Augustine of Hippo
354 to 430
Augustine was a bishop in Roman North Africa and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of the church. As a young man he was a brilliant teacher of rhetoric who chased success and pleasure and ran from God for years, while his mother Monica prayed for him without ceasing. Under the preaching of Ambrose in Milan he finally came home to Christ. His Confessions, written as one long prayer, still reads as though he were sitting beside you.
Augustine has been read for sixteen centuries for one reason above his learning or his office: he is honest. The Confessions are written as a long prayer, and in them he tells God the truth about himself, the wasted years, the divided will, the famous admission that our heart is restless until it rests in God. Anyone who has ever wanted two opposite things at once will recognise the man on the page.
He also offers the impatient a strange sort of patience. He ran from God for years while his mother prayed, and he is the first to say that the running was real and that the coming home was God’s doing and not his own cleverness. If you find yourself somewhere in the middle of that same story, he is good and unhurried company.
Quotes with a reflection
Selected sayings
A few more lines from Augustine of Hippo, gathered as encouragement, each with a note on where it comes from or what it means.
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“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you.”
From the Confessions, his ache at how long it took him to come home to God.
Augustine of Hippo
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“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
Augustine on what faith is, and where it finally leads.
Augustine of Hippo