one28 PodcastThe Journey of a Restless Heart
A Life of Repentance: Augustine of Hippo
Romans 13:13-14
2009.01.27
09SR Session Two
Augustine of Hippo may be the most important man in church history. German historian, Adolf Harnack, called him the greatest man “between Paul the apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian church has possessed” (quoted in Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, 24). Of course, Luther himself was an Augustinian monk for many years, and my personal hero, John Calvin, quoted Augustine no less than 342 times in the fifth and final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. B.B. Warfield summarized Augustine’s impact as follows:
His direct work as a reformer of Church life was done in a corner, and its results were immediately swept away by the flood of the Vandal invasion…[but] it was through his voluminous writings, by which his wider influence was excited, that he entered both the church and the world as a revolutionary force, and not merely created an epoch in the history of the Church, but has determined the course of its history in the West up to the present day. (quoted in Piper, 24-25)
We owe much of our thinking and theology to Augustine, in particular, “our developed anthropology and soteriology, our understanding of the Bible’s teaching on the relations between human sin and divine grace” (Nick Needham, “Augustine of Hippo: The Relevance of His Life and Thought Today”, 39). We stand downstream in the torrent of his teaching on original sin and the sovereignty of God.
There are a few reasons, however, that understanding his life and thought is difficult for us. First, Augustine lived from AD 354-430, so we are removed almost 1600 years from his culture, language, and experience.
Not only does the time gap present us with challenges, but also the volume of his writings is overwhelming. Few can claim to have read everything written by him, and none can claim to read everything written about him. There are more than five million words in his recorded works (remarkable considering he had no computer, or electricity). There are approximately 3500 word in this message, so it would take 1428.5 messages added together to reach five million words (or, a little less than four and a half years straight of snow retreat with six sessions a week). Benedict Groeschel, a Catholic historian, wrote an introduction to Augustine’s life and said,
I felt like a man beginning to write a guidebook of the Swiss Alps….After forty years I can still meditate on one book of the Confessions…during a week-long retreat and come back feeling frustrated that there is still so much more gold to mind in those few pages. I, for one, know that I shall never in this life escape from the Augustinian Alps. (quoted in Piper, 45).
The other difficulty is that, among those five million words, it is possible to find things that contradict, and some that we would say are clearly unbiblical. For example, I hate Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of numerous Old Testament passages (for example, his approach to the narrative in Genesis). Worse than his hermeneutic, Augustine seems to have attributed special, if not saving power to baptism. We do not agree with him here at all.
But for all that, I am convinced, as much as ever, that we need Augustine for our souls and for our churches, which in turn would change our culture. I’ll explain why I think he’s so helpful and try to make my case as we follow two lines of thought this morning, the chronology of his life and the confessions of his life.
The Chronology of Augustine’s Life
In one respect, Augustine’s life was typical. He was born, lived like a sinner until God saved him at age 32, then he became a pastor, and shepherded the same flock until he died. On the other hand, Augustine lived no homeschool or Christian school life. And as is the case for every Christian, God’s work in his life through people and providence is a cause for praising God’s grace. Let’s take a jet tour of his 75 years and then come back to why he’s so valuable.
354 – Thagaste
Augustine was born November 13, 354, in Thagaste, a small city in northern Africa. His father, Patricius, was a poor, unbelieving farmer, though his mother, Monica, was a devoted Christian in the Catholic church (since that was the only orthodox church). His father didn’t profess faith until one year before he died when Augustine was 16, but Augustine later lamented that his father
did not care what character before You I was developing, or how chaste I was so long as I possessed a cultured tongue–though my culture really meant a desert uncultivated by You, God. (Confessions, II. iii.)
366 – Madera
From 366 to 369, between the ages of 11 and 15, Augustine was sent away for schooling in Madera, about 20 miles from Thagaste. His father wanted his son to have the best education possible; education was the only way out of poverty for a young man like Augustine. He was “acutely anxious to be accepted, to compete successfully, to avoid being shamed, terrified of the humiliation of being beaten at school” (Brown, 35). After those three years, he spent a year at home (370) before leaving for more school.
