Excerpts from Philip Schaff

The follow are mainly excerpts from A Sketch of the Life of St. Augustin by Philip Schaff

Conversion

If ever there was a thorough and fruitful conversion, next to that of Paul on the way to Damascus, it was that of Augustin, when, in a garden not far from Milan, in September of the year 386, amidst the most violent struggles of mind and heart—the birth-throes of the new life—he heard that divine voice of a child: “Tolle Lege!” (“Take, read!”) and he “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. xiii. 14). It is a touching lamentation of his: “I have loved Thee late, Thou Beauty, so old and so new; I have loved Thee late! And lo! Thou wast within, but I was without, and was seeking Thee there. And into Thy fair creation I plunged myself in my ugliness; for Thou was with me, and I was not with Thee! Those things kept me away from Thee, which had not been, except they had been in Thee! Thou didst call, and didst cry aloud, and break through my deafness. Thou didst glimmer, Thou didst shine, and didst drive away my blindness. Thou didst breathe, and I drew breath, and breathed in Thee. I tasted Thee, and I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burn for Thy peace. If I, with all that is within me, may once live in Thee, then shall pain and trouble forsake me; entirely filled with Thee, all shall be life to me.”

He received baptism from Ambrose in Milan on Easter Sunday, 387, in company with his friend and fellow-convert Alypius, and his natural son Adeodatus (given by God). It impressed the divine seal upon the inward transformation. As it was said to Monica his mother, “A son of so many prayers and tears could not be lost,” and the faithful mother who travailed with him in spirit with greater pain than her body had in bringing him into the world, he ascribes his conversion under God “to the faithful and daily tears” of his mother. She was permitted, for the encouragement of future mothers, to receive shortly before her death an answer to her prayers and expectations, and was able to leave this world with joy.

Augustine broke radically with the world; abandoned the brilliant and lucrative vocation of a teacher of rhetoric, which he had followed in Rome and Milan; sold his goods for the benefit of the poor; and thenceforth devoted his rare gifts exclusively to the service of Christ, and to that service he continued faithful to his last breath. After the death of his mother, whom he revered and loved with the most tender affection, he went a second time to Rome for several months, and wrote books in defence of true Christianity against false philosophy and against the Manichæan heresy. Returning to Africa, he spent three years, with his friends Alypius and Evodius, on an estate in his native Tagaste, in contemplative and literary retirement.

Then, in 391, he was chosen presbyter against his will, by the voice of the people, which, as in the similar cases of Cyprian and Ambrose, proved to be the voice of God, in the Numidian maritime city of Hippo Regius; and in 395 he was elected bishop in the same city. For eight and thirty years, until his death, he labored in this place, and made it the intellectual centre of Western Christendom. He is still known among the inhabitants of the place as “the great Christian” (Rumi Kebir).

Confessions

“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.”

The Confessions are a sublime composition, in which Augustin, like David in the fifty-first Psalm, confesses to God, in view of his own and of succeeding generations, without reserve the sins of his youth; and they are at the same time a hymn of praise to the grace of God, which led him out of darkness into light, and called him to service in the kingdom of Christ. Here we see the great church teacher of all times “prostrate in the dust, conversing with God, basking in his love; his readers hovering before him only as a shadow.” He puts away from himself all honor, all greatness, all merit, and lays them gratefully at the feet of the All-merciful. The reader feels on every hand that Christianity is no dream nor illusion, but truth and life, and he is carried along in adoration of the wonderful grace of God.

Life as a Christian Leader

His outward mode of life was extremely simple, and mildly ascetic. He lived with his clergy in one house in an apostolic community of goods, and made this house a seminary of theology, out of which ten bishops and many lower clergy went forth. He often preached five days in succession, sometimes twice a day, and set it as the object of his preaching, that all might live with him, and he with all, in Christ. Wherever he went in Africa, he was begged to preach the world of salvation. He faithfully administered the external affairs connected with his office, though he found his chief delight in contemplation. He was specially devoted to the poor, and, like Ambrose, caused the church vessels to be melted down to redeem prisoners.

Augustine’s labors extended far beyond his little diocese. He was the intellectual head of the North African and the entire Western church of his time. He took active interest in all theological and ecclesiastical questions. He was the champion of the orthodox doctrine against Manichæan, Donatist, and Pelagian. In him was concentrated the whole polemic power of the catholic church of the time against heresy and schism; and in him it won the victory over them.

His Death

The evening of his life was troubled by increasing infirmities of body and by the unspeakable wretchedness which the barbarian Vandals spread over his country in their victorious invasion, destroying cities, villages, and churches, without mercy, and even besieging the fortified city of Hippo. Yet he faithfully persevered in his work. The last ten days of his life he spent in close retirement, in prayers and tears and repeated reading of the penitential Psalms, which he caused to be written on the wall over his bed, that he might have them always before his eyes. Thus with an act of penitence he closed his life. In the midst of the terrors of the siege and the despair of his people he could not suspect what abundant seed he had sown for the future.

In the third month of the siege of Hippo, on the 28th of August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, in full possession of his faculties, and in the presence of many friends and pupils, he past gently and peacefully into that eternity to which he had so long aspired. “O how wonderful,” wrote he in his Meditations, I freely combine several passages. “how beautiful and lovely are the dwellings of Thy house, Almighty God! I burn with longing to behold Thy beauty in Thy bridal-chamber.…O Jerusalem, holy city of God, dear bride of Christ, my heart loves thee, my soul has already long sighed for thy beauty!…The King of kings Himself is in the midst of thee, and His children are within thy walls. There are the hymning choirs of angels, the fellowship of heavenly citizens. There is the wedding-feast of all who from this sad earthly pilgrimage have reached thy joys. There is the far-seeing choir of the prophets; there the company of the twelve apostles; there the triumphant army of innumerable martyrs and holy confessors. Full and perfect love there reigns, for God is all in all. They love and praise, they praise and love Him evermore.…Blessed, perfectly and forever blessed, shall I too be, if, when my poor body shall be dissolved,… I may stand before my King and God, and see Him in His glory, as He Himself hath deigned to promise: ‘Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory which I had with Thee before the world was.’”

He left no will, for in his voluntary poverty he had no earthly property to dispose of, except his library; this he bequeathed to the church.

A few decades later the whole West-Roman empire fell in ruins. But the work of Augustine could not perish. His ideas fell like living seed into the soil of Europe, and produced abundant fruits in nations and countries of which he had never heard.

Major Works

• Confessions – spiritual autobiography, written early in Christian life
• Enchiridion – “Handbook” of Faith, Hope and Love, compendium of essential for the Christian, written later in life
• City of God – grand apology for the Faith, against those who blame Christianity and the forsaking of the pagan gods, for the downfall of the Roman Empire. Great concepts of The City of God, and The City of Man
• many other works.

Questions for discussion

• Should Introductory material be trusted without question? Why or Why not? Are there any mistakes in Omnibus II
  • e.g. page 32 “he hung out with the “cool” crowd of ruffians…They called themselves the wreckers..”
  • Confessions, Book III, chapter 3 says: “as you well know, Lord, I behaved far more quietly than the ‘Wreckers’, a title of ferocious devilry which the fashionable set chose for themselves. I had nothing whatever to do with their outbursts of violence…”
  • Read with a critical mind, but not a critical spirit.
• What is meant by the term “Confessions?”
• What made Mani a false prophet by biblical criteria?
• How was the life of Augustine emblematic of the downfall of classical paganism and the ascendancy of Christianity?
• Compare Augustine to Paul, in terms of how each was prepared by God for their respective places in history.