St. Augustine of Hippo (Aurelius Augustinus) was born at Tagaste in
Numidia, November 13th, 354. The story of his life has been told by
himself in that wonderful book addressed to God which he called the
'Confessions'. He gained but little from his father Patricius; he owed
almost everything to his loving and saintly mother Monica. Though she
was a Christian, she did not venture to bring her son to baptism; and he
went away from home with only the echo of the name of Jesus Christ in
his soul, as it had been spoken by his mother's lips. He fell deeply
into the sins of youth, but found no satisfaction in them, nor was he
satisfied by the studies of literature to which for a while he devoted
himself. The reading of Cicero's 'Hortensius' partly called him back to
himself; but before he was twenty years old he was carried away into
Manichæism, a strange system of belief which united traces of Christian
teaching with Persian doctrines of two antagonistic principles,
practically two gods, a good god of the spiritual world and an evil god
of the material world. From this he passed after a while into less gross
forms of philosophical speculation, and presently began to lecture on
rhetoric at Tagaste and at Carthage. When nearly thirty years of age he
went to Rome, only to be disappointed in his hopes for glory as a
rhetorician; and after two years his mother joined him at Milan.
[Illustration: _ST. AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER_. Photogravure from a
Painting by Ary Scheffer.]
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The great Ambrose had been called from the magistrate's chair to be
bishop of this important city; and his character and ability made a
great impression on Augustine. But Augustine was kept from acknowledging
and submitting to the truth, not by the intellectual difficulties which
he propounded as an excuse, but by his unwillingness to submit to the
moral demands which Christianity made upon him. At last there came one
great struggle, described in a passage from the 'Confessions' which is
given below; and Monica's hopes and prayers were answered in the
conversion of her son to the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ. On
Easter Day, 387, in the thirty-third year of his life, he was baptized,
an unsubstantiated tradition assigning to this occasion the composition
and first use of the _Te Deum_. His mother died at Ostia as they were
setting out for Africa; and he returned to his native land, with the
hope that he might there live a life of retirement and of simple
Christian obedience. But this might not be: on the occasion of
Augustine's visit to Hippo in 391, the bishop of that city persuaded him
to receive ordination to the priesthood and to remain with him as an
adviser; and four years later he was consecrated as colleague or
coadjutor in the episcopate. Thus he entered on a busy public life of
thirty-five years, which called for the exercise of all his powers as a
Christian, a metaphysician, a man of letters, a theologian, an
ecclesiastic, and an administrator.
Into the details of that life it is impossible to enter here; it must
suffice to indicate some of the ways in which as a writer he gained and
still holds a high place in Western Christendom, having had an influence
which can be paralleled, from among uninspired men, only by that of
Aristotle. He maintained the unity of the Church, and its true breadth,
against the Donatists; he argued, as he so well could argue, against the
irreligion of the Manichaeans; when the great Pelagian heresy arose, he
defended the truth of the doctrine of divine grace as no one could have
done who had not learned by experience its power in the regeneration and
conversion of his own soul; he brought out from the treasures of Holy
Scripture ample lessons of truth and duty, in simple exposition and
exhortation; and in full treatises he stated and enforced the great
doctrines of Christianity.
Augustine was not alone or chiefly the stern theologian whom men picture
to themselves when they are told that he was the Calvin of those early
days, or when they read from his voluminous and often illogical writings
quotations which have a hard sound. If he taught a stern doctrine of
predestinarianism, he taught also the great power of sacramental grace;
if he dwelt at times on the awfulness of the divine justice, he spoke
also from the depths of his experience of the power of the divine love;
and his influence on the ages has been rather that of the
'Confessions'--taking their key-note from the words of the first
chapter, "Thou, O Lord, hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is
unquiet until it find rest in Thee"--than that of the writings which
have earned for their author the foremost place among the Doctors of the
Western Church. But his greatest work, without any doubt, is the
treatise on the 'City of God.' The Roman empire, as Augustine's life
passed on, was hastening to its end. Moral and political declension had
doubtless been arrested by the good influence which had been brought to
bear upon it; but it was impossible to avert its fall. "Men's hearts,"
as well among the heathen as among the Christians, were "failing them
for fear and for looking after those things that were coming on the
earth." And Christianity was called to meet the argument drawn from the
fact that the visible declension seemed to date from the time when the
new religion was introduced into the Roman world, and that the most
rapid decline had been from the time when it had been accepted as the
religion of the State. It fell to the Bishop of Hippo to write in reply
one of the greatest works ever written by a Christian. Eloquence and
learning, argument and irony, appeals to history and earnest entreaties,
are united to move enemies to acknowledge the truth and to strengthen
the faithful in maintaining it. The writer sets over against each other
the city of the world and the city of God, and in varied ways draws the
contrast between them; and while mourning over the ruin that is coming
upon the great city that had become a world-empire, he tells of the holy
beauty and enduring strength of "the city that hath the foundations."
Apart from the interest attaching to the great subjects handled by St.
Augustine in his many works, and from the literary attractions of
writings which unite high moral earnestness and the use of a cultivated
rhetorical style, his works formed a model for Latin theologians as long
as that language continued to be habitually used by Western scholars;
and to-day both the spirit and the style of the great man have a wide
influence on the devotional and the controversial style of writers on
sacred subjects.
He died at Hippo, August 28th, 430.
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The selections are from the 'Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,'
by permission of the Christian Literature Company.