Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
“…you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.” (Confessions, ca. 397)
Augustine of Hippo writing.
Ten years after his conversion to Christianity, Augustine takes up his pen to tell how God brought him to Himself. Heart bursting with the reality of God, he addresses his manuscript directly to Him as one long prayer and meditation—a prayer and meditation that will take him five years to complete. He dips his quill and begins. “Great are you, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is your power, and your wisdom is infinite.”
In contrast to God, he muses, what is man? Yet there is a connection between the two beings. Humans, such a small part of creation and short-lived as they are, still find a need to praise God. In spite of sins, each feels the longing to reach out to his Creator. Why is this? he asks. He realizes it is of God. “You stimulate him to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”
If any single line can summarize Augustine’s life or serve as its theme, it is this: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find peace in you.” Ahead of him lie years of wrestling with the deepest issues of theology. Behind him lie a succession of desperate searches for fulfillment: excessive pleasures, false religions, philosophy, dissipation and distractions—futilities that left him so weary of himself he could only cry out “How long, O Lord, How Long?” At the moment that he uttered that cry, circumstances led his eyes to a passage in Romans that showed him he could be freed from sin. Shortly afterward, he was baptized.
Now, a decade after his baptism, after long musing upon the transformation that took place in him when he finally believed, here he is, beginning his unique autobiographical and philosophical prayer to God, a book which will become one of the most original and famous works in all of literature, the first psychological “autobiography” —the Confessions. It will be his testimony of God’s interaction with a soul that has found rest in its Creator.
—Dan Graves
Dig a Little Deeper
- Aland, Kurt. Saints and Sinners; Men and Ideas in the Early Church. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970.
- Augustine. Confessions, translated by Rex Warner. New York: Mentor, 1963.
- ————. The City of God, edited with an introduction by Vernon J. Bourke. Garden City, New York: Image, 1958.
- “Augustine, St.” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie. New York: Scribner’s, 1970.
- Bowie, Walter Russell. Men of Fire. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961.
- Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. London: Burn, Oates & Washbourn, 1951.
- D’Souza, Dinesh. The Catholic Classics. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1986.
- Dunham, James H. The Religion of Philosophers. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969, 1947.
- Portalie, Eugene. “Works of St. Augustine of Hippo.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton, 1914.
- ————–. “Augustine, Life of Saint.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton, 1914.
- Russell, Bertrand. Wisdom of the West. New York: Fawcett, 1964.
