Augustine of Hippo

A Tireless Truth-Seeker

January 20-26, 2008 Issue | Posted 1/15/08 at 1:14 PM

Weekly General Audience January 9, 2008

During his general audience on Jan. 9, Pope Benedict XVI continued his series of teachings on the Fathers of the Church by offering his reflections on St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Augustine eventually was led to a moral and intellectual conversion, which he recounted in his many writings and was an exemplary pastor, an assiduous preacher and an influential champion of the Catholic faith.

Dear brothers and sisters,

After the festivities of the Christmas holidays, today I would like to return to our meditations on the Fathers of the Church and speak about the greatest Father of the Latin Church, St. Augustine — a man of passion and faith, great intelligence and untiring pastoral zeal.

Since this great saint and doctor of the Church left a lasting mark on the cultural life of the Western world and on the world as a whole, he is often well-known — at least by name — even among those who are ignorant of Christianity or unfamiliar with it.

Because of his exceptional importance, St. Augustine has been widely influential. On one hand, one might say that all roads of Christian Latin literature lead to Hippo (which is known today as Annaba on the Algerian coast), where Augustine was a bishop from 395 to 430. On the other hand, one might also say that many of the subsequent developments in Christianity and in Western culture have branched out from this city in Roman Africa.

Rarely has a civilization encountered such a great figure who knew how to uphold values, proclaim their intrinsic richness and formulate ideas and methods that would nurture following generations as Paul VI himself noted: “One can say that all the philosophies of the ancient world converge in his work and that currents of thought are derived from it that pervade the entire doctrinal tradition of the following centuries” (AAS, 62, 1970, p. 426).

Moreover, Augustine is the Father of the Church who has left the greatest number of written works. His biographer Possidius says that it seems impossible that a man could write so much during his lifetime. We will speak about his various works in a future gathering.

Today we will focus on his life, which we are well able to reconstruct from his writings, especially the Confessions, the extraordinary spiritual autobiography written in praise of God that is his most famous work.

Indeed, because of the attention he pays to psychology and the inner life, Augustine’s Confessions is unique in Western literature, and non only Western but even non-religious literature, even into modern times.

His concern for the spiritual life, for the mystery of the “I” and for the mystery of God who hides within the “I,” is extraordinary and unprecedented and remains forever, so to speak, a “high point” of spirituality.

Returning, however, to his life, Augustine was born to Patricius, a pagan who later became a catechumen, and Monica, a devout Christian, in Tagaste in the Roman province of Numidia in Africa on Nov. 13, 354.

Monica, a passionate woman who is venerated as a saint, was a major influence on her son and reared him in the Christian faith. As a sign of being welcomed into the catechumenate, Augustine was presented with the gift of salt.

He was always fascinated by the person of Jesus Christ. He said he had always loved Jesus, yet he grew more and more distant from the faith of the Church and the practices of the Church as happens with a lot of young people today.

Augustine also had a brother, Navigius, and a sister whose name we do not know, who later became the head of a monastery of women when she was left a widow.

Augustine had a keen intelligence and received a good education, though he was not always a model student. Nevertheless, he successfully studied grammar, first in his hometown and then in Madaurus.

Beginning in 370, he studied rhetoric in Carthage, the capital of Roman Africa. He became a master of the Latin language but never managed to master Greek or learn Punic, the language that his fellow countrymen spoke.

It was in Carthage that Augustine read Hortensius for the first time, a work by Cicero that was subsequently lost and that started him on the road to conversion.

Cicero’s text enkindled in him a love for wisdom, as he later wrote in his Confessions once he was a bishop: “That book truly changed the way I felt,” so much so that “suddenly every vain hope became empty to me and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardor in my heart” (see Confessions III, 4, 7).

Since Augustine was convinced that truth cannot truly be found without Jesus and since Jesus’ name was missing in the book he found so fascinating, immediately after reading it he began to read Scripture, the Bible. But he was disappointed with it. Not only was the Latin translation of sacred Scripture inadequate, but also the content itself did not seem to satisfy him.

In its accounts of wars and other human events, he did not find the lofty ideals of philosophy or the splendor of the quest for truth that is part of the philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, he did not want to live without God so he sought a religion that corresponded to his desire for truth and to his desire to draw close to Jesus.

For this reason, he fell into the clutches of the Manichaeans, who presented themselves as Christians and offered the promise of a religion that was totally rational. They maintained that the world was divided into two principles: good and evil.

Thus, this explained the complexity of human history. St. Augustine liked this dualistic morality because it included a very high morality for those who were chosen. Moreover, for those, like him, who adhered to it, it was possible to live a life more suited to the times, especially for a young man.

