The way he explained about God’s grace was a great eye opener to many Christians. It released people from the burden of sin, as he once to: carried the guilt and cried out to God to help him understand the meaning of atonement of Christ. Looking back through his life journey, there is his mother, Monica, who cried to God to save her son from the destructive life he was leading. She got assurance from a Pastor she visited who said that‘ the child of so many tears’ could not be lost. Augustine realised how prayer to God had been answered in his life and he was ready to share the difference between living as a true Christian that leads to eternal life or living a passionate quest for human love that leads to destruction. One of the famous words from Augustine is “…Thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee ” Brought people to the realisation that a restless soul will only come to the serenity if the soul recognise the living God and is in a close relationship with God.
This essay will briefly explore Augustine’s early life and the spiritual transformation he had in the process of becoming a Christian. Also what we can learn from his life, the battle of his spirituality he faced, and how he overcome that with prayer and understanding of God’s grace shall be explored. In order for us to be inspired and strengthened in our faith let us reflect from the very life of Augustine himself.
Augustine was born from a Christian mother named Monica and a pagan father, Patricius. The family are consider a middle class, more likely to have been influential but very poor due to the unfair tax system of Roman Empire. Augustine grew up in the area of Thagaste, a small town in North Africa (in modern Algeria), the Roman government was in charge of many places in Africa including Thagaste. The name Augustine means ‘little emperor’, a reflection of an ambitious parent, who really wanted Augustine to be somebody in the government sector, a lawyer or rhetorician. Even though they did not have enough money to give Augustine the privilege of studying in the good school, they had extended family who would have help Augustine in pursuing a higher education. Romanianus was a very wealthy relative who helped Augustine by giving him a scholarship. Throughout the year they became very good friends and shared many of the same interests in education. For Romanianus, Augustine’s intellect was brilliant, and it helped him to gain more knowledge by conversation. For Augustine, there was the enjoyment of the facility Romanius had, a grand library and much more. While Romanianus supported Augustine materially, Augustine did much to enrich Romanianus’s mind and soul. Augustine began to think of starting a community of philosophers and Romanianus agreed to put up the money for It. .
In Africa, the native religion was pagan and deeply superstitious. The local beliefs involved the worship of the spirits of the dead, it was also common to perform magic charms. Human sacrifices were given to the gods who controlled the forces of nature, whom they believe in. Christianity brought the good news of an all powerful, invisible, and loving Creator God, and a saviour who could defeat every kind of evil. The pagans also endorsed a self-indulgent lifestyle.
As Augustine reflected on his childhood experience, he learnt how to cope with peer pressure by doing what the gang of boys had requested. As a young boy he liked to gang up and try to fit in with the group. Later on in his book ‘confessions’, he recalled the peer pressure’s influence on him, making him do certain things that he did not wish to do. For example, stealing sour pears from the neighbor’s tree. He was not for the pleasant taste nor driven by hunger: It was truly merely a feeling of a satisfy action for doing something he knows was wrong. “Behold, my God, the lively review of my soul’ career is laid bare before thee. I would not have committed that theft alone. My pleasure in it was not what I stole but, rather, the act of stealing. Nor would I have enjoyed doing it alone- indeed I would not have done it! O friendship all unfriendly!” . Later on in his life he realised this is what the Christians called ‘original sins’. The sins you get because of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Because of this the rest of humankind also became sinners since they were born.
Augustine in his teenage life did not care about the laws on what was right or wrong. He enjoyed the free spirit lifestyle, filling the desire in his heart with something for the moment. He was exposed to the church as a child, probably because Monica took her son to the church. As he grew older, and lived in different cities, he decided the only reason he went to church was to pursue girls, rather than the teaching itself.
