“Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
This phrase, which appears in the autobiographical book confessionssays a lot about the two stages in the life of Saint Augustine (354-430), a character born in present-day Algeria who led a life full of worldly pleasures until he converted to Christianity and became a great philosopher and theologian.
“San Agustín has great importance not only in the history of the Church, but in the history of Western thought,” says the philosopher and jurist Segundo Azevedo, a scholar of the work of Agustín and a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará (IFCE), in Brazil.
“Of the male saints of the Church, he was one of the ones who wrote the most throughout his life,” adds the scholar of hagiology (the theory of saints, blesseds, and personages of the Catholic Church) Thiago Maerki, researcher of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and associate of the Hagiography Society, in the United States.
“He was a great intellectual, one of the greatest the Church has ever known,” Maerki stresses.
In the book ‘Il Santo Del Giorno’, Mario Sgarbossa and Luigi Giovannini stressed that “it is not easy to speak” of the “saint who more than any other has spoken of himself, with sincerity and simplicity”.
Definitely an allusion to the book confessionsa Christian bestseller to date, in which, as Sgarbossa and Giovannini say, “bare his soul with sincerity and candor”.
The son of a Catholic mother —later Saint Monica— and a pagan, Patricio, who would only convert to Christianity on his deathbed, Aurelio Agustín de Hipona was born in Tagaste, in what is now the city of Souk Ahras, in Algeria.
At that time, the town was part of the Roman province of Numidia. Everything indicates that his family, considered to be of the upper class of “honorable men”, had Roman citizenship.
experimenting with pleasure
The fact is that in his childhood he was educated in Latin and, at the age of 11, he ended up being taken to a school about 30 kilometers from his hometown, where he learned literature and customs typical of the Roman civilization.
There he had access to classic works of philosophy, and contact with authors such as Marco Tulio Cícero (106 BC – 43 BC), later credited by Agustín himself as the person responsible for awakening his interest in the subject.
At the age of 17, Augustine left for Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, to study rhetoric.
Raised within Christian principles, due to his maternal education, it was there that he ended up taking positions contradictory to the faith.
He embraced Manichaeism as a doctrine and, in the company of other young people, began to live with a hedonistic spirit, in search of worldly pleasures.
His group boasted of collecting sexual experiences, listing affairs with both women and men.
Agustín got involved with a local girl, but, contrary to what society expected, he decided not to marry her.
They lived as lovers and had a son, Adeodatus, about whom little is known other than the fact that he died at a young age.
His intellectual training would also end up becoming his financial support.
At the age of 19 he became a grammar teacher, first in his native Tagaste, then in Carthage.
Ten years later, he decided to found a school in Rome. I thought that totherein the capital of civilization, would be the greatest and brightest minds.
He failed in the effort, disappointed by the lack of receptivity of the students.
By then he had already distanced himself from Manichaeism and embraced the ideas of skepticism.
“Take it, read it”
His fame as a man of good learning spread and he soon got a job teaching rhetoric at Mediolanum, present-day Milan.
He was 30 years old and had a remarkable intellectual career.
However, the thorn in his side was his mother, Monica, who continued to pressure him to convert to Christianity.
And that adherence to the faith would come in the year 386.
According to his own account, he was impressed upon coming into contact with the life story of San Antonio del Desierto (251-356), a hermit who would come to be known as “the father of all monks.”
In that trance, he heard the voice of a child telling him “take it, read it.” She took it as an order: he was to take the Bible and read the first passage he found.
It fell on an excerpt from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which the apostle talks about how the Holy Scriptures have the power to transform the behavior of human beings.
“Let us behave with decency, as it is done during the day: no banquets and drunkenness, no prostitution and vices, no lawsuits and envy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not allow yourself to be led away by the flesh to satisfy his desires, ”the passage urges.
He interpreted it as a message addressed to him.
At Easter 387 he was baptized by the Bishop of Mediolanum, Aurelius Ambrose (340-397). The following year, in the company of his mother and his son, he decided to return to Africa.
Monica, however, died before boarding. Adeodato would die shortly after the return.
Afflicted by the family’s misfortunes, Agustín decided to sell all the assets and donate the money to the poor.
He only kept his house, converted into a monastery.
In 391 he was ordained a priest in Hippo, in the same province of Numidia.
It was then that the converted Augustine allowed himself to use all his erudition in favor of Christianity. He would soon become a great preacher and a great theoretical scholar of the fundamentals of religion.
A few years later, at the end of the fourth century, he was appointed Bishop of Hippo.
Until the end of his life he dedicated himself to preaching, studying and writing, always maintaining a sober and ascetic style.
According to the accounts of a bishop who was his contemporary, Possidius, he ate little, worked hard, did not like conversations about the lives of others, and was a skilled financial administrator of the works of his community.
frontier thinker
From an intellectual point of view, Augustine is responsible for the first great synthesis of Christianity, bringing together the practices of the tradition of the time, comparing them with the Scriptures and trying to infer from them a catechetical philosophy.
Although the term did not exist at the time, he is considered a great theologian.
He was one of the pioneers in defending that the human being was the perfect union of two substances, the body and the soul.an understanding that ended up influencing a large part of the philosophy that would be built from then on.
He also laid the foundations of ecclesiology, proposing that the Church was a single legitimate entity, but that it should be understood under two realities. The visible part would be formed by the hierarchical institution and the sacraments; but the invisible part would be constituted by the souls of the practitioners.
“Agustín de Hipona is characterized as a frontier thinker. But what does it mean to be a frontier thinker? It is knowing how to reflect in stages in which the political and cultural crisis gives rise to a new moment in history”, says Azevedo.
“The Augustinian border reflection covers classical antiquity and provides the sources to think about the nascent Christian period.”
The researcher recalls that Augustine was deeply influenced by “Greek philosophical reason, especially Neoplatonism, and Christian revelation with the Pauline letters.”
In this sense, it seems inevitable to compare the two, Augustine and Paul. Both late converts to Christianity. Both dedicated to creating a theoretical basis for religion.
“There is an association between Pablo and Agustín and that association is loaded with symbolism, with very strong meanings”, explains Maerki.
“Both make interpretations, adapting Platonic philosophy to Christianity, influenced by Platonic philosophy.”
“The combination of these two ways of thinking about the world [la filosofía griega y el cristianismo] and reflection on oneself finds support in the restless heart of Agustín. There, there is an atmosphere of conjunction and formation of a new way of thinking”, completes Azevedo.
“The ancient Greek style of writing finds a link in Christian reflection, in the necessary association of thinking and living.”
The professor stresses, however, that it was not just theory, but religious practice that made Augustine the saint who would end up being recognized.
“He shows with his life that thought without action is empty,” he says.
choose to love
In this process, Augustine’s tools of scholarship appear to be the same as those he used as a teacher of Latin and rhetoric. No wonder he became a scholar of the Scriptures.
“He was a great lover of the sacred texts, not only in the sense that, after his conversion, he deeply lived the so-called biblical truths, but also because he was an assiduous student of the Scriptures, proposing biblical interpretations from the point of view of a more classical rhetoric”, comments Maerki.
“Today there is much talk about investigating the Bible from literary theories. Agustín proposed, in his time, something a little close to that, ”adds the researcher.
“It was a time when the term literature did not exist, but he was interested in the construction and interpretation of the text. That affinity for letters strikes me.”
Azevedo explains that one of the main issues raised by Agustín was the perception of the concept of will.
“The notion of will was not developed by the Greeks, although Aristotle gives indications to be able to reflect on it.”
Augustine “identifies the will and conditions it to the notion of choice, deliberation.”
“The ethical action, to love, consists in loving what should be loved in the face of the order of the world,” says Professor Azevedo.
“The union between cosmology and Judeo-Christian creation is revealed in a hierarchical order, in which there are some goods that must be chosen.”
In other words, for Augustine, the choice would be based on knowledge, “but above all because of the properly human capacity to love”.
“Love is a choice,” says Azevedo.
Maerki summarizes this point from some Augustinian premises.
The first is that people knoweitherhe loves what he knows. In this sense, the existence of God would be proven precisely by the love that human beings dedicate to him, that is, if they do, it is because they know him.
Another is the search. For Augustine, yeseitherit look for what HE loves. That is why the human being, who loves God, would commit himself to seek him.
“He was a saint who wrote a lot and talked a lot about love. He believed that love should be the measure of all things, ”summarizes Maerki.
In confessions, Agustín affirms: “my love is my weight; for him I am carried wherever I am taken.”
“Agustín teaches today’s human beings that it is possible to start over, that there is always a possibility, even with the past,” adds Azevedo.
At age 75, he fell ill. He died on August 28, 430. At a time when the Church had not defined objective criteria for canonization, he ended up becoming a saint by popular acclamation.
In 1298, Pope Boniface 8 (1235-1303) awarded him the posthumous title of Doctor of the Church.
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