371 – Carthage
Carthage was the big city. Boys from small towns all over northern Africa came to study, and to play, in Carthage. Augustine came to Carthage as a 17 year-old full of lust.
I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust….My real need was for You, my God, who are the food of the soul. I was not aware of this hunger. (Confessions, quoted in Piper, 47)
Augustine discovered the theatre in Carthage, and wrote “it was a world ‘full of reflections of my own unhappiness, fuel to my raging fire’” (Brown, 39). His only shame was that he wasn’t as bad as his friends.
I went on my way headlong with such blindness that among my peer group I was ashamed not to be equally guilty of shameful behavior when I heard them boasting of their sexual exploits….I went deeper into vice to avoid being despised, and when there was no act by admitting to which I could rival my depraved companions, I used to pretend I had done things I had not done at all, so that my innocence should not lead my companions to scorn my lack of courage, and lest my chastity be taken as a mark of inferiority. (II. iii.)
He took a concubine, who we might call a live-in girlfriend, or more palatably, a mistress, and lived with her for 15 years. It was socially acceptable, but never acceptable to his mother. In five million words he never mentions her name, even though she bore him his only son, Adeodatus.
Augustine was a slave to the praise of men and the love of women. For all his external success and advancement, a dissatisfaction grew within him.
373 – Thagaste/Carthage
He went home to Thagaste for a couple years to teach grammar, then returned to Carthage for nine years (374-383) to teach rhetoric. During this time Augustine became part of a religious cult, the Manichaees. Basically, these followers of Mani were dualists who believed in an eternal battle between the spirit that was good and the flesh that was evil. This temporarily soothed Augustine’s guilty conscience, because Manichaeism claimed sin wasn’t really the person’s fault, it was his body’s fault. Manichaeism was so heretical that Augustine’s mother didn’t even let him back in the house.
Ironically, he grew tired of the apathetic, out of control, rebellious students in Carthage.
383 – Rome
He moved to Rome when he was 29, believing that there were better students there. He was wrong. The students would skip out on the teacher before the final class and their tuition was due.
384 – Milan
Desiring to get away, burnt out by pathetic students and the politics of Rome, he moved to Milan after only one year. Most significantly, he met the bishop, Ambrose. Augustine was enthralled with Ambrose’s teaching style as well as his explanation of parts of the Bible Augustine had misunderstood. Now 30 years old, Augustine realized many of his previous objections to Christianity were wrong.
During his time in Milan, his mother had arranged a marriage for him. In her eyes, this would make Augustine proper. In his eyes, it was a way to advance his career. He sent his concubine back to Africa, though he said, “this was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding. I loved her dearly.” (quoted in Brown, 88). He got for himself another. He was unwilling to let loose of, and unable to escape, his lusts.
That is until 386. We’ll come back to cover his conversion in a couple minutes, but after getting saved, Augustine returned to Thagaste in 388. His mom died in 387, and soon after, his son died.
391 – Hippo (Regius)
He wanted to start an monastery now that he was a Christian. Hippo was a fairly large city, and more importantly, the church already had a bishop, so Augustine figured he would be free from public responsibility. Much like John Calvin, however, he was soon pressed into the role of assistant bishop (396), and five years later he became the primary bishop, and served the church in Hippo for almost 40 years until his death in 430.
For a number of years, he spent his mornings arbitrating legal cases. I can’t imagine how much I would hate that; Augustine hated it too.
