HOMILY FOR THE JUBILEE OF THE BIRTH OF AUGUSTINE
Augustine was born at Tagaste in that part of Africa which is modern Algeria on 13 November, in the year 354. If we were to put Augustine into a meaningful time frame for ourselves, it may help if we remind ourselves that he died in 430, two years before St. Patrick's arrival in Ireland. Tagaste was a relatively small town by Roman standards, large enough to have its own bishop but too small for a college or university. His parents, Patricius and Monica, belonged to the financially strapped middle class. They were well enough off to have educational ambitions for their son, but too poor to finance those ambitions themselves. The fourth century was an age of mixed marriages at this level of society, in which devout Christian women like Monica were often to be found praying for the conversion of their irreligious husbands. Her prayers were not unavailing; Patricius accepted baptism on his deathbed. Though Patricius offered no direct incentive towards Christianity for his son, he must not have been much more than a passive obstacle.
Of Augustine's childhood we know very little, only what he chooses to tell us in the highly selective Confessions. He depicts himself as an ordinary sort of child, good at his lessons but not fond of school. While he was leading what he wants us to think was a rather boisterous adolescence, his parents were worrying about paying for his education. Finally, with the help of an affluent family friend, they managed to scrape together enough to send him to the nearest university town a dozen miles away. He then moved on to Carthage at the age of 17. Not long after, his father died and his mother was left with modest resources and nothing to tie her to Tagaste. Augustine himself quickly fell in love with a young woman and moved in with her. A son was born not long after. This woman would stay with Augustine for over a decade and, though we do not know her name, he would say that when he had to give her up to make a society marriage in Milan "his heart ran blood" with grief as she went off to Africa - perhaps to enter a convent. The son, Adeodatus, stayed with Augustine until premature death took him in late adolescence.
From his writings and homilies it is obvious that Augustine was an intensely passionate man. His turbulent and passionate life faithfully reflected the Africa into which he was born, the world that shaped him. Africa at the time was a colony of the Roman Empire. an empire on the verge of collapse. This instability and insecurity found expression in the lives of the common citizens, most particularly in the lives of the young people. The old patterns of Roman life no longer satisfied the hunger experienced by the people. The observation of Augustine's latest biographer, Peter Brown, has a ring of modernity to it: "The young people of the saint's day," he informs us, "began to favour long hair, took to the wearing outlandish clothes and displaying signs of restlessness in the presence of their elders!!" The Roman Empire of Augustine's day was like a pressure cooker. From the north the Barbarians pressed down upon it; from the south the growing Persian Empire impinged. While internally the Empire rent itself apart with religious and social strife. Augustine's world had a few further things in common with our own: Taxation had trebled in living memory and the poor were victimised by an insane inflation. The rich responded to the crisis in the only way they knew how: they accumulated still further wealth.
Augustine then was born into a fragile world, a world of change and political turmoil, into a world of contending voices and cultural confusion, in fact into a world that had much in common with our own day. The people of his time, too, were full of far. They hankered after 'the good old days' when Rome was great. "You talk about the good old days", Augustine chided his congregation at the basilica at Hippo, "Were the old days so good after all? Good times, bad times: Were they good times when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden of Paradise? Were they good days when Noah and his family went into the ark? Good times, bad times: What makes them good? If you are good, the times are good; if you are bad, the times are bad?" Augustine knew where responsibility lay!
Not only did Augustine live in a time of rapid and dramatic change, he himself was constantly changing. The lifestyle of the young Augustine would be very familiar to ourselves. While the fact that he had a child by a long term girlfriend is often cited as evidence of his great sinfulness, it was conventional behaviour enough in his own day. His restlessness led to his baptism by St Ambrose in Milan at the age of 33. From there he returned to Africa with the explicit intention of founding a monastery, a place of tranquility for his Christian people in the gathering hurricane. Elected bishop of Hippo, for thirty four years he was an exemplary bishop of his flock, teaching his people by his sermons and writings, striving to combat the errors of the time and to make the faith understood. Driven by restlessness and insecurity from a young age, he came to look upon this as divine blessing rather than a human compulsion.
Augustine's life is best summed up by his best-known prayer "You have made us for yourself O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." He died in the year 430 as the barbarians sacked his beloved city. Providentially, his greatest gift to the human race, his library was saved.
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