Brothers of Mercy of St. John of God

St. Augustine

He was born in 354 at Tagaste, now Souk-Ahras, Algeria. His parents saved to give him the best education and sent him to Carthage for his final two or three years. There, at seventeen, he already had a son by a woman with whom he would live for thirteen years. S. Monica’s admonitions on purity seemed exaggerated to him. Her faith, he abandoned-though he was catechumen-to join the semi-Christian Manichees. One of the turning points in his life was reading Cicero’s ‘Hortentius’ at the age of nineteen, for it inflamed him with an intense and abiding desire for true wisdom, So he turned to the Scriptures to see what they had to offer him, but soon gave them up as inferior to Cicero. Then, in Tagaste, Carthage, Rome, and Milan, he taught rhetoric. Gregarious and a natural leader with a remarkable capacity for friendship, he became the center of a group of intellectuals who at one time were thinking of forming a commune. For nine years he was connected with the Manichees. Then came a period when he thought sceptics were probably the wisest men. Such was his state of mind on arriving at Milan in his thirtieth year. There he met S. Ambrose. “I came to love him,” Augustine wrote, “for his kindness towards me. I attended carefully when he preached...Opening my heart to learn how eloquently he spoke, I came to feel, though only gradually, how truly he spoke...I began to see that the Catholic Faith could be maintained on reasonable grounds.” Augustine began to appreciate Scripture and again became a catechumen. Neo-Platonism by teaching him to reflect on his own mental processes, showed him a way out of materialism. He also came to see evil as an absence of good rather than as the positive thing the Manichees made it. But a moral problem remained. “Lord,” he would pray, “give me chastity, but not yet.” Then came the dramatic experience in the garden, the child’s voice bidding him “take up and read; take up and read,” The words of Saint Paul on chastity pierced his heart effecting his conversion; as likewise the previous reading of the life of Saint Antony Abbot. For he now found himself with the strength to observe Christ’s law. He was baptized at thirty-two, and immediately founded his first monastery at Tagaste. The Rule which he wrote -valued especially for its brevity, discretion, and emphasis on charity, became the basis of all other ‘rules’ in the west; it is observed today by more than one hundred and fifty Orders and Congregations throughout the world.

Labels: saints