Augustine’s early school experience of reading and writing was in Thagaste. He was not good at the Greek language, preferred Latin, which in his future this would be his disadvantage. This is because all the scholars read Greek and every book that translated into Latin lost certain essences of meanings. Often Augustine seemed to be a struggling student at school “His early prayers included fervent pleas to be spared the rod: ‘ though I was only a small child, there was great feeling when I pleaded with you that I might not be caned at school’ (Confessions 1.9.14).” Little did he know the passion he developed in school for Latin literature, theater, and rhetoric would benefit him in the future for having the ability in abundance to conjure words, phrases, puns and rhymes. This made him excellent in conversations, debates, letters, and sermons. At this stage he dreamt of becoming a schoolmaster one day, while Patricius hoped his son would rather be a lawyer or rhetorician.
In his early teenage life, he moved to a new school at a ‘university town’ called Madauros. In this town Augustine was exposed to many great writers such as the great Roman orator Cicero (106-43 BC) this influenced him in his thinking and the principles of orators and debate. When Augustine reached fifteen his parents decided it would be best for him to study at the university in Carthage. It took the parents about a year to raise enough money, during this time Augustine was at home with his family. Because Augustine had no other activity in this waiting period, and his adolescent energy was raised up, he ended up spending so much time with a group of young people going drinking, stealing and having sex. It was difficult for Monica to tell her beloved son not to do such things because her pagan husband would actually give permission. Perhaps is as Augustine famous prayer says “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet” (confessions 8.7.17.). He wanted to live his life in a fast line.
Finally, with all the resources ready, Augustine moved to Carthage and pursued a higher education. It might not have been the best choice for the wild young boy: the freedom he got just made him worse. Carthage was the excesses of the pagan world and also a place of a wider spiritual quest. He started to admire a few great speakers and that lead him to learning more about different belief systems.
His personal life began to take a journey in the direction he never planned. He met a girl and after an intense relationship, she became pregnant. At the age of eighteen he was already a father to a son named Adeodatus. He did not marry her, perhaps because of her different social status. Around the same year he lost his father, perhaps this also was a reason for his commitment to this girl that lead to the fifteen years of being together without marriage.
In his spare time outside of university, he enjoyed to observing his son, Adeodatus. He was intrigued by the sucking, sleeping, smiling, crying and all the physical exertion and mental frustration. “For Augustine, who was always as questioning as he was observant, this was rich seam of discovery and reflection. He could see that ‘original sin’, in the form of self-seeking and anger, was inherent in human nature from the earliest day of life”. In his second year of college in Carthage, he read Hortensius, written by the greatest of Roman orators, Cicero. It transformed his mind, and led to pursuing more wisdom; the content of this book was written in dialogue form and expounded the importance of finding and loving wisdom. Cicero’s path to wisdom was by self-discipline and self-improvement, by controlling earthy desires and developing reason and knowledge. In this way a person could embark to heaven . He began to read more books from the great writer as Plato and Socrates.
“Augustine immediately identified ‘wisdom’ with the Christian God of his upbringing and devoted himself to seeking this God by reading the bible”. But soon he started to become very disappointed because of the translation of the bible in rough Latin made by an uneducated Greek missionary who went to Africa in the second century. The way of its style and content made him so offended that he compared it with Cicero’s writing. The only thing at that time that brought delight to Augustine’s new Christian life was the Christian community. In this new community he found some of them so intelligent and this drew him to a new, radical, exciting and otherworldly form of Christianity, known as Manichaeism.
Founded by Mani (216-76), he claimed his message was a unique disclosure of the nature of God, humanity and the universe. Augustine was a Manichee for nine years. He enjoyed the fellowship and sense of purpose, but soon developed doubts about the truth of their belief. He found that through Manichaeism might look impressive, it was actually full of superstition and myth. It bothered him that goodness must be passive; he could not accept that God could be that powerless. A bright sunny day came after the rain of confusion in his mind; he met a Christian by the name of Helpidius, who was able to argue the case against Manichaeism in a convincing way. Augustine desire to know and to fill the hunger in his heart for God, he was restless and in great hope for being at last, in peace with God.
Then Augustine moved to Italy, first Rome then Milan. He traveled with his little ‘family’. Of course this happened without the permission of his mother, Monica, who later on moved to Milan and requested that Augustine sent the women back to Africa and married someone from the same class or a higher class to secure his position in society.
