St. Augustine was a very busy 5th century Catholic bishop of a prosperous town in North Africa, called Hippo, in what is today Algeria but which was then called Numidia.  The full name of the town where he lived and served for almost forty years was Hippo Regius.  The latter name, regius, which is the Latin word for “royal,” referred to the fact that Hippo had once been the home of the kings of Numidia.   And so Hippo was a very old town where people had already lived for a thousand years when the 37 year old Augustine arrived there as a still new covert to Christianity in 391 A.D.

Augustine lived at a difficult time in history, sandwiched between two ages and two cultures.  The classical Greco-Roman age, of which he was a wonderful product, was coming to a close, while the future of the Christian culture that would replace it was still in doubt.  Places like the town of Hippo were feeling the steady decay of the old Roman culture and practices and increasing threats from invading barbarians, like the Vandals, who were in the midst of attacking his beloved city as Augustine lay dying in August of 430 A.D.    
Even Augustine’s own parents can symbolize the same tension between a dying world and a world yet to be born.  Patricius, his father, was a pagan and a Roman curiale, or government official, in a town near to Hippo called Thagaste.  His mother Monica, on the other hand, was a committed Christian of deep virtue.  Augustine’s upbringing and education was also divided in this way.  As a young boy his mother had him enrolled in the Church with those who were preparing for Christian Baptism, but later his father saw to it that he received the kind of Roman education that would lead to worldly success but away from Christianity.     

In his youth, Augustine faced great moral and mental struggles before arriving at Christian faith.  While still a young student, far from home, he fathered a son with a young girl to whom he was not married.  For years he tried to follow an eastern religion, called Manicheanism, and studied pagan (non-Christian) philosophies. During this period he thought of the Bible as primitive and preferred the classical Latin books and plays that he had studied in school.  He did become very successful as a teacher of rhetoric, or the art of public speaking, but during this same period he lived out of wedlock for 15 years with the woman who was the mother of his illegitimate son, Adeodatus.  All of this gave his pious Christian mother many reasons for the tears she shed for his soul.  All in all, Augustine’s is really a very modern sounding story.

Through the influence of St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan in Italy where he was then living, and by the continuous prayers of his mother St. Monica, Augustine finally came to conversion to the Christian faith.  He first hoped to live with some close friends in a monastery, to pray and study, but while visiting the people and bishop in the Church of Hippo, they recognized his talents and asked him to become a priest and then their bishop.
In Augustine’s time, the rich farm fields of North Africa were the breadbasket of the Roman Empire and the two leading port cities of Carthage and Hippo served as centers of trade.  In those days, when the town government was less well developed, Catholic bishops served not just as liturgical ministers, teachers and administrators, but as judges who would have been called upon to spend long hours advising the Christian populace and weighing the claims of people over matters of business or deciding the outcome of other personal disputes brought before them.  

But despite his many pastoral and other duties, Augustine was a gifted and productive writer.  Augustine, as a bishop and teacher, faced and responded to many attacks against the Catholic faith by people who questioned the nature of God and of His Church; the authority of her bishops and the value of the sacraments; our need for grace and even that Jesus Christ was God.  By answering these objections to the Catholic faith he became an important figure for the whole future of western Christian thought.  Many of the whole library of books that Augustine wrote were written at the request of friends and neighboring bishops who would ask him to help them defend the faith or address a difficult question or controversy.  Recently, even Pope Benedict XVI said that Augustine was the saint who influenced him most as he struggled to be a good teacher and bishop.     

Augustine is an important model for us today because he experienced times not all that unlike our own.  He made many of the same mistakes that young men and women still make, but despite his weaknesses (many of which he writes about in his famous work The Confessions), he became firmly committed, from the early age of 19, to the pursuit of true wisdom.  As it happens, he came to find that Wisdom Itself, Jesus Christ, had been pursuing him much longer and much more energetically than he had been seeking philosophical wisdom.  And so for the last forty years of his life St. Augustine committed himself to spreading, to teaching and preaching, the unmatched wisdom of Christ which he had found in the Catholic Church.     

St. Augustine, pray for us!