The Story of St. Augustine, Who Asked God to Make Him Good, But Not Yet
He is the most self-examined man of the ancient world, which is exactly why the gaps in his account are worth noticing.
Sometime around the year 400, a North African bishop sat down and did something nobody had quite done before. He wrote a book about his own interior life: not his campaigns or his offices or his ancestry, but what it had actually been like to be him, addressed throughout to God, in the second person.
The Confessions is why we can say more about Augustine’s inner weather than about almost anyone else who lived before the modern era. It is also why we can say so much about his mother, whose feast falls the day before his, and it is why the silences in the book are so loud.
The ambitious young man
He was born in 354 in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa, in what is now Algeria. His father Patricius was a pagan town official; Monica was a Christian who had been trying to steer him her way since he was small.
He was clever in a way that got noticed and funded. He went to Carthage to study, and at nineteen read Cicero’s Hortensius, a book now lost, which he says redirected his whole life toward the pursuit of wisdom. He then spent nine years as a follower of the Manichees, a rival religion with an elaborate cosmology, which he later regarded as a long detour through nonsense he should have seen through sooner.
He taught rhetoric in Thagaste, then Carthage, then Rome, and in 384 landed the professorship of rhetoric in Milan, an imperial appointment and about as high as a provincial boy could climb. He was thirty. He was, by his own account, ambitious, showy, and hungry for exactly the kind of status the job gave him.
The woman with no name
Here is what belongs next, and it usually gets skipped.
For about fifteen years Augustine lived with a woman. They had a son, Adeodatus, born when Augustine was around eighteen. By the standards of the time this was a recognized arrangement, stable and monogamous, if not a legal marriage.
When his career reached Milan, a socially advantageous marriage was arranged for him. Monica was closely involved in arranging it. The woman Augustine had lived with for fifteen years was sent back to Africa. Their son stayed with his father.
Augustine writes about this with real pain. He says his heart was torn and wounded and that it bled, and he records, without excusing himself, that while waiting two years for his young fiancée to come of age he took up with another woman, because he could not manage the waiting. It is not a flattering passage and he does not make it one.
And in a book of some three hundred pages about his own soul, in which his mother is a constant presence and named on nearly every other page, the woman he lived with for fifteen years and had a child with is never named. Not once.
That absence is the most useful thing in the Confessions for understanding what kind of document it is. It is a work of astonishing honesty about the author’s own interior, written by a man for whom other people are largely instruments of his journey toward God. He tells us he was wounded. He does not tell us what she was called.
The garden
The famous scene comes in 386, in a garden in Milan, and it is famous because it is well told.
He had been circling conversion for years, unable to make himself want it entirely. He had already prayed, in one of the most quoted sentences he ever wrote, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” He knew what he wanted and he knew he did not want it yet, and he had the vocabulary to describe the deadlock with unbearable precision.
In the garden, in a state of collapse, he heard a child’s voice from over the wall, chanting something like a game rhyme: tolle lege, tolle lege. Take up and read. He went to the letters of Paul, opened them at random, and read a passage from Romans about putting off the works of darkness. He says all the shadows of doubt dispersed.
He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter in 387. Monica died at Ostia that same year, on the way home, having got what she waited most of her adult life for.
Thirty-five years of parish administration
The part everyone forgets is what he actually did for the rest of his life.
He went home to Africa intending a quiet monastic existence of study. In 391, visiting Hippo, he was effectively seized by the congregation and pressed into ordination, which was a thing that happened to promising men in that era whether they liked it or not. Around 395 he became bishop of Hippo, a middling port town, and he stayed there for roughly thirty-five years until he died.
The greatest mind of the Latin church spent those decades hearing property disputes between parishioners, arbitrating local quarrels, preaching several times a week, answering letters, and running a small diocese. The Confessions, On the Trinity, and the City of God were written in the gaps.
The City of God he began in 413, after the sack of Rome in 410 sent educated pagans looking for someone to blame and many of them blamed the Christians. It took thirteen years and it changed how the West thought about history, empire, and the relationship between earthly and heavenly citizenship.
Late in life he did something else worth noticing here: he began keeping written records of reported healings in his own diocese, having accounts written down and read publicly, and he included a sober catalogue of them in the City of God. He wanted the claims documented rather than merely repeated, which is recognizably the same instinct the Church formalized many centuries later.
The parts that are argued about
Honesty requires saying that Augustine’s influence is not uniformly celebrated, including by people who admire him.
His work on original sin and predestination, hammered out in a long fight with the followers of Pelagius, shaped Western theology permanently and was later pushed by Calvinists and Jansenists into harder shapes than he may have intended. His writing on sex and the body cast a very long shadow, and a great deal of modern criticism of Christian attitudes there lands on him personally. And in his conflict with the Donatists he moved, over time, from opposing state coercion of schismatics to accepting it, an argument later generations used for worse purposes than he faced.
None of that is hidden. It is in his own writings, which is the recurring theme of his life: he left the evidence for the case against him.
The Vandals at the walls
He died on August 28, 430, aged seventy-five, while a Vandal army besieged Hippo. The Roman North Africa that had made him was visibly ending.
His friend and biographer Possidius, who was there, records that in his final illness Augustine had the penitential psalms copied out and hung on the wall where he could see them from his bed, and that he read them and wept. The man who had explained the interior life to the entire Western world spent his last days looking at other people’s words about being sorry.
He was never formally canonized, because the process did not exist yet. He was acclaimed, as the early saints were, by people who had read him.
Why he still gets asked
He is the patron of theologians and printers, of people with sore eyes, and, in one of the calendar’s better jokes, of brewers, on the strength of the years he spent doing exactly what he later wished he had not.
The reason people still reach for him is not the systematic theology. It is that he wrote the sentence at the front of the Confessions that names the condition most people recognize before they can explain it: that the heart is restless, and stays restless, until it rests somewhere worth resting.
He spent thirty years being restless in public and then wrote it down. That is the whole appeal.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.