Reckless years

Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 AD, of a pagan father and Christian mother. He grew up with only a hazy idea of God, immoral and thoroughly dissolute, and being highly intelligent his father sent him off to Carthage for a university career.

In this tumultuous atmosphere of dance girls and jockeys, ecstatic yet obscene religion, Augustine ran riot, regarding himself as 'ridiculous if innocent, despicable if pure, the greatest shame of all was to feel ashamed'. He wrote later: 'I went to Carthage where shameful love bubbled round me like boiling oil'.

Having no strong personal religion, Augustine began with a series of amours that offered themselves so easily to a young man of great personality and brilliant gifts.

At first he was alarmed; he even prayed in a misty fashion: 'Give me chastity' - then added with discreet caution - 'but not just yet'.

Many get no further and spend their shallow, empty lives tossed from rapture to disillusion. Augustine, however, was obsessed by that longing for permanence which dominated his life and thought to the end.

So he exchanged his light, fleeting loves for one deep and faithful attachment which lasted for 15 years.

This true affection, this love for one, is always a humanising and civilising factor and it is clear that this alliance was the first step in bringing stability into Augustine's life. But still the soul was hungry, there were yearnings that no human love could fill.

He was beginning to tire of his chaotic existence.
Yearnings for higher love

Then one day, in the midst of his reckless life, he was reading Ciecro's Hortensius, a pagan book about virtue and vice and lighted on the following passage:

If a man has a soul, as the greatest philosophers maintain, and if that soul is immortal and divine, then must it needs be that the more it has been steeped in reason and true love and the pursuit of truth, and the less it has been stained by vice and passion, so much the more surely it will rise above this earth and ascend to the skies.

This made him pause and he later admitted that it was the beginning of his enlightenment.

By now he was disenchanted with Africa so he fled to Rome and opened up a school of rhetoric - but that could not satisfy a man of Augustine's depth and originality.

In despair he became an agnostic, doubting everything. Then, in the very depths of his desolation and confusion, three forces conspired to save him.

Firstly, the philosophy of Plato from which he gained a truer idea of the nature of God. God was spiritual, not semi-material, as the Manicheans said. Secondly, having come to Milan he had the most salutary advantage of personal contact with its most illustrious Bishop, St Ambrose.

Lastly, there was the influence of his mother, Monica, one of the most noble, heroic characters that history hands down to us.

From the beginning, she had been repelled and appalled by his life-style. She determined to win him back - that would be the obsession of her life. She had come to Milan to be near her son but spent most of her time in the church praying for him. 'The son of so many tears,' Ambrose assured her, 'can never be lost.'
The last act in this drama was fast coming to a close. As he sat one day in his garden, alone and desperate, he heard in the distance a child singing a nursery rhyme - 'take it, read it'.

The light of faith

He looked around and there among his books were the scriptures. Unrolling them he chanced on those words of St Paul: 'Not in riotings, drunkenness and impurities, but put on the Lord, Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts.

Then, suddenly, he saw the light. The 'miracle' was worked; the old life of sin was despised and rejected. He had been lost and now - after 33 dissipated years - he had found his true self.

And in this supreme, climactic hour he suddenly realised how much he owed to the patient, persistent prayers of his saintly mother. He had boasted to her of his wickedness and ridiculed her religious beliefs.

A few months later she died and he was devastated. 'That volcanic, unmitigated humanity, 'wrote Fr Martindale SJ, 'that first drove him into revolt and sin, and secondly, kept him loving his mother beyond anything on earth, was never extinguished in him and one can feel it pulsing and glowing even in his most philosophic utterances.' Augustine on fire

Once a Christian, Augustine harmonised himself with extraordinary rapidity. Now life had a meaning. Now he knew how to gather together all the diverse, intense elements of his soul into one splendid whole, canalising it towards Christ, giving it real cohesion, force and unity.

Augustine's character was such that he had to be profoundly good - or profoundly bad. We, too, have our share of qualities but for the most part we have them in a pale, perhaps anaemic sort of way. With Augustine, it was different. Everything he had, he had intensely. He would try to make amends for the excesses of the past (his later teachings on sexuality, alas, were rigorous and pessimistic) - so he gave away all his money, prayed and fasted a lot and ultimately became a priest.

And so strikingly charismatic was the man, his learning, his preaching, that he was elected Bishop of Hippo. Now with all his massive intellectual power he would champion the cause of Christianity.

The heart of Augustine was a warm, affectionate heart. In the past it had led him far astray but later it led him with no less ardour to sanctity and a passionate love for Christ, the God-Man whose humility and love were the obsession of his life.

As a man, he could never forget what he had been. Sometimes hot passions would surge up within him and even in his old age he still feared lest they might get the better of him, so he worked incessantly, preaching, reading, writing and praying. There was no respite, no let-up.

And you might well ask 'What lasting work did he accomplish?' He has left his mark on the Christian world in a thousand ways, that can help our modern age immensely. Three aspects of his teaching 1 shall especially single out.

Augustine's legacy

No one has ever spoken of the soul like St Augustine. True, he experienced transports of joy and wonderment at the sight of the order, riches and beauty of the universe, but before the human soul which contains all worlds within itself, he was enthralled.

And when he descends into its depths he gives us, as it were, a sensation of giddiness, so powerful is his intuition that God is to be found there, so strong is his desire to touch him and help others to reach him.

He knew from bitter experience that sheer indulgence and physical pleasure cannot bring lasting happiness to the soul; the senses are never satisfied but always demand more.

Augustine discovered - but our modern age seems to have forgotten it - that the soul is the highest part of a person; that all the finest properties of the body, its activity, beauty, capacity for feeling, proceed primarily from the soul, not the body.

Secondly, Augustine stressed human will- power. It is willpower that builds up that dynamic quality we call character.

By the very intensity and rigour of his own life, Augustine showed how strong the human will can be; but he also experienced in himself and stressed incessantly that our poor human will can never get far without God's grace and help.

We must then strive with our will as hard as we can, as though all depended on our efforts - and pray as though all depended on God's grace and help.

Finally, our western ideals of freedom owe more than we realise to the thought of Augustine. Under the Roman Empire the state was exalted as a super-human power against which the individual personality had no rights - as in the totalitarian state today.

In the east, in the Byzantine and Russian Empires, even Christianity proved powerless to change this tradition.

But in the west, Augustine broke with it decisively and sought the principle of social order in the human will.

The civilisation of his times was tumbling in ruins from its own inherent weakness, as ours is today!

The remedy he proposed was as efficacious then as it is today.

The world would find no rest, no stability, till it found it in God and he has left us in that immortal sentence by which he is best known, the essence of his religion and philosophy: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself, 0 Lord, and our heart is restless till it rest in Thee'.