More religious communities follow his Rule than any other. Some of his best-known books can still be found in the bookshops and he is likely to merit some kind of reference in much modern philosophy and theology. Add to all this the fact that Augustine reflects in his lifestyle so many of the dilemmas, failures and successes of even today’s men and women and we soon realise that he is indeed a man for all seasons, ages and places.
Augustine was born in 354 in the small town of Thagaste in Roman North Africa – today Algeria. His Christian mother was Monica, his pagan father Patricius. Monica herself was to become a saint immortalised in the autobiography of her son. Patricius did not become a Christian till near the end of his life but, with Monica, he spared no effort for the education and future of their gifted son. Augustine’s life was dominated by a restless, if extremely talented, nature in search of truth, beauty and ultimately faith but with many distracting adventures along the way. He would be nearly 33 by the time he was baptised at Easter, 387 by the great bishop St Ambrose in Milan Cathedral.
He provides us with a detailed and dramatic account of his early life in his «Confessions», a book still readily available in bookshops and libraries today. As student, teacher, philosopher and aspiring politician Augustine was also very much a «man about town» who joined several trendy sects, took a live-in lover and fathered a son while still in his teens. His son Adeodatus («given by God») and his best friend Alypius who had shared his search from the early years in Thagaste were baptised with him. Monica had followed him from Africa to Rome and Milan as he progressed along the social ladder but seemed to her to be getting farther from God. Her persistence and prayer – «the son of such tears can never be lost», a bishop once assured her – played a big part in his conversion. The preaching of Ambrose was also important, as indeed was his own ever-searching nature.
Most important of all, he knew, was the care of a loving God who would never lose him from sight whatever happened. The decisive moment of his conversion, gathering pace over several years, came when he was on a kind of retreat near Milan and he heard a mysterious child’s voice chanting «take up and read». He picked up the New Testament he had earlier been reading and his eyes fell on St Paul’s letter to the Romans: «No more wild parties or drunkenness, no promiscuity or licentiousness, no rivalry or jealously, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts» (Rom. 13, 13-14). As he says himself: «I neither wished nor needed to read more». Life had changed completely for him. The struggle was over. God had won.
Once converted and baptised Augustine knew no half measures. With Monica, his young son and his friends he set off for Africa with the intention of withdrawing from all the distractions of life and giving himself completely to God and the study of the Scriptures in an intense form of what we might today call contemplative religious Life.
Monica died on the way, at Ostia the port of Rome. Augustine, Alypius and a group of like-minded friends set up their religious community at Thagaste. Prayer, study, community were now all that mattered. But this was not the end. God had other plans for Augustine.
In the year 391 Augustine had reason to visit Hippo, an important city some 80 kilometres away on the North African coast. His growing reputation for faith and learning went before him and the ageing bishop of Hippo and his people decided – as was not uncommon at the time – that he was just the man needed as priest and soon (396) as bishop of this important port-city. God had once more turned Augustine’s life upside down and changed all his plans. He would bring his Religious Life with him, but now to contemplation and community a third element would be added – the apostolate, whatever work God would require for his people in his Church.
Thus began one of the most active and influential lives in history that would leave a mark not only on Hippo and the North African Church but on the entire Western Church, indeed society, for centuries to come. Augustine preached and taught incessantly, producing through the devoted labours of followers and secretaries an immense library of some 200 books and nearly 1000 lengthy letters and sermons. Among these works were biblical commentaries, treatises on the most profound truths of the Faith such as the Blessed Trinity and disputations with the main heresies of the time that would become the norm in Catholic theological thinking for centuries to come. Augustine lived at a time when the old Roman world seemed to be falling apart. Rome itself was sacked by the Barbarians in 410 and by the time of Augustine’s death in 430 Hippo too was under siege. «The City of God», perhaps Augustine’s greatest work, was his answer to the terrifying situation that faced Church and world – seen with the eyes of faith and trust in God.
Exhausted by his labours Augustine died on 28th August, 430. Too weak to use his books he had the penitential psalms placed round the walls of his room where he could read them and make them the meditation of his final days. Vandal hordes surrounded Hippo. The civilization Augustine had known and served so well was about to collapse. Fortunately his books were to survive, but not the monastic communities he had founded. His Rule did survive and would become the inspiration of various groups in southern Europe that in the 13th century would be brought together by Pope Alexander IV at the Grand Union of 1256 to form the new mendicant Augustinian Order.
Later, in the sixteenth century in Spain, a renewal movement within this Order would be the origin of the Augustinian Recollects. Several other congregations, male and female, derive from this same tradition and the Rule of St Augustine became in time the most widely used of all Religious Rules. Augustine’s spirit of contemplation and prayer, where all of life is directed towards God, of community and brotherhood, where all is shared and no one calls anything his own, of apostolic service, always responsive to the call of the Church and the needs of the neighbour, continues to inspire nearly 16 centuries after his death.