Saint Augustine, Doctor of the Church

The Friday last was the feast day of the great Saint Augustine of Hippo, so I set out to read the biography of this Saint presented by Pope Benedict in his homilies on the Doctors of the Church. 

Augustine is a popular Saint, his most well-known work being his very affective autobiography, called the Confessions, in which he sets out to demonstrate his conversion to Catholicism - the movement from human weakness, in great humility, to a grace-filled procession into the bosom of the Church. He is the greatest of the Latin Fathers, so voluminous in his writing, so much of which has survived (the greatest body of all the work of the early Fathers) and still furnishes us regularly today in the divine Office of prayer. He came from the province of Africa (near Carthage), extremely energetic and a high intellectual, this bishop still spent most of his time with the simplest of the Christians in his care. He is seen today as a great philosopher in the Western tradition, so is often referred to in a non-religious context. He may also have begun the tradition of autobiography as we understand it today, with the Confessions, which includes a detailed narrative of his conversion, through the influence of the great bishop Saint Ambrose of Milan and the tireless prayers of his mother, Saint Monica. Disenchanted with the Manichaeans, Augustine moved to Rome and then to Milan, plying his trade as a superlative teacher of the science of rhetoric. In Milan, his life changed when he attempted to learn rhetoric from the bishop Saint Ambrose, but ended up embracing the religion of his mother. She was able to witness his baptism in AD 387, before dying on the trip back to Africa. He tried to begin a monastic life at Hippo and was ordained in AD 391, setting up the rule that even today is followed by the communities of Augustinian canons, but he was quickly called to be bishop of Hippo in AD 395. He became one of the greatest forces in the Church at the time, opposing vigorously the heresies linked to Manichaeism, Donatism and then Pelagianism. He died in great distress in AD 430, even as Hippo was being besieged by the Germanic Vandals, who had invaded Roman Africa through Spain; he did not live to see the final capture of the city or the devastation of the province.

Augustine left behind very much for our intellectual and spiritual development. Aside from his autobiographical Confessions (famous and a bestseller for centuries), there are hundreds of letters, hundreds of homilies, and these are only what is extant; much more has been lost. Philosophy, apologetics, catechetics, doctrine, morality, the monastic life and scriptural exegesis are also included in the corpus. There is also the City of God, a large, twenty-two-book work treating the Christian view of politics and religion, that followed the sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410, a grave shock for Roman citizens, who had not experienced this shame for over 800 years. His fifteen-book work on the Holy Trinity needs mention also, and his apologetic work on Christian doctrine, both of which have, together with the City of God, formed Western culture. He left nothing in death but the library of his works, with which Holy Church is indeed enriched.