Augustine would visit jails to protect prisoners from ill-treatment; he would intervene, tactfully, but firmly, to save criminals from judicial torture and execution; above all, he was expected to keep peace within his ‘family’ by arbitrating in their lawsuits. Augustine would listen for hours while families of farmers argued passionately about every detail of their father’s will. (Brown, 195, 226)
He was heavily involved in writing against the Manichaean heresy, and during the last few years of his life, he debated Pelagius over the issue of man’s depravity and the place of God’s grace. Augustine himself listed over eighty heresies he had fought against (Brown, 35-56).
Possidius, a friend of Augustine, wrote about him as a “man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence in the financial stewardship of his see” (“Augustine,” Wikepedia, accessed January 3, 2009.)
Personally, I tend to think he was a bit of a momma’s boy. I also suspect that after salvation, he fell a little too far toward the “fasting” side and missed out on the “feasting” side of enjoying God’s gifts to His people. Yet I have come to love Augustine as a tenacious pastor and a prolific author, who wielded a worldview always ready to magnify God, and who had remarkably great optimism regarding God’s work in and through the church. He was constantly trying to resolve tensions that were within himself, learning and making progress till his death. He loathed his sin, lauded grace, and loved God’s Word.
In [Augustine] we discover heart and mind married in an intimate union where deep, thoughtful theology, rooted in Scripture and never afraid of condemning error, nonetheless burns and sings with a spiritual vibrancy that makes most modern piety seem pale and sickly by contrast. (Needham, 43)
But the reason I find him so compelling, the reason I think God graciously chose to use him as an instrument to change the world, is because he saw sin for what it really is. He loathed his sin and lauded God’s grace.
The Confessions of Augustine’s Life
Augustine intended for the Confessions to be much more than an autobiography. He wrote this book at the age of 43, and it covers the first 33 years of life up to his conversion.
The entire book is a prayer to God, and contain , as we might suspect, his confessions of sin. Augustine is not the hero, or even the main character of the story. He portrays himself as wicked, and when doing well, the he directed the credit away from himself. In his Retractions (written near the end of his life around AD 426/427 to correct or annotate his previous works),
The thirteen books of my Confessions whether they refer to my evil or good, praise the just and good God, and stimulate the heart and mind of man to approach unto Him.
In a letter to his friend Darious (429),
Accept the books of my Confessions which you have asked for. Behold me therein, that you may not praise me above what I am….If there is anything in me that pleases you, praise with me there Him whom I wish to be praised for me–for that One is not myself. Because it is He that made us and not we ourselves; nay, we have destroyed ourselves, but He that made us has remade us.
The Confessions were, therefore, primarily about God, not Augustine.
[It is the very purpose of this book] to give the impression that Augustine himself was a weak and erring sinner, and that all of the good that came into his life was of God…this whole account of his life history…up to its crisis in his conversion is written…not that we may know Augustine, but that we may know God: and it shows us Augustine only that we may see God. (BB. Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine, vol. 4 in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991) 267).
Augustine’s intimate love for God emerges in little phrases like, “God of my heart,” “God my sweetness,” “[God] my late joy.” (Brown, 167) The Confessions narrate the change in Augustine’s heart (Brown, 169), and exhibit the enormous difference between confessions that focus on God and confessions that focus on self.
On the first page of Confessions, he swiftly and succinctly summarizes man’s greatest joy, and the reason why men so often fail to experience that joy.
You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You. (I. i.)
Men are made by God to worship Him, not out of duty, but for their delight. Our Creator formed us in this . The Confessions contains Augustine’s personal testimony of his restless heart’s journey to God. It is the story of empty, yet enslaving sinful pleasures that kept him from the greatest pleasure, God. It recounts the increasing misery and unhappiness of his soul with “ferocious honesty” (Brown, 171).
As he grew from infancy into boyhood, he noted
I myself was meanwhile dying by my alienation from You, and my miserable condition in that respect brought no tear to my eyes. (I. xii.)
