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"Almost sixteen and a half centuries separate us from St. Augustine, as Henri Marrou in his classic biography of Augustine reminds us. But is "separate" really an appropriate term? he asks. Do not these centuries instead "unite us" to Augustine? After all, these centuries are not an empty gap; they are penetrated through and through with Augustine's presence, with his greatness and influence, to say nothing of the debates that have been generated by the interpretations of his thought.
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Augustine's influence comes from his writings, which are prodigious.
His books number ninety-three, and there are almost three hundred letters and four hundred sermons--out of an estimated eight thousand that he preached--that have survived to this day, and more are being discovered. His unique synthesis of the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian heritage set the pattern and defined the problems of religion and culture for fifteen hundred years. Theology and philosophy, as we know it, would be inconceivable without his Confessions, his The City of God, his treatises and his sermons.
Without him we would be at a loss to understand such luminaries as Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Luther, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Cardinal Newman, Marcel, Blondel, Heidegger, Arendt, Rahner, and so many other great minds down to our own day. He remains one of the few Christian thinkers of whose existence non-Christians are aware, and whose influence on the evolution of the human mind is acknowledged by believers and non-believers alike. Less than nine months after Augustine's death in 430, Pope Celestine pronounced the first of a long series of tributes to him that continue down to our own time: "We remember [Augustine] as a man of such great wisdom that he was always counted by my predecessors to be one of the greatest teachers."
Augustine, named Aurelius Augustinus, was born in 354 A.D. of parents of comfortable means in the North African town of Thagaste. At the age of sixteen he went to Carthage to finish his education. In 375, on reading Cicero's Hortensus, he became deeply interested in philosophy and later a convert to the Manichean religion. Augustine was a brilliant and passionate scholar. He taught rhetoric in Carthage and founded his own school of rhetoric at Rome, in 383. Offered a professorship at Milan, Augustine came under the influence both of Neoplatonism and of the preaching of St. Ambrose. After enduring inward conflicts and intense struggles with sexual temptations, Augustine renounced his unorthodox beliefs and converted to Christianity at the age of thirty two.
After his conversion, Augustine returned to North Africa where he established a monastic community for himself and his friends in his parents' home at Thagaste. He devoted a joyful three years to study, dialogue, and prayer, and it is at this time that Augustine wrote his famous Rule for the monks who lived with him.
The scope of Augustine's intellectual and apostolic achievement is staggering. In addition to his literary output, he was a priest and bishop who 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.
When he became a bishop of Hippo, where he was to spend the remainder of his forty-four years, Augustine was determined not to abandon a way of life that he had found so fulfilling. He established a monastery for priests in his bishop's residence. There they lived togther in a religious community according to the Rule.
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. Augustine had come to believe that a monk could lead both a contemplative life and a life of action, as expressed in his work The City of God. A monk's first responsibility was serving the Church; but study, scholarship and contemplation would make that service all the more meaningful."
Source: The Mission and Heritage of Villanova University: Catholic and Augustinian (2000), Page 3-4
web source: www.heritage.villanova.edu
Biographical Outline of St. Agustine
354 (Birth of St. Augustine at Thagaste, 13 November)
361 (Scholastic formation)
372 (Birth of Adeodatus, his son; death of Patricius, his father)
372-373 (Reading of Hortensius; conversion to philosophy; adhesion to Manichaeism)
373-374 (Teaching stint at Thagaste and Carthage)
380 (First work: On the Beautiful and Fitting)
383 (Teaches in Rome)
384 (Appointed Professor of Rhetoric in Milan)
385 (St. Monica arrives in Milan)
386 (Reading of Platonic books: studies St. Paul's epistles; visited by Potencianus; returns (conversion to the Christian faith; goes to Cassiciacum)
387 (Baptism at Milan; vision of Ostia; death of Monica)
388-391 (Returns to Africa; monastic life at Thagaste; death of Adeodatus)
391 (Foundation of a new monastery in Hippo; ordained priest)
396 (Becomes Bishop of Hippo)
410 (Retires to a villa outside Hippo for the winter because of his health)
426 (Nominates Heraclitus as his successor)
430 (Death and burial of St. Augustine, 28 August)
Source: According to St. Augustine: A Collection of 201 Augustinian Sayings, Compiled by Demetrio S. Peñascoza, OAR (Quezon City, Philippines: Quærens Editions, 2000), vi.
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