Saint Augustine of Hippo

Saint Augustine of Hippo was a bishop in Roman Africa and a Father and Doctor of the Church. His long path to faith, which he described himself in the Confessions, ended in baptism at the hands of Saint Ambrose. The Church remembers him on August 28, the anniversary of his death.

He was born on November 13, 354, in Tagaste in Numidia, in present-day Algeria. His father Patricius was a pagan, and his mother, Saint Monica, was a fervent Christian who raised her son in the faith. From 370 Augustine studied rhetoric in Carthage, where reading Cicero’s Hortensius awakened in him a love of wisdom. At that time he joined the Manichaeans. He lived with a woman whose name we do not know and had a son with her, Adeodatus.

He taught rhetoric in Carthage and then moved to Rome and to Milan. There the sermons of Bishop Ambrose and reading the letters of Saint Paul helped him find faith. According to the Confessions, he heard a child’s voice in a garden repeating “Tolle, lege” (“Take up and read”), opened the Letter to the Romans, and received its words as addressed to himself. At the Easter Vigil of 387, at the age of thirty-two, he was baptized by Ambrose.

Soon afterward, in Ostia, on the way back to Africa, his mother died. In his native Tagaste Augustine led with his friends the life of a community devoted to prayer and study. In 391 the faithful of Hippo pressed him to accept priestly ordination, and a few years later, in 395 or 396 (the sources give both years), he succeeded Bishop Valerius. He turned the bishop’s house into a community of clergy living like monks, and his rule became the foundation of life for many religious orders.

According to the Roman Martyrology, for thirty-four years he was a model for his flock. He preached, supported the poor and orphans, and cared for the clergy and the monasteries. He defended the faith against Manichaeism, Donatism, and Pelagianism, stressing the necessity of grace. He left more than a thousand writings, among them the Confessions and, after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410, The City of God. At the beginning of the Confessions he wrote: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

In 429 the Vandals invaded Africa, and in 430 they laid siege to Hippo. In the third month of the siege Augustine fell ill with a fever. He had the penitential psalms, written out in large letters, hung on the wall so that he could read them from his bed. He died on August 28, 430, not yet seventy-six years old. Since around 725 his body has rested in Pavia, in the Basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro.

Augustine has been venerated as a saint since antiquity. Only a year after his death Pope Celestine I called him one of the best teachers of the Church. In 1986, on the sixteenth centenary of his conversion, John Paul II devoted the apostolic letter Augustinum Hipponensem to him, and in 2008 Benedict XVI devoted five catecheses to him.