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CHAPTER II.—A Sketch of the
Life of St. Augustin.
It is a venturesome and delicate undertaking to
write one’s own life, even though that life be a masterpiece of
nature and the grace of God, and therefore most worthy to be
described. Of all autobiographies none has so happily avoided the
reef of vanity and self-praise, and none has won so much esteem and
love through its honesty and humility as that of St. Augustin.
The “Confessions,” which he wrote in the
forty-fourth year of his life, still burning in the ardor of his
first love, are full of the fire and unction of the Holy Spirit.
They are a sublime composition, in which Augustin, like David in
the fifty-first Psalm, confesses to God, in view of his own and of
succeeding generations, without reserve the sins of his youth; and
they are at the same time a hymn of praise to the grace of God,
which led him out of darkness into light, and called him to service
in the kingdom of Christ.1
1
Augustin himself says of his Confessions: “Confessionum
mearum libri tredecim et de malis et de bonis meis Deum laudant
justum et bonum, atque in eum excitant humanum intellectum et
affectum.” Retract. 1. ii. c. 6. He refers to his
Confessions also in his Epistola ad Darium, Ep.
CCXXXI. cap. 5; and in his De dono perseverantiæ, cap. 20
(53). |
Here we see the great church teacher of all times “prostrate in
the dust, conversing with God, basking in his love; his readers
hovering before him only as a shadow.” He puts away from himself
all honor, all greatness, all merit, and lays them gratefully at
the feet of the All-merciful. The reader feels on every hand that
Christianity is no dream nor illusion, but truth and life, and he
is carried along in adoration of the wonderful grace of
God.
Aurelius Augustinus,
born on the 13th of November, 354,2
2
He died, according to the Chronicle of his friend and
pupil Prosper Aquitanus, the 28th of August, 430 (in the third
month of the siege of Hippo by the Vandals); according to his
biographer Possidius he lived seventy-six years. The day of his
birth Augustin states himself, De vita beata, § 6 (tom. i.
300): “Idibus Novemoris mihi natalis dies erat.” | at
Tagaste, an unimportant village of the fertile province of Numidia
in North Africa, not far from Hippo Regius, inherited from his
heathen father, Patricius,3 a
passionate sensibility, from his Christian mother, Monnica (one of
the noblest women in the history of Christianity, of a highly
intellectual and spiritual cast, of fervent piety, most tender
affection, and all-conquering love), the deep yearning towards God
so grandly expressed in his sentence: “Thou hast made us for
Thyself, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.”4
4
Conf. i. 1: “Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est
cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te.” In all his aberrations,
which we would hardly know, if it were not from his own free
confession, he never sunk to anything mean, but remained, like Paul
in his Jewish fanaticism, a noble intellect and an honorable
character, with burning love for the true and the good. | This yearning, and his reverence for
the sweet and holy name of Jesus, though crowded into the
background, attended him in his studies at the schools of Madaura
and Carthage, on his journeys to Rome and Milan, and on his tedious
wanderings through the labyrinth of carnal pleasures, Manichæan
mock-wisdom, Academic skepticism, and Platonic idealism; till at
last the prayers of his mother, the sermons of Ambrose, the
biography of
St. Anthony, and above all, the Epistles of Paul, as so many
instruments in the hand of the Holy Spirit, wrought in the man of
three and thirty years that wonderful change which made him an
incalculable blessing to the whole Christian world, and brought
even the sins and errors of his youth into the service of the
truth.5
5
For particulars respecting the course of Augustin’s
life, see my work above cited, and other monographs. Comp. also the
fine remarks of Dr. Baur in his posthumous
Lectures on Doctrine-History (1866), vol. i. Part ii. p. 26
sqq. He compares the development of Augustin with the course of
Christianity from the beginning to his time, and draws a parallel
between Augustin and Origen. |
A son of so many prayers and tears could not
be lost, and the faithful mother who travailed with him in spirit
with greater pain than her body had in bringing him into the
world,6
6
Conf. ix. c. 8: “Quæ me parturivit et carne, ut in
hanc temporalem, et carde, ut in æternam lucem nascerer.” L.
v. 9: “Non enim satis eloquor, quid erga me habebat anima, et
quanto majore sollicitudine nie partur iebat spiritu, quam carne
pepererat.” In De dono persev. c. 20, he ascribes his
conversion under God “to the faithful and daily tears” of his
mother. | was permitted,
for the encouragement of future mothers, to receive shortly before
her death an answer to her prayers and expectations, and was able
to leave this world with joy without revisiting her earthly home.
