The Great St. Augustine


Without his saintly mother, Augustine of Tagaste (354-386) would not be St. Augustine.  St. Monica would painstakingly suffer and pray for her son until the day she died. St. Monica, who was placed into a marriage she did not want, would also be instrumental in prayer and good example in the conversion of her pagan husband and mother-in-law.

Philosophy and theology would never be the same with St. Augustine.

But he had a long way to go before he reached this bridge of being with his God, a Beauty he had avoided for many years.

His "Confessions" are still read widely and reveal the depth of his life and soul.

Augustine began a Christian with a Christian education, yet not baptized  Augustine fell away from grace in the sinful city of Carthage with its many seductions, pagan atmosphere, the wayward example of other students, the theatres, the lure of rhetoric and "fancy literature", and other evils, including eventually a Manichean philosophy of a good god and an evil god, dualistic in nature. 

Augustine would have a son in his immoral relationship with a woman.

He would teach grammar and rhetoric in Tagaste.  The ways of Augustine were loaded with error at this time and he could not see the Truth who is Jesus Christ.  He taught rhetoric at Carthage.  The Manichean philosophy overtook Augustine.  It even stated that the Catholic Scriptures had been falsified.  It was immoral and destructive. 

After nine years, he would discover the falseness of the rhetoric of the Manicheans.

All this time, St. Monica was praying and fasting for her son.

Only in Italy under St. Amrose did St. Augustine find the Light of God.  He was baptized.  Now he was a Christian at the age of 33.  He became a priest at age 36 and then a bishop at the age of 41.

This patron of printers has beautifully described the God of the Universe who created heaven and earth, the God he as creature would worship, putting aside his creator worship.

"Too late have I loved you, O Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new!  Too late I loved you!  And behold, you were within, and I abroad, and there I searched for you: I was deformed, plunging amid those fair forms, which you had made.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  Things held me far from you--things which, if they were not in you, were not at all.  You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness.  You flashed and shone, and scattered my blindness.  You breathed odors and I drew in breath--and I pant for you.  I tasted, and I hunger and thirst.  You touched me, and I burned for your peace".

St. Augustine put aside his debauchery and lived for Christ.

St. Augustine pray for us!