Augustine, named
Aurelius Augustinus, was born in 354 A.D. of middle-class parents in the
North African town of Thagaste. A brilliant and passionate scholar, he
taught rhetoric in Carthage and later Rome and Milan until his early 30s
and—as he acknowledged with extreme candor in his Confessions—developed
an obsessive taste for pleasures of the flesh. A dramatic conversion to
Christianity at the age of 32 set his life on a new course: He returned to
North Africa and was ordained bishop of Hippo, where he was to spend the
remaining 44 years of his life.
The scope of Augustine's
intellectual and apostolic achievement is staggering. He wrote 113 books,
among them two classics of world literature: Confessions and
The City of God. Over 800 of his sermons have been preserved. As
priest and bishop, he traveled thousands of miles in the Church's service
and fought tirelessly against the people who were dividing Catholics to
the point of physical violence. But in the midst of these demanding
activities, Augustine's life had a very different side: He was, at heart,
a monk.
After his conversion, Augustine
had established a monastic community for himself and his friends in his
parents' home, in Thagaste, and he had devoted a joyful three years to
study, dialogue, and prayer. It is at this time that Augustine wrote his
famous Rule for the monks who lived with him. Out of this
tradition stems the emphasis on the part of the early Augustinians of the
thirteenth century and us today on fraternal life in community.
When he became a bishop, he was
determined not to abandon a way of life that he had found so fulfilling.
He set up a monastery for priests in his bishop's residence and lived the
Rule he wrote as a guide for living in a religious community.
Augustine's monastery took
monasticism in a new direction. Monks had pastoral duties, and they could
not abandon those duties for a life of contemplation. But Augustine had
come to believe that a monk could, and should, lead both a contemplative
life and a life of action, as he expressed it in his work The City of
God. A monk's first responsibility, he felt, was serving the
Church—but study and contemplation would make that service all the more
meaningful.
Since its beginnings in the
thirteenth century, the Augustinian Order has been characterized by a
style of life that is, like Augustine's, both active and contemplative.
For Augustinians, it is perhaps the most distinctive feature of our
community and the challenge for us Augustinians and society at large.
"Every time we
hear Saint Augustine spoken of, we experience something like a tremor of
joy, of great devotion, of great communion. He seems to us to be such a
universal and dynamic being, so much the interpreter of the two worlds we
must bring together: the world of human beings and the world of God… He is
an encyclopedia of the Christian life and the spiritual life."
- Pope Paul
VI