For Monnica died on a homeward journey, in Ostia at the mouth of
the Tiber, in her fifty-sixth year, in the arms of her son, after
enjoying with him a glorious conversation that soared above the
confines of space and time, and was a foretaste of the eternal
Sabbath-rest of the saints. If those moments, he says, could be
prolonged for ever, they would more than suffice for his happiness
in heaven. She regretted not to die in a foreign land, because she
was not far from God, who would raise her up at the last day.
“Bury my body anywhere, “was her last request, “and trouble
not yourselves for it; only this one thing I ask, that you remember
me at the altar of my God, wherever you may be.”7
7
Conf. l. ix. c. 11: “Tantum illud vos rogo, ut ad Domini
altare memineritis mei, ubs fuertis.” This must be explained
from the already prevailing custom of offering prayers for the
dead, which, however, had rather the form of thanksgiving for the
mercy of God shown to them, than the later form of intercession for
them. | Augustin, in his
Confessions, has erected to Monnica a noble monument that can
never perish.
If ever there was a thorough and fruitful
conversion, next to that of Paul on the way to Damascus, it was
that of Augustin, when, in a garden of the Villa Cassiciacum, not
far from Milan, in September of the year 386, amidst the most
violent struggles of mind and heart—the birth-throes of the new
life—he heard that divine voice of a child: “Take, read!” and
he “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. xiii. 14). It is a
touching lamentation of his: “I have loved Thee late, Thou
Beauty, so old and so new; I have loved Thee late! And lo! Thou
wast within, but I was without, and was seeking Thee there. And
into Thy fair creation I plunged myself in my ugliness; for Thou
was with me, and I was not with Thee! Those things kept me away
from Thee, which had not been, except they had been in Thee! Thou
didst call, and didst cry aloud, and break through my deafness.
Thou didst glimmer, Thou didst shine, and didst drive away my
blindness. Thou didst breathe, and I drew breath, and breathed in
Thee. I tasted Thee, and I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me,
and I burn for Thy peace. If I, with all that is within me, may
once live in Thee, then shall pain and trouble forsake me; entirely
filled with Thee, all shall be life to me.”
He received baptism from Ambrose in Milan on
Easter Sunday, 387, in company with his friend and fellow-convert
Alypius, and his natural son Adeodatus (given by God). It
impressed the divine seal upon the inward transformation. He broke
radically with the world; abandoned the brilliant and lucrative
vocation of a teacher of rhetoric, which he had followed in Rome
and Milan; sold his goods for the benefit of the poor; and
thenceforth devoted his rare gifts exclusively to the service of
Christ, and to that service he continued faithful to his latest
breath. After the death of his mother, whom he revered and loved
with the most tender affection, he went a second time to Rome for
several months, and wrote books in defence of true Christianity
against false philosophy and against the Manichæan heresy.
Returning to Africa, he spent three years, with his friends Alypius
and Evodius, on an estate in his native Tagaste, in contemplative
and literary retirement.
Then, in 391, he was chosen presbyter against his
will, by the voice of the people, which, as
in the similar cases of Cyprian and
Ambrose, proved to be the voice of God, in the Numidian maritime
city of Hippo Regius (now Bona); and in 395 he was elected bishop
in the same city. For eight and thirty years, until his death, he
labored in this place, and made it the intellectual centre of
Western Christendom.8
8
He is still known among the inhabitants of the place as
“the great Christian” (Rumi Kebir).