He had heard the truth, but he was indifferent and ignorant, a slave to “seductive delights” (I. xv.). He also understood that it was part of God’s judgment to let men remain in blindness, “By Your inexhaustible law You assign penal blindness to illicit desires” (I. xviii.), yet those the Lord loves, He disciplines. “There can be no surprise that an unhappy sheep wandering from Your flock and impatient of Your protection was infected by a disgusting sore” (III. iii.).
But he still could not escape his lust. “The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved” (II. ii.).
I was in love with love, and hated safety and a path free of snares….I was without any desire for incorruptible nourishment not because I was replete with it, but the emptier I was, the more unappetizing such food became. So my soul was in rotten health. (III. i.)
Sin makes a person stupid. Even though the further one moves away from God, the more miserable he becomes, he also becomes less interested in returning to God. God gave Augustine what he (thought he) wanted in order to make him more miserable.
I aspired to honors, money, marriage, and You laughed at me. I those ambitions I suffered the bitterest difficulties; that was by Your mercy–so much the greater in that You gave me the less occasion to find sweet pleasure in what was not You. (VI. vi.)
I was full of my punishment, but I shed no tears of penitence. (VII. xx.)
God was systematically showing him what sin really looks like.
You took me up from behind my own back where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself, and You set me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping myself. If I and You once again placed me in front of myself; You thrust me before my own eyes so that I should discover my iniquity and hate it. I had known it, but deceived myself, refused to admit it, and pushed it out of my mind. (VIII. vii.)
He was a slave to his sin, until God saved him. In Milan, at the end of August, 386, he and a small group of friends hosted a Christian man, Ponticanus, who told Augustine and his friend Alypius about the monks in Egypt and of their founder, Saint Anthony. While Augustine listened, his heart burned with guilt and he withdrew into a garden beside the house.
I threw myself down somehow under a certain fig tree, and let my tears flow freely. Rivers streamed from my eyes, a sacrifice acceptable to You, ad (though not in these words, yet in this sense) I repeatedly said to You: ‘How long, O Lord? How long, Lord, will You be angry to the uttermost? Do not be mindful of our old iniquities.’ For I felt my past to have a grip on me. It uttered wretched cries: ‘How long, how long is it to be?’ ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow.’ ‘Why not now? Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?’
As I was saying this and weeping in the bitter agony of my heart, suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again, (Tolle lege, tolle lege) ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’ At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children’s game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find….So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’ (Romans 13:13-14).
I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. (VIII. xii.)
God can even use the “bulls’-eye” approach to Scripture reading. The journey of his restless heart finished as God granted him repentance and faith. So he would say,
You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, You put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after You. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for You. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is Yours. (X. xxvi.)
Conclusion
Augustine had a powerful and profound impact because he accurately identified the real problem, in his own heart and in the church. The problem was not low self-esteem or bad parents; the problem was sin. He also accurately understood the solution to the problem was not more of the world, but more of God. He saw sin, not only as an offense before God, but as an obstacle between he and God. Sin lied to him, telling him that it was good. God helped Augustine see sin for what it is, and that God Himself was his best good.
We need Augustine’s insight on the misery of sin so that we too can see it for what it really is: a hindrance not only to holiness, a hindrance not only to heaven, but a hindrance to happiness in God. Augustine hated sin because it spoiled his delight in God. That is the kind of person God uses to change the world.
A few years before his death, on September 26, 426, a large congregation gathered as Augustine was to install his successor, Eraclius. After the decision had been officially recorded, Eraclius stood forward to preach, while the old Augustine sat behind him on his raised throne. “The cricket chirps,” Eraclius said, “the swan is silent” (Brown, 408). Just the opposite has been true for 1600 years. We should thank God for His loud voice through Augustine.
We know now, after 1600 years, that Augustine’s conversion was monumental in Church history. I can’t think of anything he would celebrate more, than if someone here repented, by God’s grace, from their sin like he did. We may not affect the church for two more millennia, but angels will rejoice in heaven as eagerly as when God called Augustine’s restless heart back to Himself.
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