St. Augustine of Hippo: Father of the Christian Church
Cathedral of Milan. Then and there, Ambrose received Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis as Christian, and Augustine would express his immortal conversion to Catholicism in Book VIII of Confessions.
Chapter 4: A New Path
As a Christian convert, Augustine set out to make a clean break with his former life. Una was already gone, and he voiced his intention to give up his court post citing ill health, which seems to have been somewhat true. He claimed in Confessions, "it had at first troubled me that in this very summer my lungs began to give way, amid too great literary labour, and to breathe deeply with difficulty, and by the pain in my chest to show that they were injured, and to refuse any full or lengthened speaking..."
Augustine then retreated to the seclusion of a friend's villa to prepare for the life of an ascetic, taking his three most prized pupils and servants with him. At 32 years old, he had completed relatively few written works by this point, but now he proceeded to write four dialogues in four months and outlined several more, using his pupils, friends, and relatives to flesh-out the raw material for dialogues on a number of subjects. These dialogues discussed order in the universe, refutation of skepticism, and happiness in this life.
Shortly after his baptism, Augustine left Milan with his mother and a group of friends and returned to Africa, but tragically his mother died during the journey. He would later write of guiding his mother through a final discussion on the Neoplatonic view of ascent from this world to the next shortly before her death, a conversation he discussed at length in Confessions. Though it appears he had for many years discounted his mother's spiritual insight, her final observations seem to have affected him profoundly: "W Jhen we were speaking of these things, and this world with all its delights became, as we spake, contemptible to us, my mother said, 'Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life. What I do here any longer, and to what I am here, I know not, now that my hopes in this world are accomplished. One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God hath done this for me more abundantly, that I should now see thee withal, despising earthly happiness, become His servant: what do I here?'...
On the ninth day then of her sickness, and the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the three-and-thirtieth of mine, was that religious and holy soul freed from the body. I closed her eyes; and there flowed withal a mighty sorrow into my heart, which was overflowing into tears; mine eyes at the same time, by the violent command of my mind, drank up their fountain wholly dry; and woe was me in such a strife! But when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus burst out into a loud lament; then, checked by us all, held his peace. In like manner also a childish feeling in me, which was, through my heart's youthful voice, finding its vent in weeping, was checked and silenced. For we thought it not fitting to solemnise that funeral with tearful lament, and groanings; for thereby do they for the most part express grief for the departed, as though unhappy, or altogether dead; whereas she was neither unhappy in her death, nor altogether dead.
Of this we were assured on good grounds, the testimony of her good conversation and her faith unfeigned.
What then was it which did grievously pain me within, but a fresh wound wrought through the sudden wrench of that most sweet and dear custom of living together? I joyed indeed in her testimony, when, in that her last sickness, mingling her endearments with my acts of duty, she called me 'dutiful,' and mentioned, with great affection of love, that she never had heard any harsh or reproachful sound uttered by my mouth against her."
With winter's inclement weather now threatening to cut off his return to Carthage, Augustine planned his return to Rome. By this point, he was pumping out theological writings at a furious pace, and he would need the libraries there to support his works. Upon his return, he found himself surrounded by Rome's Christian community for the first time, but for Augustine, "the man who had given up a court orator's post to be baptized by Ambrose," his dealings with the papacy would always be formal and distant at best. While there, he finished one dialogue, How to Measure the Soul, began another, Freedom of Choice, and wrote the treatise Catholic and Manichean Moral Systems.
Later in 388, as autumn approached, Augustine set off for Africa. Returning to Thagaste, Augustine settled on his father's property, where he and his companions elected to form an ascetic community devoted to religious life, one of contemplation, introspection, study, and philosophical discourse. As most scholars concur, by this point in his life Augustine felt two duties now incumbent upon him: to expound the whole width and breadth of knowledge in Christian terms, and to refute other common schools of thought both within and outside of Christianity.
In addition to a number of other works, Augustine made his first attempt to address the Bible symbolically in Genesis in Answer to the Manicheans, in which he shows that even the "crude"
Jewish account of creation makes more sense than the "obscene" cosmology presented by the Manicheans. At the same time, many have noted that Augustine took a naturalistic approach to interpreting Genesis and the creation story. For example, Augustine cast doubt upon man's creation of the Creation story, writing, "Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been... They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed." In Science and Faith, Aubrey Moore wrote, "Augustine distinctly rejected Special Creation in favor of a doctrine which, without any violence to language, we may call a theory of Evolution." Henry Fairfield Osborn went even further, asserting, "If the orthodoxy of Augustine had remained the teaching of the Church, the final establishment of Evolution would have come far earlier than it did, certainly during the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, and the bitter controversy over this truth of Nature would never have arisen."
In 391, Augustine chose to move to the African port city of Hippo Regius, Numidia (modern
Nigeria) and set up a monastery, but once he arrived his path took an unexpected turn towards what theologians consider his destiny. According to popular accounts, Augustine had never considered entering the priesthood and had, in fact, avoided cities in which an episcopacy election was possible (cities ruled by Bishops who could "appoint" church positions). But while praying in a church in Hippo for a friend who'd sought his intercession, a number of people suddenly gathered around him, cheered him, and begged regional bishop Valerius to raise him to the priesthood. While this account may have been a later construct to emphasize Saint
Augustine's predestination, according to his own narrative, it was Bishop Valerius who had recognized the limitations of his own Latin delivery and decided he needed a man of more eloquent rhetoric to deliver scripture. In spite of Augustine's initial objection that as a newlybaptized Christian he needed to study the faith before preaching it, he was obliged to yield to episcopacy election and was thus ordained as an assistant priest to Valerius.
Renaissance painter Jaume Huguet's The Consecration of Saint Augustine
With Valerius's approval, church property was put at Augustine's disposal, a garden adjacent to the church, which enabled him to establish a monastery. And though oral ministry was traditionally restricted to bishops, Valerius urged Augustine to disseminate the word, and his priestly ministry proved extremely fruitful over the next five years.
Valerius died in 396, and upon his death Augustine assumed his position as bishop, entering the episcopate in which he would labor ceaselessly for the Church for the remainder of his life.
As historical documents indicate, in Roman Africa during the 5" century, a bishop was not just the pastor (the teacher and preacher of a parish) but also the presiding judge in a bustling court of summary jurisdiction in civil court cases. At the time of Augustine's appointment as bishop,