What will God, whose chief instrument is often irony, choose as His weapon to pull Augustine back from the brink? A book by Cicero. To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning… (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) Eliot’s allusion, among countless others strewn about [...]
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. The Scriptures are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. Throughout his City of God, Augustine accuses the Romans of willfully forgetting their origins. The philosopher Varro, Augustine says, [...]
Augustine, of course, was not the first to chart the cycle of lust, as anyone for whom the body/soul connection remains a work in progress well knows. I must now carry my thoughts back to the abominable things I did in those days,” writes Augustine at the very beginning of Book II, “the sins of the [...]
Five-hundred years on from the Protestant revolution and Christendom is not just dismantled, but in full apostasy. Can it be revived, and if so, how? St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who was the greatest Christian philosopher of antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence, maintained that a Christian state is the only [...]
Like Mr. Chesterton, it would never have occurred to St. Augustine to assign blame for the world’s problems to anyone other than himself. Around the turn of the last century, a prominent London newspaper called The World put the following question to its readers, offering a prize for the best possible answer: “What’s wrong with the world?” Not [...]
When it comes to our role in salvation, St. Augustine sits squarely between the heretical extremes of Luther and Pelagius. A large mug arrived in the mail the other day, around which I counted twenty or so apothegms written by St. Augustine. It was a gift, anonymously sent by someone who obviously thought I wasn’t getting [...]
From the first moment of his conversion, rivetingly recounted in the pages of his Confessions, Augustine rooted himself in Christ, determined to cleave to his person and the redemption wrought by the sacrifice of his life. Not as mere idea, distant and remote, toward which he would now and again direct his attention. Such rarefied realms, [...]
Augustine was standing at a precipice when he heard the story of two men very much like himself. He recalls in the eighth book of his Confessions how he learned of two men foregoing promising careers in Milan in favor of the peaceful austerities of the monastery. They came upon the cloister while taking a stroll, and [...]
The first half of Augustine’s life was spent amid the remnants of a Greek and Roman world; the latter half was spent in the company of provincial Africans, to whom he would unravel the mysteries of a shared faith. In the immediate aftermath of his conversion, following a life not infrequently strewn with sin, Augustine [...]
Why did St. Augustine write "The City of God"? Why should it continue to compel our attention today? It was the one project St. Augustine prized above all others and would spend fourteen years of his life putting it all together: The City of God. He finished the last of the twenty-two books in the year 426, [...]
The sheer impact of St. Augustine upon the life of the Church, of the emerging medieval world he had a hand in shaping, has never been equaled. Perhaps the first and most obvious thing to be said about St. Augustine, the span of whose life was close to eighty years—from A.D. 354 to 430—is that he [...]
Part of the continuing fascination of Augustine for people who know almost nothing of the period in which he lived, whose own time and place seem so completely removed from the corruptions of late antiquity that for them Augustine might as well have come from another planet, is the fact that here was a man whose [...]
Putting it in precise Augustinian terms, it is the choice between the love of God and the love of self that will determine the outcome of a man’s life. There are two forces at work in the world—gravity and grace—and each of us must choose to follow one or the other. There is no third [...]
What was it about Augustine’s "Confessions" that made it so readable, or managed to endear its author to so many who read it? Might its appeal have had something to do with the fact that here was a great sinner who lived to regret his sins, and so completely reform his life as to become [...]