Saint Augustine of Hippo

Augustine was born in 354 at Thagaste in North Africa, in what is now Algeria. His mother, Saint Monica, was a Christian, and his father, Patricius, was a pagan. Brilliant and ambitious, he studied at Carthage and became a teacher of rhetoric. For nine years he followed the Manichees, a sect that promised a rational religion. He lived with a woman he did not marry, and they had a son, Adeodatus. All the while his mother prayed for him.

His career took him to Rome and then to Milan, where he went to hear the famous bishop Ambrose preach, at first only to study his style. Slowly the Scriptures and Ambrose’s teaching won him over, but his will lagged behind. In a garden in Milan in 386, in anguish, he heard a child’s voice chanting, “Take and read.” He opened Saint Paul at random and read: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh” (Romans 13). Ambrose baptized him at the Easter Vigil of 387.

He returned to Africa to live a quiet life of prayer with friends. But in 391 the people of Hippo seized him and had him ordained a priest, and a few years later he became their bishop. For thirty-five years he preached, judged disputes, cared for the poor and wrote without rest. His Confessions are addressed to God: “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rest in thee.” His City of God answered the pagans after the sack of Rome, and he defended the Church’s teaching on grace against the Pelagians.

He died on 28 August 430, while the Vandals were besieging Hippo. He is one of the greatest Doctors of the Church.