A Restless Heart from Thagaste

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments. PSALM 119:176

A boy of Numidia. Augustine was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste, a modest town in the hills of Roman North Africa, in the province of Numidia — today Souk Ahras in Algeria. His father, Patricius, was a small landowner and town councillor, a pagan of quick temper who was baptised only near the end of his life. His mother, Monica, was a Christian of deep and stubborn faith. The family was African through and through; they belonged to the Latin-speaking townspeople of a province that had been Christian, in part, for a century and a half. They were not rich, and they stretched themselves to educate their clever son, first at nearby Madauros and then, when he was about seventeen, at Carthage, the great city of the African coast. In between there was an idle year at home, and a night when he and his friends stripped a neighbour’s pear tree and threw the fruit to the pigs. He never forgot it, and he would make it the most famous theft in Christian literature.

A cauldron of unholy loves. At Carthage he was brilliant and hungry — for learning, for applause, for love. He took a woman into his house, whom he never names, and lived with her faithfully for some fifteen years; she bore him a son, Adeodatus, whose name means given by God. In his nineteenth year he read Cicero’s Hortensius, an appeal to seek wisdom, and it set him on fire. He turned to the Bible and found its Latin crude beside Cicero’s, and he turned away. Instead he joined the Manichees, a sect that taught that the world was the battleground of two opposing powers, light and darkness, and that the evil in a man was not really his own doing. It suited him. For nine years, from nineteen to twenty-eight, he was one of their hearers. He taught rhetoric in Thagaste and in Carthage, and grew in reputation.

The son of these tears. Monica grieved as if he had died. For a time she would not let him eat at her table; then a dream, in which she saw him standing beside her on the same wooden rule, gave her hope, and she took him back. She begged a bishop to argue her son out of his errors. The bishop, himself once a Manichee, told her the young man was not yet teachable and she should pray. When she pressed him with tears, he sent her away with the words the Confessions has made immortal: “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She took it, Augustine says, as if it had sounded from heaven.

Rome and Milan. Disillusion came slowly. When the celebrated Manichee teacher Faustus came to Carthage, Augustine found him charming and shallow; his questions went unanswered. In 383 he sailed for Rome, deceiving his mother, who wished to come with him, by slipping away at night while she prayed in a chapel by the shore. In 384 he won the public post of professor of rhetoric at Milan, then the seat of the Western imperial court. It was the height of a provincial boy’s ambition. Monica followed him there.

Ambrose. At Milan two things worked on him. The first was Ambrose, the city’s bishop, whose sermons Augustine went to hear for their style and found he was listening to their substance. Ambrose showed him that the Old Testament he had despised could be read with depth and spiritual sense. The second was a handful of Platonist books, which freed him from the Manichaean habit of imagining God as a kind of bodily substance. His mind was changing. His will was not. At his mother’s urging a respectable marriage was arranged, and the mother of his son was sent back to Africa. He records the wound of it without excuse, and he records too that he promptly took another woman while he waited for his bride to come of age. He had long prayed, he tells us, for chastity — only not yet.

The garden. In August 386, after hearing of others who had given up everything to follow Christ, Augustine broke down in a garden at Milan. He flung himself under a fig tree, weeping, and heard from a neighbouring house a child’s voice chanting, “Take up and read; Take up and read.” He took up the letters of Paul that lay beside his friend Alypius and read the first words his eyes fell on, from Romans 13:13–14, a command to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. The struggle was over. He went in and told his mother, and she rejoiced.

Baptism, and Ostia. He gave up his professorship and spent the winter in a borrowed country house at Cassiciacum with his mother, his son and a group of friends, reading, talking and praying the Psalms. At Easter 387 Ambrose baptised him in Milan, together with Adeodatus and Alypius. Later that year, waiting at Ostia, the port of Rome, for a ship home to Africa, he and Monica stood at a window overlooking a garden and spoke together of the life of the saints, and were lifted, for a moment, beyond everything. Within days she fell ill. She died, in her fifty-sixth year and his thirty-third, asking only to be remembered at the Lord’s altar.

Hippo. Augustine returned to Africa in 388 and set up a small community of prayer and study at Thagaste. Adeodatus died there within a few years, still a young man. In 391, on a visit to the port city of Hippo Regius, he was seized by the congregation in church and presented to their bishop, Valerius, for ordination as a priest — a thing that happened in those days, and he wept at it. About 395 he was made Valerius’s fellow bishop and soon succeeded him. He remained bishop of Hippo for the rest of his life, some thirty-five years: preaching several times a week, hearing lawsuits, caring for the poor, living in common with his clergy, and writing without cease.

The controversies. His writing was forged in argument. Against the Manichees he defended the goodness of creation. Against the Donatists, a rival African church that held the Catholic clergy to be polluted by those who had handed over the Scriptures in the persecutions of a century earlier, he argued that the church is a mixed field of wheat and tares, and that the sacraments belong to Christ, not to the purity of the minister. That long struggle led him, in the end, to approve the empire’s coercion of the Donatists — the darkest page in his record. From about 411 he contended with the followers of the British monk Pelagius, who taught that human beings could keep God’s commandments by the strength of their own free will. Against them Augustine wrote the great books on grace that were to shape all Western theology after him.

The fall of Rome. In 410 the Goths under Alaric sacked the city of Rome. Pagans blamed the disaster on the Christians, who had abandoned the old gods. Augustine answered with The City of God, which he wrote over thirteen years and more: the story of two cities, built by two loves, running together through all of history. Around 421 he wrote the Enchiridion for a man named Laurentius. Near the end he reviewed all his writings in the Retractations, correcting what he thought mistaken.

The end. In 430 the Vandals, who had crossed from Spain, overran Roman Africa and besieged Hippo. Augustine fell ill in the third month of the siege. His friend and first biographer, Possidius, records that he had the penitential Psalms copied out and fixed to the wall beside his bed, and read them, weeping, in his last days. He died on 28 August 430, aged seventy-five. He left no will, Possidius says, because as one of God’s poor he had nothing to leave — nothing but a library. The library survived.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Trace the years in your own life when you were running from God. Where, looking back, can you see Him following?

2. Augustine’s turning came through a mother’s prayers, a bishop’s preaching, a book, a friend and a child’s voice. Thank God this week for the people and means He used to reach you.

3. If you are praying for someone who seems far from God, write down their name and keep it where you pray, as Monica kept her dream.

4. Consider what you would leave behind if your life ended as his did. Is there anything you are holding that you would be ashamed to have hoarded?

5. Choose one of the penitential Psalms — 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 or 143 — and pray it slowly this week, as he did at the last.

A PRAYER

Lord, You followed Augustine from Thagaste to Carthage, from Rome to Milan, and You did not let him go.

Thank You for the ways You have followed me: for those who prayed, those who preached, those who told me the truth when I did not want it.

Where I am still saying “not yet” to You, forgive me, and make me willing today.

Keep me to the end, humble and thankful, holding nothing back from You. Amen.