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Saint Augustine Biography

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AUGUSTINE, SAINT (Lat. Aurelius Augustinus) (354-430). Bishop of Hippo, in north Africa, the greatest of the Latin Fathers and one of the most eminent doctors of the Western church. He is called Aurelius Augustinus by Orosius and Prosper of Aquitania. From his autobiographical Confessions, and from the biography written by his friend Possidius, we gather the most important facts of his life. He was born in Tagaste, a town. in Numidia, Nov. 13, 354, and died in Hippo, Aug. 28, 430, during the siege of that town by the Vandals. His father, Patricius, was a pagan (afterward converted), but his mother, Monica, was a devoted Christian, who labored long and earnestly for her son's conversion and who has been canonized by the Church. Augustine was brought up to be a rhetorician and studied at Tagaste, Madaura, and Carthage. From about the age of 16 until shortly before his conversion, he lived in concubinage, which, along with other youthful irregularities, he afterward bitterly lamented (cf. his Confessions, bk. iii). One of the greatest obstacles to his conversion was this state of concubinage, against whose bondage he struggled for a long time in vain; he seemed to be sincerely and deeply attached to the object of his passion, to whom he was faithful for many years. By her he had one son, whom he named Adeodatus (‘the gift of God’).

The perusal of Cicero's Hortensius awakened Augustine to a more serious view of life, and he became an earnest seeker after truth, but experimented with several systems before finally entering the Christian church. For nine years he was a follower of Manichæism (q.v.), a Persian dualistic philosophy then widely current in the Western Empire. With its fundamental principle of conflict between two opposing world powers, symbolized by light and darkness, good and evil, Manichæism seemed to Augustine to correspond to the facts of experience and to furnish the most plausible hypothesis upon which to construct a philosophical and ethical system. Moreover, its demands upon novices (auditores) were not strict enough to cause great uneasiness of conscience; witness Augustine's petition recorded in his Confessions (viii, 17 ), "Lord, make me pure and chaste-but not quite yet!" He never advanced to full membership, not becoming one of the perfecti. After nine years he abandoned this system, failing after diligent inquiry to find in it the, solution of his greatest difficulties. His next sage of development was skepticism.

About this time (383) Augustine left Carthage for Rome. His mother, almost heartbroken at his secret flight, took ship and followed. He did not remain long in the capital, but went on to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, where he fell under the influence of the Neo-Platonic philosophy, which has so often carried serious thinkers over from doubt to faith, and where he also met the great Bishop Ambrose, who at that time was the most distinguished ecclesiastic in Italy. Augustine presently found himself attracted once more toward Christianity, and asking what answer it had to give to the problems of life. At last, one day, he seemed to hear God saying to him, "Take and read." He turned to the Scriptures and read the words, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof" (Rom. xiii. 14). This decided the question. Augustine resolved to embrace Christianity and to believe as the Church believed. With his natural son he was baptized by Ambrose on Easter Eve, 387. His mother, who had rejoined him in Italy, was rejoiced at this answer to her prayers and hopes. She died soon afterward at Ostia on the return journey to Africa with Augustine.

The remaining 43 years of Augustine's life were devoted to the service of the Church. He returned to Africa, was made presbyter in 391, and Bishop of Hippo in 395, which latter office he held until his death. It was a period of political and theological unrest, for, while the barbarians pressed in upon the Empire, even sacking Rome itself, schism and heresy also threatened the Church. Augustine threw himself into the theological conflict, not from inclination, but from a sense of duty. With voice and pen he waged war, and usually he conquered. The whole of Western Christendom has entered into the fruits of his victories. Besides the Manichæan controversy, Augustine was engaged in two great theological conflicts. One was with the Donatists (q.v.), who held that the purity of the Church forbade receiving back any who had denied Christ under persecution. This Puritan theory Augustine did not share. In the course of this discussion he developed his ecclesiastical and sacramental theories. The other was with the Pelagians, followers of a British monk who disliked the idea of absolute predestination, and related to such doctrinal questions as man's primitive state, the fall, freedom of will, and depravity. In the course of this conflict, which was long and bitter, Augustine developed his theories of sin and grace, of divine sovereignty and predestination. Augustine's doctrine can be treated from two sides, the ecclesiastical and the theological. The Roman Catholic church has found special satisfaction in the former; Catholic and Protestant theology alike are based on the latter. Both Calvin and Luther were close students of Augustine.

He taught that the true Church was characterized by four qualities-unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. Outside this Church there could be no salvation. It alone was the "ark of safety" in which a perishing world must take refuge through submission to its authority. Convinced of the indispensable necessity of church membership, Augustine finally came to believe it right to coerce the intractable; it was the duty of the Christian state to "compel them to come in." The force doctrine, so repellant to our modern ideas and so fraught with evil in the history of religion, may be found clearly stated by Augustine in his Ninety-third Epistle (408), where he cites the Parable of the Wedding Feast in support of his position, and also in the proceedings of the Synod of Carthage, held in the year 411, which is commonly said to have ended the Donatist schism. Augustine's doctrine stood between the extremes of Pelagianism and Manichæism. Against Pelagian naturalism he held that death came into the world as the result of sin, and that man is saved by divine grace; against Manichæism he vigorously defended free will. A misunderstanding of his position on grace and free will often arises from neglecting to consider that he is at the same time an ardent defender of human freedom against Manichæan fatalism, and the champion of divine grace against the theory of complete human independence.

Augustine was an energetic controversialist, as we have seen. He was also a powerful preacher; but his sermons, owing partly to the great difference between their style and method and that to which we are accustomed, and partly to their fanciful interpretation of Scripture, often disappoint the modern reader. The editors have accepted 363 sermons as genuine, among a much larger number which bear his name. In his great apologetic work, the City of God, Augustine appeared in the role of seer, unfolding the meaning of the past and the secrets of the future with abundant learning and marvelous fertility of imagination. Ten of the 22 books into which this long work is divided are devoted to refuting the pagan notion that the worship of the gods insures prosperity in this life or in the life to come. The remaining 12 trace the origin, progress, and destiny of the two cities--one of God, the other of this world--with the final triumph of the former, which is the Christian church. Thirteen years of Augustine's busy life (413-426) were occupied with this sublime attempt to construct a Christian philosophy of history. In 428, shortly before his death, Augustine wrote the Retractions, in which he registers his final verdict upon the books he had previously written, correcting whatever his maturer judgment held to be misleading or wrong.

The Confessions were written in 397; the Epistles, of which there are 270 in the Benedictine edition, are variously dated between 386 and 429. Among other important works may be noted his treatise On Free-Will (388-395); On Christian Doctrine (397); On Baptism: Against the Donatists (400); On the Trinity (400-416); On Nature and Grace (415); and Homilies upon several books of the Bible.