"We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God." (1 Cor 2:12)

St. Augustine was born on November 13th 354 at Thagaste in Numidia (now Souk-Ahras in Algeria). His parents were probably both native Numidians, i.e. Berbers. His father Patricius, a small landowner and town councillor, was a pagan (though he became a Christian at the end of his life). His mother, St. Monica, was a Christian; and it was she who by her prayers and her unwearying patience and affection was responsible, more than any other human being, for her son's conversion. As was common at that time, he was entered in infancy among the candidates for baptism, but the actual baptism was indefinitely postponed, to avoid the risk of post-baptismal sin. He was in fact baptized, by St. Ambrose, only after his conversion, when he was thirty-two. He went through the usual course of literary studies of his time (he loved Virgil and hated Greek, which he probably never perfectly mastered) at Thagaste and Madaura, and eventually trained and began to practice as a rhetorician at Carthage. His morals during this period were probably no worse, perhaps rather better, than those of his contemporaries, and we should not take his fierce condemnations of his own behavior in the Confessions too literally. He certainly took a concubine; but he was faithful to her till he sent her away at Milan in 385, and had a dearly loved son, Adeodatus, by her. At this period he became a Manichee, attracted by the intellectual pretensions of Manichaeism and the slick and easy solutions it offered to problems about the nature of God (corporeal, a sort of glorified gas), the scriptures (rejected or allegorized) and the origin of evil (due to an independent uncreated principle).

In 383 he went to Rome as a teacher of rhetoric, and in 384 obtained a post at Milan. He had already begun to see through Manichaeism, and was in a painful state of skepticism and uncertainty. At Milan he came into contact with the city's great bishop, St. Ambrose, whose sermons showed him for the first time how he could believe the scriptures interpreted according to the teaching of the Church without sacrificing his intelligence: and he also read the books of the Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Porphyry, which cured him of Manichaean materialism and gave him a spiritual philosophy which he found in harmony with the Christian revelation. He became intellectually convinced of the truth of Christianity, but held back from any decisive step till in September 386 he underwent the great experience of conversion, instantaneous though long prepared, and complete, which he describes unsurpassably in the eighth book of his Confessions. It was a conversion both to Christianity and to the pursuit of Christian perfection by an ascetic life. After it he gave up his profession of rhetorician and retired to Cassiciacum, in the country near Milan, with his mother St. Monica, his son Adeodatus, and several friends. Here he began to write, and produced a group of philosophical dialogues, the earliest of his works that we have.

He was baptized by St. Ambrose at Easter 387, and started back with his mother and friends to Africa. St. Monica died on the way at Ostia. In Africa he was persuaded by Bishop Valerius of Hippo to become a priest, and was ordained in 391. In 395 he was consecrated bishop as coadjutor to Valerius, and succeeded him as bishop of Hippo on his death soon after. He spent the remaining thirty-five years of his life as a hardworking diocesan bishop, somehow finding time to produce, besides his best known and loved works, the Confessions and the City of God, that vast series of theological writings which have made his thought a living force throughout Western Christianity from his own day to ours, and which are read and studied now perhaps more than ever before.

He lived a monastic common life with his clergy and did all he could to encourage the formation of religious communities. Two sermons on ascetic communal life and a long letter on its principles which he wrote to a community of women he had founded, with his sister as its first head, form the so-called 'Rule of St. Augustine', which is the basis of the rules of a great many communities of canons regular, friars and nuns. The account of his life as a bishop by his friend St. Possidius is a most attractive one, and shows St. Augustine as a very human, kindly and charitable person, devoted to the service of the community, living very simply himself and with a real love of poverty, though not ostentatiously ascetic, but practicing a very liberal hospitality. He always had wine at the common meals, as a sign of respect for the good gifts of God (perhaps he remembered the perverted puritanism of his Manichaean days). The one thing he would not tolerate at his table was malicious gossip and scandal, even when it came from fellow-bishops. He was continually engaged in the defense of the Catholic faith against schismatics, heretics and pagans; he had to deal in turn with his old friends the Manichees, with the wild Berber schism of the Donatists, and with the formidable Briton, Breton, or Irishman Pelagius and his followers, who denied original sin and did not believe that God's grace was needed for salvation. This last controversy produced St. Augustine's writings on grace, which have had so great an influence on later Christian thought (though his influence extends far wider than this one field). But, though he opposed heresy with vigor, he was on the whole, for his period, courteous and charitable in dealing with individual heretics and pagans.

St. Augustine lived to see the savage Vandal invasion of Africa which began in 429, and died on August 28th 430 at the age of seventy-six, while the Vandals were besieging his episcopal city of Hippo, in a spirit of the greatest courage, humility and penitence. He made no will, for he had no possessions to leave: but, from the time of his death to our own day, his legacy of thought has been recognized by most western Christians as the richest left by any Christian teacher after St. Paul.— Taken from The Saints Edited by John Coulson.

" Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so old and so new! Too late have I loved Thee. And lo, Thou wert inside me and I outside, and I sought for Thee there, and in all my unsightliness I flung myself on those beautiful things which Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee. Those beauties kept me away from Thee, though if they had not been in Thee, they would not have been at all. Thou didst call and cry to me and break down my deafness. Thou didst flash and shine on me and put my blindness to flight." — St. Augustine.

When he was still afraid to commit himself to the obligations of Christian living, chastity, wrote St. Augustine, enticed him with the thought of good examples. "So may boys and girls, so many young men and young women, people of every age, staid widows and maidens of ripe years. And in all these chastity was not barren, but the mother of delights begotten of you, Lord, their bridegroom. And she mocked gently at me, as it were saying, 'Cannot you do what these men and women did?'" — Taken from The Following of the Saints compiled by Henry Sebastian Bowden.