Gibbon (ch. xxxiii. ad ann. 430) thus describes the place
which became so famous through Augustin: “The maritime colony of
Hippo, about two hundred miles westward of Carthage, had
formerly acquired the distinguishing epithet of Regius, from
the residence of the Numidian kings; and some remains of trade and
populousness still adhere to the modern city, which is known in
Europe by the corrupted name of Bona.” Sallust mentions Hippo
once in his history of the Jugurthine War. A part of the wealth
with which Sallust built and beautified his splendid mansion and
gardens in Rome, was extorted from this and other towns of North
Africa while governor of Numidia. Since the French conquest of
Algiers Hippo Regius was rebuilt under the name of Bona and is now
one of the finest towns in North Africa, numbering over 10,000
inhabitants, French, Moors, and Jews. |
His outward mode of life was extremely simple,
and mildly ascetic. He lived with his clergy in one house in an
apostolic community of goods, and made this house a seminary of
theology, out of which ten bishops and many lower clergy went
forth. Females, even his sister, were excluded from his house, and
could see him only in the presence of others. But he founded
religious societies of women; and over one of these his sister, a
saintly widow, presided.9
9
He mentions a sister, “soror mea, sancta
proposita” [monasterii], without naming her,
Epist. 211, n. 4 (ed. Bened.), alias Ep. 109. He also
had a brother by the name of Navigius. | He
once said in a sermon, that he had nowhere found better men, and he
had nowhere found worse, than in monasteries. Combining, as he did,
the clerical life with the monastic, he became unwittingly the
founder of the Augustinian order, which gave the reformer Luther to
the world. He wore the black dress of the Easter cœnobites, with a
cowl and a leathern girdle. He lived almost entirely on vegetables,
and seasoned the common meal with reading or free conversation, in
which it was a rule that the character of an absent person should
never be touched. He had this couplet engraved on the
table:
“Quisquis amat dictis absentum rodere vitam,
Hanc mensam vetitam noverit esse sibi.”
He often preached five days in succession,
sometimes twice a day, and set it as the object of his preaching,
that all might live with him, and he with all, in Christ. Wherever
he went in Africa, he was begged to preach the world of
salvation.10
10
Possidius says, in his Vita Aug.: “Cæterum
episcopatu suscepto multo instantius ac ferventius, majore
auctoritate, non in una tantum regione, sed ubicunque rogatus
venisset, verbum satutis alacriter, ac suaviter pullulante atque
crescente Domini ecclesia, prædicavit.” | He faithfully
administered the external affairs connected with his office, though
he found his chief delight in contemplation. He was specially
devoted to the poor, and, like Ambrose, upon exigency, caused the
church vessels to be melted down to redeem prisoners. But he
refused legacies by which injustice was done to natural heirs, and
commended the bishop Aurelius of Carthage for giving back unasked
some property which a man has bequeathed to the church, when his
wife unexpectedly bore him children.
Augustin’s labors extended far beyond his little
diocese. He was the intellectual head of the North African and the
entire Western church of his time. He took active interest in all
theological and ecclesiastical questions. He was the champion of
the orthodox doctrine against Manichæan, Donatist, and Pelagian.
In him was concentrated the whole polemic power of the catholic
church of the time against heresy and schism; and in him it won the
victory over them.
In his last years he took a critical review of his
literary productions, and gave them a thorough sifting in his
Retractations. His latest controversial works, against the
Semi-Pelagians, written in a gentle spirit, date from the same
period. He bore the duties of his office alone till his
seventy-second year, when his people unanimously elected his friend
Heraclius to be his assistant.
The evening of his life was troubled by increasing
infirmities of body and by the unspeakable wretchedness which the
barbarian Vandals spread over his country in their victorious
invasion, destroying cities, villages, and churches,
without mercy, and even besieging the fortified city of Hippo.11
11
Possidius, c. 28, gives a vivid picture of the ravages
of the Vandals, which have become proverbial. Comp. also Gibbon,
ch. xxxiii. | Yet he faithfully persevered in his
work. The last ten days of his life he spent in close retirement,
in prayers and tears and repeated reading of the penitential
Psalms, which he can caused to be written on the wall over his bed,
that he might have them always before his eyes. Thus with an act of
penitence he closed his life. In the midst of the terrors of the
siege and the despair of his people he could not suspect what
abundant seed he had sown for the future.
In the third month of the siege of Hippo, on
the 28th of August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, in
full possession of his faculties, and in the presence of many
friends and pupils, he past gently and peacefully into that
eternity to which he had so long aspired. “O how wonderful,”
wrote he in his Meditations,12
12
I freely combine several passages. | “how beautiful and lovely are the
dwellings of Thy house, Almighty God! I burn with longing to behold
Thy beauty in Thy bridal-chamber.…O Jerusalem, holy city of God,
dear bride of Christ, my heart loves thee, my soul has already long
sighed for thy beauty!…The King of kings Himself is in the midst
of thee, and His children are within thy walls. There are the
hymning choirs of angels, the fellowship of heavenly citizens.
