The saints

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Bishop and Doctor of the Church · Feast day August 28 · 354 to 430 · Hippo, North Africa · Also known as Augustine, Austin

Saint Augustine of Hippo was a brilliant and restless young man who chased pleasure, ambition, and false philosophies before being converted at last in a garden in Milan, and became the most influential theologian in the history of the Western church. His Confessions and City of God are read to this day, and his cry, Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee, has spoken for every searching soul since.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.Psalm 42:1 (KJV)

A restless youth

Augustine was born in the town of Thagaste in Roman North Africa to a pagan father and a devout Christian mother, Monica, who prayed for him without ceasing through all his wanderings. Gifted beyond his peers, he was sent to Carthage to study rhetoric, and there he threw himself into ambition and pleasure, took a mistress, and fathered a son. He later confessed the famous prayer of his divided heart: Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.

For years he searched for truth in the wrong places. He joined the Manichees, a sect that promised secret wisdom, and pursued the fashionable philosophies of the day, always brilliant, always dissatisfied. He crossed the sea to Rome and then to Milan to teach rhetoric, carrying his restlessness with him, unable to find in success or pleasure the peace his soul was made for.

Take up and read

In Milan he came under the preaching of the great bishop Ambrose, whose wisdom began to dismantle Augustine's objections to the faith. His mother Monica, who had followed him across the sea, prayed on. Augustine found himself convinced in mind but unable to surrender his will, torn and weeping in a garden, crying out, How long, O Lord, how long.

Then he heard a child's voice from a neighboring house, chanting, Take up and read, take up and read. He opened the letters of Paul at random and read: not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ. In that instant, he wrote, a light of certainty flooded his heart and every shadow of doubt was gone. He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter in the year 387, and Monica, her lifelong prayer answered, died soon after in peace.

Bishop of Hippo

Augustine returned to Africa meaning to live quietly, but the church seized upon him, and against his own wishes he was ordained and soon made bishop of the port city of Hippo, which he served for thirty-five years. He preached constantly to ordinary people, cared for the poor, judged disputes, and defended the faith against the errors of his age.

From his study poured a flood of writing that has never been equaled in the West: sermons, letters, and great books on grace, on the Trinity, on the Psalms, and on the Christian life. He understood the human heart as few ever have, because he had known its darkness in himself and found it healed by grace alone.

Confessions and the City of God

Two of his works changed the world. The Confessions is the first true autobiography, a long and searching prayer in which Augustine lays his whole life open before God, tracing how grace pursued him through every wandering. Its opening words have never been surpassed: Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.

As the Roman world crumbled and the city of Rome itself was sacked, Augustine wrote the City of God, contrasting the earthly city that rises and falls with the eternal city of God that endures forever, teaching the church to set its hope not on any empire but on the kingdom that cannot be shaken. He died in 430 as the Vandals besieged his own city, with the penitential Psalms pinned to his wall.

Why Augustine still matters

Augustine is the patron of everyone who came to God the long way, through failure and searching and years of resisting. He proved that the sharpest mind and the most divided heart are no match for grace, and he gave the church its deepest words on the truth that we do not save ourselves; God, who made us for himself, comes and finds us. Every restless heart still finds its own story in his.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Monica · Saint Jerome · Saints for August 28 · Saint of the day