Saint Augustine of Hippo

Saint Augustine of Hippo was born at Thagaste to Patricius, a pagan town councillor, and Saint Monica, a Christian. St. Monica had him signed with the cross and enrolled among the catechumens as an infant.

A sudden illness brought him to the point of death, and he begged for baptism. He recovered quickly, and the sacrament was deferred. He learned grammar at Thagaste, went on to school at Madaura, and never learned Punic.

St. Augustine reached Carthage towards the end of 370 AD to study rhetoric. Within two years he had formed a union with a woman who bore him a son. He named the boy Adeodatus, and never names the mother anywhere in his writings.

In 373 AD he read Cicero's exhortation to philosophy, the Hortensius, a book now lost. It turned his prayers to God, and in the same year he joined the Manichaeans.

St. Augustine went back to Thagaste to teach grammar, and St. Monica would not receive him at her table. She begged a bishop to argue her son out of the heresy, and he refused.

Faustus, the Manichaean bishop he had been told to wait for, came to Carthage in 382 AD. St. Augustine questioned him and found an elegant speaker who was a stranger to the sciences. In 383 AD he lied to his mother at the harbour and sailed for Rome by night.

Symmachus sent St. Augustine to Milan in 384 AD as the city's public teacher of rhetoric. He went to hear St. Ambrose in order to weigh his eloquence, and was held by the matter. A marriage was arranged, and the woman who had been with him fifteen years went back to Africa without her son.

In 386 AD, weeping under a fig tree in a garden, he heard a child chanting in a neighbouring house. He opened the letters of the apostle, read the thirteenth chapter of Romans, and read no further. St. Ambrose baptized him with Adeodatus and St. Alypius on the night of Holy Saturday, April 24, 387 AD.

Waiting at Ostia for the crossing to Africa, St. Augustine and his mother talked at a window of eternal life. Five days later St. Monica was prostrated by fever, and she died on its ninth day. She asked only to be remembered at the Lord's altar, wherever her sons might be.

At Thagaste he sold his goods, gave the money to the poor, and lived in common for nearly three years. In 391 AD the people of Hippo laid hands on him in church and demanded that Bishop Valerius ordain him. He wept, and told St. Possidius afterwards that he saw the dangers of governing a church.

St. Augustine was consecrated bishop of Hippo Regius in 395 AD and held the see for some thirty-four years. He turned his own house into a monastery and lived in common with his clergy. He heard lawsuits until he sometimes fasted all day, and he would never buy land.

When the church's money failed he told the people plainly that he had nothing to give the poor. For the sake of captives he ordered the holy vessels broken up and melted down. He began the Confessions about 397 AD and finished the City of God in 426 AD.

St. Augustine had just been to Milevis, where a bishop had named his successor to the clergy but not to the people. On September 26, 426 AD, in the Church of Peace at Hippo, he named the presbyter Eraclius. The notaries took down his words and counted the people's acclamations.

He told the congregation that his own consecration had broken a canon of Nicaea. He refused to have Eraclius consecrated while he himself lived. Asked whether bishops might withdraw before the barbarians, he answered that the flock must not be deserted.

Vandals and Alans crossed from Spain and overran Africa, sparing neither age nor the churches. Of the innumerable churches of Africa, St. Augustine saw only Carthage, Hippo and Cirta survive. About the end of May 430 AD the enemy shut up Hippo and blockaded its coast.

At table he taught the bishops sheltering in his house the prayer he was making for the city. In the third month of the siege he took to his bed, the penitential psalms hung where he could read them. He died on August 28, 430 AD, and made no will, having nothing to leave.