St. Augustine (28 August) ~ The Patron Saint of Theologians

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So to understand a little more about Augustine, we go to the year 354 in the North African town of Tagast, and he was born to a pagan father and a Christian mother. By accounts, he had one brother and one sister. He was predisposed for intellectual activity. He was very good at it, and given a very good education at which he excelled. However, his mother, St. Monica, was very grieved at his pagan behavior. His father was a very bad example, and he fell into all kinds of youthful excesses and sins, St. Augustine did. So although his mother, St. Monica, attempted to raise him Catholic, he did fall away from the faith as a young man, and ended up embracing the heresy of Manichaeism for a time. By this time, he had also begun to study rhetoric, and was very good at it. He was an excellent rhetorician, and began to have students, and he taught grammar and rhetoric himself. He began to read the pagan works of Cicero and so on, and that did inspire him with a love of seeking the truth. He was, at least in that regards, he thought, okay, there is some truth out there, and I want to find out what it is. So St. Augustine, no different. So he's searching for the truth, and that leads him to, eventually it leads him away from Manichaeism. He sees that it's just a self-contradictory, every heresy is self-contradictory, which is not true. Because the foundational ideas in Plato gave me what I needed to understand the truths of the Catholic faith, the philosophy, the theology of Catholicism. And I would say here, making kind of a side note, this is the problem in the Church today. It's that people talk about we have to evangelize, we have to bring the good news to the world and to people. We talk about the new evangelization, which is just trying to understand why Catholics are leaving the faith. The new evangelization is kind of a nice way of saying, why can't we even retain the Catholics we have? We have to evangelize other Catholics. Why is that? Because the Catholic faith, the truths of theology, even the philosophical advancements of St. Thomas Aquinas and later theologians, is founded on a certain natural philosophy. There are natural law truths to all of this that are always true no matter what. This is why it's called the natural law. If you depart from that, your foundation is wrong. It's flawed. Now that's the wisdom that comes from St. Augustine's understanding and knowledge of free will, the problem of evil, and God's grace. All of which he was foundational. I mentioned he was a foundational figure and that's why. Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof. And if I could just make a note that this passage he read from Romans chapter 13, chapter divisions didn't exist until the 11th or 12th century, so that's a retroactive thing. It was all one thing. He just happened to read that passage. So, little side note there. So Augustine was finally baptized on Easter Vigil in the year 387. He was 33 years old, and it was, of course, by Ambrose, was the one who baptized him, prepared him, brought him into the church. So he would eventually die in the year 430. He was close to, I guess it would be 70, 70-some years old. He writes that, the Confessions. But he also discusses in there the nature of God, the nature of evil, the idea of time, memory, these highly abstract philosophical ideas that he brings down. He gives some concrete reality to it. So that book, City of God, that's foundational for Catholic social doctrine. And that's really foundational for social doctrine in general. Government, governance, what's supposed to happen, the right way to do things, right there. So God reveals himself through scriptures, but there's difficulty in understanding it. How are we supposed to do that? And St. Augustine writes a whole book on Christian doctrine about that. And I would like to end with some quotes by St. Augustine that I think we're familiar with. We may not have known where they've come from, but here they are. They come from Augustine. So maybe we've heard it before. Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. We've heard that attributed to many, many people over the years. St. Augustine. I don't even know if he was the first, but certainly he would have made it popular. If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you don't like, it's not the gospel in which you believe, but yourself. Take that, Protestants. Take that, lukewarm Catholics. And any other pleasure on this earth, any other goal, any other thing we desire is intermediary. We really desire God, and we only desire those other things insofar as there's a mistake there. The soul desires God most of all. Beautiful words from St. Augustine. And so let us follow his example. Let us not be late in loving God, but prompt. All sin, any sin, is a result of not loving God sufficiently enough. This is what St. Augustine realized. Let us ask every day in our prayers for the love of God, that deep, ardent, burning love of God, of all of his gifts, that is the greatest, to be placed within us. We are all children of the Blessed Virgin, and she has wept over us. So let us believe, like St. Augustine, that we, we are the child of so many tears, tears of our Blessed Mother. Let us believe we will not be lost if we realize God is the ultimate end of all my desires. He is the only one who can satisfy me. So let's thank God for giving us St. Augustine, giving us his example of brilliance and theology, but also for having shown us his past, and realize that whatever may have happened in my past, there's a future for me as well. God bless you all. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.