Saint Augustine: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Christians Book 1) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2019-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Engaged to be Married

“My mistress being torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, my heart, which clave to her, was racked, and wounded, and bleeding.”

—Saint Augustine

By the summer of 386 CE, the man that we would come to know as Saint Augustine was gradually acclimating himself to the faith. He was slowly roiling around in his mind his newly developed esteem of Christianity along with his already established tenants of Neoplatonism and philosophical thought. The reasons behind his transformation have long been misunderstood. But it was his synthesis of these two modes of thought that now so compelled him and held him in their thrall.

At this point in time, Augustine continued to engage his contemporaries in open dialogue at philosophical conferences of which he occasionally bid his mother Monica to attend. It is the recollections of these meetings that ended up forming the basis of what would be known as Augustine’s dialogues. The most common subject matters at these discussions were the meanings of “truth, certainty, true happiness in philosophy, the Providential order of the world and the problems of evil, and God and the soul.”

Many have since openly pondered whether or not Augustine could be said to have been a Christian in the classical sense of the word at the time of these great debates. But whatever the case may be, Augustine had found himself completely dissatisfied with his life. His career as an orator was not taking off as he had hoped. And he had grown so weary of the day to day routine of his life in Milan that on one occasion he happened upon a drunken beggar and openly wished to “switch places with him.”

Augustine found himself in a position that many find themselves in—he was stuck in a daily grind of work to make a living with no time for any other serious thought or reflection in between. This constant grind began to weigh heavily on Augustine’s soul. He thought that surely there was more for him in life than being trapped in the perpetual rat race that he had found himself in. In his typical routine at the time, the mornings were completely booked by his teaching, and the rest of his evening was spent keeping tabs on his social contacts and vigorously writing up discourses to sell to scholars.

In the world Augustine was in, this continuous meticulous labor was the only way he could pay his bills and keep himself afloat. He didn’t have much time for anything else. He talked until his voice was hoarse in the morning, and he wrote until his fingers ached in the evening. Augustine longed for a change of pace. He found this change of pace when he made the acquaintance of a visitor to Milan by the name of Ponticianus. This well-traveled visitor came full of tales of Saint Anthony and his “desert monks of Egypt” who had sworn off all enticements of the outside world in order to completely devote themselves to God.

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