THE HOLIDAYS are over. It is time to return to work, to begin again, even for those who have not been away. We start afresh. But how fresh are we? What ideals will inspire us? Better than abstract ideals, who will inspire us? Who are our heroes? Today is the feast of Augustine of Hippo, one of the great Latin Fathers of the Church who died in 430. A 5th-century North African bishop, he may seem to be an unlikely model for us. We must avoid facile comparisons; we need to look for the deeper lessons.
Let me offer three examples.
First, when he was 16, Augustine formed a relationship with a woman. In his Confessions he speaks of her, but does not tell us her name. They never married, but lived together, as though married, completely faithful to each other, for 15 years. They had a son, Adeodatus, who grew to young manhood, full of promise, but died before he was 20. After 15 years, however, Augustine was persuaded to send the woman away. He was yielding to pressure from his mother and he was himself ambitious: in that society, if he was to advance as a teacher, he needed to make an advantageous marriage, not be bound to a woman from a lower social class. To us it seems heartless. But the very starkness of the example can also remind us that we need to be able to see situations not only through our eyes but also with the eyes of others.
Then, to further his career, Augustine went to Milan. There he met the bishop, Ambrose. He was impressed. It was a critical moment in his conversion to Christianity. What impressed him? Was it the force of Ambrose’s arguments, the strength of the case he presented, which moved him? Not at all. “I began to like him,” Augustine wrote later, “at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth, for I had absolutely no confidence in your Church, but as a human being who was kind to me.”
Augustine was touched by the kindness he was shown. Do we underestimate the worth of human qualities such as courtesy, thoughtfulness, consideration, understanding, and kindness?
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Thirdly, what we admire most obviously about Augustine is, of course, his learning. There is nothing arid in what he has to say. Here is one of the towering intellects of Western civilization. In him we find a passionate combination of mind and heart.
His output, particularly from the time of his ordination as bishop in 395, is formidable. And the lesson? What he wrote was not composed in privileged serenity. His great works were forged in the furnace of controversy. Most notably for us he had to combat the ideas of a British monk, Pelagius, who argued that there is a good we can do independently of God.
But there was not only controversy. There was also political upheaval. Rome was the centre of Augustine’s world, but Rome was under threat. He lived with insecurity through the early years of his episcopate. Then in 410 Rome fell. Nightmare became reality. People fled from Rome. They came as refugees to North Africa. There was a tide of asylum seekers. One was Pelagius, although he and Augustine never met. When Augustine lay on his deathbed 20 years later, Hippo itself was being besieged by Vandals. His legacy to us, therefore, is not the fruit of tranquillity, but fashioned under pressure, in spite of pressure.
Here then are three lessons I might learn from Augustine, as I return to work: not to be limited by my own viewpoint; to value ordinary human qualities; and not to use the plea of stress to excuse my failure to deliver.
To learn these lessons, however, I must not rely upon my own efforts. I must search for God. “Our heart is restless,” Augustine declared, “until it rests in you.” I do not need to look far. “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there . . . You were with me, and I was not with you.” There is the key: “You were with me.” The presence is within.
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Monsignor Roderick Strange is the Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome.