August 28th is reserved as the Feast Day for St. Augustine of
Hippo, the patron saint of this
congregation.
In the year 354 in
North Africa a dark-skinned boy was born in what is now
Algeria. He was named Augustine, a child
destined to become one of the most influential people who ever
lived.
He was a great genius, a great lover, a
great sinner, and a great saint. He lived almost 76 years and died sixty miles
away, in Hippo Regius, on the Mediterranean
coast.
Augustine's parents, Patricius and Monica,
belonged to the financially imperiled middle class of that
time. His mother was a devout Christian and his father was a
pagan who was baptized on his deathbed.
At the age of sixteen Augustine went to
Carthage in Greece – the center of action for him – to
finish his education for the law. He set up housekeeping
with a young woman he met in Carthage and not long
afterwards Augustine fathered a son. This woman, whose name we
never learn, stayed with him for over a decade, until he was
forced to give her up for a society marriage.
While teaching in Carthage Augustine's
career began to be described as brilliant and he was
recognized as a formidable scholar and orator. At that time,
in a university town like Carthage, education was a
free-market enterprise with each teacher independently setting
up class in the city center. Many students were rowdy and they
often tried to cheat teachers out of their fees. Many teachers
failed, but Augustine prospered. His reputation grew and he
became a professor for the imperial court at Milan. At the age
of 30 Augustine had won the most visible academic
position in the Latin world.
In
Milan Augustine met Ambrose, the
city's bishop and its most influential citizen. As
Augustine sat through the the bishop's sermons, he began to
see Christianity in a new, intellectually respectable light.
Soon he gave up his academic position to study and debate
Christianity. In the spring of 387, he returned to Milan
to be baptized by Ambrose.
Augustine and his friends decided
to return to Africa to live in what might be called a small
monastery, praying and studying scripture. But while he was on
a trip to the coastal city of Hippo Regius, he was virtually
forced into the priesthood by a local congregation. Before
serving that congregation, he pleaded with his bishop for a
little time to prepare. He then devoted himself to the mastery
of the texts of scripture – a mastery that was to make him a
formidable theologian in the decades to come.
When the old bishop died in 395,
Augustine assumed responsibility for the church at Hippo and
continued there as bishop until his death 34 years
later.
During this time Augustine’s written
work is simply staggering. Today, 1610 years later, there
still survive 113 books and treatises, over 200 letters and
more than 500 sermons. Often late into the night Augustine
dictated letters and articles to relays of secretaries. But at
that time there were no Christian libraries or schools, no
easy means of distributing books, not even a systematic way of
telling the world that a book existed. So Augustine hired
teams of men to copy his manuscripts. Thus they
could be sent off to friends and scholars.
Later Augustine and the bishop of Calama
prepared a pamphlet indexing all of Augustine’s writings. It
is likely that the survival of Augustine’s writings Through
the Vandal invasion and the Islamic conquest of North Africa
was the happy result of the wide distribution of all those
scribes’ copies of his works and their helpful
index.
Confessions
and The City of
God, two of his
longest books, made an indelible mark not only on Christian
theology, but on the psychology and political philosophy of
the West. He wrote The City of God in response to the disorienting effect the fall
of Rome had on Christians. They saw Rome as the center of
human history and, with Rome destroyed, what sense was to be
made of the world? Augustine wrote that Rome was never
the city that could satisfy human hearts -- only the City
of God can do that. He spent 15 years writing the 22 books of
this epic work.
It is because of his book, Confessions, meaning
The Testimony, that we know Augustine so intimately. This book
is the diary of his journey of discovery of God, a journey
that took place in the mind-space between faith and
understanding. "Faith" is what is achieved by believing
scripture and authority. "Understanding" is the knowledge of
God that will only come fully in the next life.
"Since it is God we are speaking of, you
do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not
be God.... We seek one mystery, God, with another mystery,
ourselves."
The God he found was a personal God, a
concept radical in Augustine’s time but now taken for granted.
"Thou hast made us for thyself," he tells God at the beginning
of the Confessions, "and our hearts
are restless till they rest in thee!"
The immeasurable distance between God and humans cannot be bridged by
our efforts, Augustine argued. It is God who comes to meet us,
in the real world of the mind. "We are mysterious to ourselves
because God’s mystery is in us. Our mind cannot be understood,
even by itself, because it is made in God’s
image."
Karen Armstrong, in her book The
History of God, writes,
"Augustine can be called the founder of the Western spirit. No
other theologian, apart from St. Paul, has been more
influential in the West."
This is St. Augustine of
Hippo, the namesake of this
church.
For excellent references on the life of St.
Augustine, go to http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/augustine/twayne.html | 
