Saint Augustine

Augustine was born in Thagaste on November 13, 354, to a Roman father and a Berber mother, in a North African settlement that today is called Souk Ahras, in Algeria. We know his life better than that of anyone else in antiquity, because he wrote it himself: the Confessions is the first book in history in which a man tells the story of his inner life, and after sixteen hundred years it still reads as if it were written today. He taught rhetoric in Carthage, in Rome, in Milan. He went through Manichaeism, then skepticism, then Neoplatonism. He had a companion for fifteen years, with whom he had a son, Adeodatus, and he left her for an advantageous marriage that he then never went through with — and it’s one of the things he blames himself for most harshly. His conversion came in Milan in 386, in a garden, when he heard a child’s voice saying “take up and read.” He was baptized by Ambrose on Easter night in 387. Back in Africa, he became bishop of Hippo and remained so for thirty-four years. He wrote more than a hundred works: The City of God, the De Trinitate, and thousands of sermons preached to ordinary people, in a Latin that came down to their level so they could understand. He died in Hippo on August 28, 430, while the Vandals were besieging the city. The line that sums him up is at the beginning of the Confessions: our heart is restless until it rests in you. If your name is Augustine, today is your name day.