So, he became a Manichaean, convinced that he had found the synthesis between rationality, the search for the truth and love of Jesus Christ.

It also had a concrete advantage for his personal life as well: Being a Manichaean easily opened up career prospects for him.

By adhering to this religion, which included many influential people, he was able to continue a relationship with a woman with whom he was involved and to move on in his career. He had a son, Adeodatus, with this woman.

His son, whom he loved dearly and who was very intelligent, was later present as Augustine prepared for baptism near Lake Como and appears in the Dialogues that St. Augustine has left us. Unfortunately, the boy died prematurely.

Around the age of 20, Augustine was a grammar teacher in his hometown. But he soon moved to Carthage, where he became a brilliant and renowned teacher of rhetoric. Over time, however, Augustine began to distance himself from the Manichaean faith, which left him disappointed intellectually since it was not able to resolve his doubts.

He moved to Rome and then to Milan where the imperial court was then located and where he obtained a prestigious post thanks to the interest and the recommendations of the prefect of Rome, a pagan named Symmachus, who was hostile to St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan.

In Milan, Augustine began to frequent the beautiful sermons of Bishop Ambrose, initially as a way of improving his own rhetorical skills.

The bishop had been a representative of the emperor in Northern Italy. Augustine was attracted to the words of the bishop of Milan, not only because of their eloquence but also because they increasingly touched his heart.

The problems that Augustine found in the Old Testament — its lack of rhetorical beauty and lofty philosophical ideals — were resolved by St. Ambrose’s sermons, thanks to his typological interpretation of the Old Testament.

Augustine realized that the Old Testament is a journey toward Jesus Christ. Thus, he discovered the key to understanding the beauty and even the philosophical depth of the Old Testament, and he came to understand the overall unity of the mystery of Christ in history as well as the synthesis between philosophy, rationality and faith in the Logos, in Christ, the eternal Word who became flesh.

Within a short period of time, Augustine realized the allegorical reading of Scripture and the neo-Platonic philosophy that the bishop of Milan practiced allowed him to resolve the intellectual difficulties he encountered when he was younger and first studied the texts of the Bible, which seemed insurmountable at the time.

Thus, Augustine followed up his reading the writings of the philosophers with a renewed reading of Scripture, especially the letters of St. Paul. His conversion to Christianity on Aug. 15, 386, was the culmination of a long and tortuous inner journey, which we will consider in another catechesis.

With his mother Monica, his son Adeodatus, and a small group of friends, Augustine moved to the countryside north of Milan near Lake Como to prepare himself for baptism. At the age of 32, on April 24, 387, Ambrose baptized Augustine during the Easter Vigil in the Cathedral of Milan.

After his baptism Augustine decided to return to Africa with his friends, with the idea of living a life in community, a sort of monastic life in the service of God. But in Ostia, while waiting to leave, his mother suddenly fell sick and died a little later, breaking her son’s heart.

When he finally returned to his homeland, the new convert settled in Hippo with the purpose of founding a monastery. Despite his resistance, he was ordained a priest in this town on the African coast in 391 and with some friends, he began to live the monastic life he had been thinking about for some time, dividing his time between prayer, study and preaching.

He wanted to serve truth alone and did not feel called to a life of pastoral service.

However, he soon realized that God was calling him to be a shepherd for others and offer to others the gift of truth. Four years later, in 395, he was consecrated bishop of Hippo.

Deepening his study of Scripture and other texts from the Christian tradition, Augustine was an exemplary bishop in his untiring pastoral commitment: he preached to the faithful several times a week, helped the poor and the orphans, and looked after the formation of the clergy as well as the organization of monasteries for men and women.

In a very short time, the former teacher of rhetoric established himself as one of the most important representatives of Christianity of that time. Over the 35 years of his episcopate, the bishop of Hippo was very active in the administration of his diocese — with noteworthy implications for civic life as well — and he had an immense influence on guiding the Catholic Church in Roman Africa and Christianity in general during that time and stood up against such tenacious and disruptive religious movements and heresies as Manichaeism, Donatism and Pelagianism that were endangering the Christian faith in the one and only God who is rich in mercy.

Augustine entrusted himself to God every day, right up to the end of his life. He was struck by a fever while Vandal invaders were besieging Hippo over a period of almost three months.

As his friend Possidius tells us in his Vita Augustini, Augustine asked that the penitential psalms be transcribed in large characters “and had the sheets pinned to the wall so that during his illness he could read them while in bed, and he cried endlessly warm tears” (31,2).

This is how Augustine spent his last days. He died on Aug. 28, 430, before reaching the age of 76.

Register translation

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