St. Augustine of Hippo

St. Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste in Roman North Africa (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), the son of a pagan father, Patricius, and a devout Christian mother, St. Monica. Brilliant and ambitious, he pursued rhetoric at Carthage, where he took a concubine who bore him a son, Adeodatus, and drifted into the Manichaean sect, whose dualism seemed to explain the problem of evil that Christianity, he then thought, could not. For nearly two decades his mother prayed and wept for his conversion. The search for truth carried Augustine to Rome and then to Milan as a professor of rhetoric. There the preaching of the bishop, St. Ambrose, dismantled his objections to Scripture, and the example of St. Anthony of Egypt and the monks shamed his hesitation. In a Milanese garden in 386, torn by indecision, he heard a child's voice chanting 'tolle, lege'—take up and read—opened the letters of St. Paul, and read words that ended his long resistance. He was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil of 387, with Adeodatus at his side. Monica died at Ostia soon after, her prayers answered. Returning to Africa, Augustine intended a quiet monastic life, but the people of the port city of Hippo Regius seized him for ordination in 391, and by 396 he was their bishop. For thirty-four years he preached almost daily, judged disputes, cared for the poor, and fought the great controversies of his age: against the Donatists on the unity and holiness of the Church, and against the Pelagians on the absolute necessity of grace—the battle that earned him the title Doctor of Grace. His writings shaped Western Christianity more than those of any other Father. The Confessions, the first great spiritual autobiography, traces God's pursuit of one restless heart—'you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.' The City of God, written after Rome fell in 410, set human history within the drama of two loves, and On the Trinity plumbed the central mystery of the faith. His Rule continues to order the lives of Augustinian religious around the world. Augustine died on August 28, 430, as the Vandals besieged Hippo. Venerated from antiquity as one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church, he is celebrated on August 28, the day after the feast of his mother. His relics rest in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, Italy, in a magnificent marble ark that draws pilgrims and scholars alike. He is a patron of theologians, printers, and brewers.