this world is a mixed field of wheat and weeds, and that the power of the sacraments rests on Christ, not on the minister. Against Pelagius, who taught that a person could take the first step toward God unaided, he insisted — out of the memory of his own paralysed will in that garden — that everything begins with grace. A single line from the Confessions carried it: "Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt." Augustine later recalled that when a fellow bishop quoted that sentence in Pelagius's hearing, Pelagius could not bear it and nearly came to a quarrel over it. Augustine knew which side of that hinge he lived on, because he had never once rescued himself.

Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee!

— Augustine of Hippo

The siege

His last years darkened. In 429 the Vandals crossed into North Africa, burning towns, scattering congregations, and driving bishops and their people before them. In 430 they laid siege to Hippo itself. Augustine, in his seventy-sixth year, kept working and kept praying while the enemy sat outside the walls.

In the third month of the siege he took a fever. He asked that the shortest of David's penitential psalms be copied out and hung on the wall where he could see them from his bed, and he read them there and wept, Possidius says, freely and constantly — the great doctor of grace dying as a penitent. About ten days before the end he asked to be left alone except for his physicians and his food, so that nothing would interrupt his prayer. He died on 28 August 430, with the Vandals still at the gates. He left no will, because, as Possidius put it, as a poor man of God he had nothing to leave. What he left instead was his clergy, his monasteries, and his library, which he charged them to keep carefully. They did — and through it Hippo, which the Vandals burned, outlived them by fifteen centuries.

Augustine is honoured across the Christian world, by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike, as one of the greatest teachers of the faith. But that is not why people still read him. They read him because he hid nothing: not the theft of the pears, not the woman he sent away, not the prayer that asked for purity and secretly hoped to be refused, not the decades in which he knew better and did nothing. And because through all of it moves the patience of a God who would not let him go, and the prayers of a mother who would not either. He wrote his life down so that we would recognise our own restlessness in his — and then look, as he did, past the man to the only place it ever comes to rest.