Augustine is drawn to the teachings of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Ambrose gave Augustine the means of understanding the Old Testament and showed him that it was faith that led to wisdom and not wisdom that led to faith. With Ambrose’s explanation, Augustine found the bridge between Cicero in his mind and Christ in his heart. Finally someone at his level of intellect was able to push him to confirm his rejection of the Manichees and opened a way home to the Christian faith of his upbringing.
The battle within him was that his philosophy called him to a life of abstinence and self-control, but his physical passions mastered and overwhelmed him. He tried to reconcile this very human battle by praying that God would give him continent-but not yet. One day a friend of his came and told him the story about Anthony of Egypt who lived a life in supreme holiness in the desert. He was surprised he had never heard the story about the Desert Fathers or the monastic communities that become very popular to those seeking closer devotion to God. Hearing the story of Anthony the Egypt greatly shamed Augustine, for his life did not even come close to that yet. His personal ambition, self-indulgence and lust ruled his life.
After hearing the story about Anthony of Egypt, he took a walk in the garden with his friend Alypius, as his mind filled with agony of inner conflict, he questioned in his mind why he could not simply desire and do what was best. In that garden beneath the fig tree, he wept. All of a sudden he heard the little voice of a little girl or boy chanting the rhyme of a game: ‘tolle lege, tolle lege’ which mean ‘pick up and read, pick up and read’. He ran home and got his Bible and opened it up in a random order and his eyes fell to a text from Roman chapter 13.
Augustine re told the story in his book, ‘confessions’: “I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” After the sentence end, he did not want to read further, for he sensed a great change in his heart-all doubt vanished away.
He shared this great joy with his mother, Monica. She leaped for joy triumphant; and she blessed thee, who art “able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think,” It was a joyful day for her, finally all her long years of prayer had been answered with much more than she had ever asked for. She thanked God for reaching out to her long lost son. For Augustine, it was the same feeling of conversion that Paul had on the road to Damascus, when he met Christ, for he was a murderer of a Christians and yet he was not far from the hand of God.
Conclusion
Augustine moved to Africa and in Hippo he impacted on the Church and the Christians with a new way to understand God’s grace. He built the bridge between heart and mind so that people can make sense what they believe in their hearts with their minds. The legacy he left has been a blessing to many Christians. Two of his favorite books: ‘the confessions’ and ‘the city of God’ have had great impacts by giving the testimony and the inspiration for people to understand the salvation of Christ. We are not far from the reach hand of God. The very reason why Jesus came to the world is to save the lost souls like Augustine and the rest of human beings.
In the book ‘the city of God’, Augustine argued concerning the meaning of becoming a citizen of heaven and also the defending of Christians in the Roman world as it was rumored the cause of the fallen empire was because of the expansion of Christianity after Alexander the great. Augustine used all the resources of his previous understanding of other beliefs as an opening line for him to understand the opponent’s point of view or foundation. From there he would gave a Christian understanding and he would end with what is the true; from first a mistake, second a contrast, third the result of comparison.
In his prayer life, he came to a realisation that the moral debt is because of the fallen nature of human beings. He realised it is only God’s grace that can be relied on. No more using his full effort to attain eternal life, but to accept Christ as God that rule his life. The prayer by his mother has, was an encouragement for him. His mother was hoping God would save him before it was too late; it has been an inspiration to many mothers throughout the centuries to never give up in prayers for long lost sons, daughters or any other family member. As we read the passion for God in Augustine’s reflections and prayers, we learn how much he desired to have an intimate communion with the divine.
At the end of Augustine’s life, he became someone who delighted in God, knowing he had become the child of God, not by effort, but by God’s amazing grace.
That all this is the journey of a lifetime is expressed in Augustine’s prayer at the end of the trinity “Lord God, trinity, may I mindful of you, understand you, love you. Increase these gifts in me until you have entirely reformed me”.
Soli Deo Gratia,
Tracy Trinita
Bibliography
- Augustine, Confessions. Hendrickson publishers – Massachusetts 2004
- Knowles, A., and Penkett,P. , Augustine and his world. IVP Histories. Inter-varsity press – Illinois 2004
No comments:
Post a Comment