Introduction

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is. PSALM 63:1

There is hardly a Christian alive whose faith has not been shaped by Augustine of Hippo, and very few who have read him. He is quoted in sermons of every tradition, claimed by Catholics as a Doctor of the Church and by Protestants as the grandfather of the Reformation, studied by philosophers who do not share his faith, and remembered by almost everyone for a single sentence. It comes from the first paragraph of the Confessions, and it has never been bettered: “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” If a person knows nothing else of Augustine, that sentence is not a bad place to have started. It is the key to everything he wrote.

He was an African. That needs saying at the outset, because the pictures of him in European churches have long made him look like a northern Italian. Aurelius Augustinus was born in 354 at Thagaste, a small inland town in the Roman province of Numidia, in what is now Algeria. He was educated at Madauros and Carthage, he spent the greater part of his life in North Africa, and he died in 430 as bishop of Hippo Regius, a port on the African coast, while a Vandal army besieged its walls. His mind was trained on Cicero and the Platonists; but his church was the ancient, argumentative, deeply rooted church of Africa, the church of Tertullian and Cyprian, and he never stopped belonging to it.

Why he still matters

Augustine matters because he asked the questions that every serious believer eventually asks, and he asked them out of his own experience. Why do I do what I know is wrong, and love doing it? Where does evil come from, if God is good? Why can I see the truth and still not choose it? Where was God in all the years I did not want Him? Why does the world of power and applause, so solid and so impressive, fall down? Most theologians begin with a system. Augustine began with a heart that would not rest, and followed it to God.

He also matters because he shaped the language the Western church still speaks. Original sin, prevenient grace, the bondage of the will, the invisible and visible church, the two cities, the ordering of love — these are Augustine’s words or Augustine’s emphases. When the Reformers argued with the medieval church, both sides argued with his books open.

The one thread

If you look for the single thread that runs through all his teaching, you find it in love. Augustine believed that human beings are not first of all thinking machines, but lovers. We are always moving towards something, pulled by what we love, the way a stone falls or a flame rises. “My weight, is my love,” he wrote near the end of the Confessions; wherever I am carried, it is my love that carries me. Sin is not simply breaking rules; it is love disordered — loving the gifts more than the Giver, loving ourselves more than God, loving lesser goods as if they could satisfy. Grace is God reordering our loves, turning the heart back to Himself, doing in us what we could never do for ourselves. And heaven is love at rest, the heart finally home.

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee. ISAIAH 26:3

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells his life. The twenty chapters that follow each take one of his key teachings, beginning with the restless heart and ending with the vision of God. The last four follow the closing articles of the Creed, as the Enchiridion does — the church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Wherever possible they are grounded in the two of his books that sit in the Ochorus library: the Confessions, in the nineteenth-century translation of Edward Pusey, and the Enchiridion, the little handbook on faith, hope and love he wrote for a friend. His other great works — The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, On the Trinity, his sermons and his writings against Pelagius — are named where they belong, and a guide to them is given at the end.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Augustine would have wanted it so. The Confessions is itself one long prayer; he wrote it not to inform God, who knew it all, but, as he says in Book XI, to stir up his own and his readers’ devotion. So read a chapter, stop at the questions, and pray — his prayer if it helps, your own if it is truer.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and Augustine would have been the first to object if it were. Near the end of his life he wrote the Retractations, going back through his books and correcting them. His readers must do the same where he did not.

Three matters in particular must be named plainly. First, in the long struggle with the Donatist church in Africa, Augustine came to approve the use of imperial force to bring schismatics back into the Catholic fold, and he defended it from the words of the parable, compel them to come in (Luke 14:23). He pleaded that no one should be put to death, and he meant well; but the argument he built was used for centuries afterwards to justify persecution, and it cannot be defended from the mind of Christ. Second, his teaching on sexual desire, shaped partly by his own long captivity to it, tied the passing on of original sin closely to the passion of the marriage bed, and it has left many Christians, especially women, with a shame that Scripture does not lay on them. Third, his conclusions on the fate of infants who die unbaptised were severe, and later church teaching has, in several traditions, drawn back from them.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

And one more thing is worth saying to the Protestant reader, who will be most of the readers of this book. Augustine belongs to the whole church. He was a bishop who believed in the Catholic church of his day, its sacraments and its unity, and he prayed for his dead mother at the altar. He was also the great teacher of grace alone, the man who taught Luther and Calvin to read Paul. It is tempting for each side to take the half of him it likes and leave the other half to its opponents. This book tries to give you the whole man, fairly, and to let him speak where he is faithful to Scripture — which, on the restless heart, the bondage of the will, the sovereignty of grace, and the humility of Christ, he is, gloriously.

He was a sinner who was found, a proud man made humble, a lover whose loves God turned around. He would not want to be admired. He would want you to find the One he found.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read the first paragraph of the Confessions this week, slowly, and ask where your own heart has been trying to rest apart from God.

2. Name one question about God or yourself that you have been carrying unasked. Augustine asked his aloud, in prayer; do the same.

3. If you have received Augustine only through one tradition’s quotations, resolve to read him for yourself, starting with the Confessions.

4. Where a teacher you admire has been wrong, practise saying so plainly without throwing away what was right.

5. Set a time each week to read one chapter of this book, and do not move on until you have prayed its prayer.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You made me for Yourself, and my heart has tried to rest in a thousand places that were not You.

Give me the honesty Augustine had, to tell You the truth about myself, and the hope he found, that You were seeking me before I sought You.

Where Your servant was faithful to Your Word, teach me through him; where he was wrong, give me grace to see it and to keep what is good.

Turn my loves towards You, and bring my restless heart home. Amen.