There is the wedding-feast of all who from this sad earthly
pilgrimage have reached thy joys. There is the far-seeing choir of
the prophets; there the company of the twelve apostles; there the
triumphant army of innumerable martyrs and holy confessors. Full
and perfect love there reigns, for God is all in all. They love and
praise, they praise and love Him evermore.…Blessed, perfectly and
forever blessed, shall I too be, if, when my poor body shall be
dissolved,… I may stand before my King and God, and see Him in
His glory, as He Himself hath deigned to promise: ‘Father, I will
that they also whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am; that
they may behold My glory which I had with Thee before the world
was.’” This aspiration after the heavenly Jerusalem found grand
expression in the hymn De gloria et gaudiis
Paradisi:
“Ad perennis vitæ fontem mens sativit
arida.”
It is incorporated in the Meditations of Augustin,
and the ideas originated in part with him, but were not brought
into poetical form till long afterwards by Peter Damiani.13
13
Comp. Opera, tom. vi. p. 117 (Append.); Daniel: Thesaurus
hymnol. i. 116 sqq., and iv. 203 sq., and Mone: Lat.
Hymner, i. 422 sqq. Mone ascribes the poem to an unknown writer
of the sixth century, but Trench (Sacred Latin Poetry, 2d
ed., 315) and others attribute it to Cardinal Peter Damiani, the
friend of Pope Hildebrand (d. 1072). Augustin wrote his poetry in
prose. |
He left no will, for in his voluntary poverty
he had no earthly property to dispose of, except his library; this
he bequeathed to the church, and it was fortunately preserved from
the depredations of the Arian barbarians.14
14
Possidius says, Vita, c. 31: “Testamentum nullum fecit,
guia unde faceret, pauper Dei non habuit. Ecclesiæ bibliothecam
omnesgue codices diligenter posteris custodiendos semper
jubebat.” |
Soon after his death Hippo was taken and
destroyed by the Vandals.15
15
The inhabitants escaped to the sea. There appears no bishop of
Hippo after Augustin. In the seventh century the old city was
utterly destroyed by the Arabians, but two miles from it Bona was
built of its ruins. Comp. Tillemont, xiii. 945, and Gibbon, ch.
xxxiii. Gibbon says, that Bona, “in the sixteenth century,
contained about three hundred families of industrious, but
turbulent manufacturers. The adjacent territory is renowned for a
pure air, a fertile soil, and plenty of exquisite fruits.” Since
the French conquest of Algiers, Bona was rebuilt in 1832, and is
gradually assuming a French aspect. It is now one of the finest
towns in Algeria, the key to the province of Constantine, has a
public garden, several schools, considerable commerce, and a
population of over ten thousand of French, Moors, and Jews, the
great majority of whom are foreigners. The relics of St. Augustin
have been recently transferred from Pavia to Bona. See the letters
of abbé Sibour to Poujoulat sur la translation de ia relique de saint Augustin de
Pavie à Hippone, in
Poujoulat’s Histoire de saint
Augustin, tom. i. p. 413 sqq. | Africa was lost to the
Romans. A few decades later the whole West-Roman empire fell in
ruins. The culmination of the African church was the beginning of
its decline. But the work of Augustin could not perish. His ideas
fell like living seed into the soil of Europe, and produced
abundant fruits in nations and countries of which he had never
heard.16
16
Even in Africa Augustin’s spirit reappeared from time to time
notwithstanding the barbarian confusion, as a light in darkness,
first in Vigilius, bishop of Thapsus, who,
at the close of the fifth century, ably defended the orthodox
doctrine of the Trinity and the person of Christ, and to whom the
authorship of the so-called Athanasian Creed has sometimes been
ascribed; in Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe,
one of the chief opponents of Semi-Pelagianism, and the later
Arianism, who with sixty catholic bishops of Africa was banished
for several years by the Arian Vandals to the island of Sardinia,
and who was called the Augustin of the sixth century (died 533);
and in Facundus of Hermiane (died 570), and
Fulgentius Ferrandus, and
Liberatus, two deacons of Carthage, who took a prominent
part in the Three
Chapter controversy. |
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