Hallows Day

All the saints

St Augustineof Hippo

A brilliant, restless young man who found what his heart was looking for.

As a teenager, Augustine once stole pears with his friends—not because he was hungry, but because breaking the rules seemed fun! He spent years making bad choices while his mother prayed for him. Then one day, a mysterious child’s voice prompted him to read the Bible, and his life began to change. He eventually became one of the Church’s greatest thinkers, proving that it’s never too late to turn your life around!

Lived
354 to 430
Feast day
28 August
Patron saint of
theologians, printers and brewers
Where
Thagaste and Hippo in North Africa (today’s Algeria), and Italy

In pictures, look for a bishop’s mitre, a book and pen, a heart on fire, and sometimes a child with a shell on a beach

Please don’t let me be punished

As a boy, Augustine much preferred playing games to studying. He found Greek horribly hard. In those days teachers beat pupils who didn’t learn their lessons, and little Augustine prayed to God with all his heart not to be beaten at school.

It didn’t work. Even his parents laughed about his punishments, but Augustine never forgot that he had learned to pray as a child.

Source: St Augustine, Confessions, Book 1 (tr. J. G. Pilkington), chapters 9, 13 and 14

The pear tree

When he was sixteen, Augustine and a gang of friends crept out late at night and carried off great loads of pears from a tree near his family’s vineyard. They weren’t hungry. The pears weren’t even nice. They ate a few and threw the rest to the pigs.

Years later, Augustine still wondered why he had done it. His answer: he did it because it was wrong, and because he wanted his friends to think he was daring. On his own, he says, he would never have done it.

Source: St Augustine, Confessions, Book 2, chapters 4 and 8 to 9

Take up and read

By 31, Augustine was a famous teacher in Milan. He had begun to believe that the Christian faith was true, but he couldn’t bring himself to change his life. One day in a garden, he threw himself down under a fig tree and cried.

Then he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house, chanting over and over: “Take up and read; take up and read.” He picked up the letters of St Paul, opened them and read: “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”. In that moment, he wrote, “all the gloom of doubt vanished away”.

Source: St Augustine, Confessions, Book 8, chapter 12

Grabbed for the job

Back home in Africa, Augustine wanted a quiet life of prayer and study with his friends. He kept away from towns that needed a bishop, in case they picked him.

But one day in the town of Hippo, while he was in church, the people took hold of him and brought him to the bishop to be made a priest. Augustine was in tears. A few years later he became bishop of Hippo, and he stayed for the rest of his life.

Source: St Possidius, Life of St Augustine (tr. H. T. Weiskotten, 1919), chapters 3, 4 and 8

No gossip at this table

Augustine had a rhyme written on his dining table: “Who injures the name of an absent friend / May not at this table as guest attend.” In other words: if you say unkind things about people who aren’t here, you’re not welcome.

Once, some bishops who were close friends of his started gossiping anyway. Augustine told them that either those words would have to be rubbed off the table, or he would get up and leave.

Source: St Possidius, Life of St Augustine (tr. H. T. Weiskotten, 1919), chapter 22

The child on the beach

Legend A very old story that may not have happened exactly like this.

An old story says that Augustine was walking by the sea, trying to understand how God can be three persons in one. He met a child scooping seawater into a little hole in the sand with a shell.

Augustine told the child that the whole sea would never fit in there. The child answered that it would be easier than fitting the mystery of God into Augustine’s mind. Then the child vanished. That’s why artists sometimes paint Augustine with a child and a shell.

Source: National Catholic Register, “Why is the seashell the symbol for St Augustine?”

When it was hard

Augustine knew God was calling him, but he kept putting it off. He once prayed to be made pure and good, “but not yet”. He was proud of his own cleverness, and he liked getting his own way.

In the end he cried out to God: “How long, how long? Tomorrow, and tomorrow? Why not now?” Saints aren’t people who never put things off. They are people who finally say yes.

Source: St Augustine, Confessions, Book 8, chapters 7 and 12

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

St Augustine, Confessions (source)

Try this

  • Augustine’s Confessions is an honest talk with God. Tonight, before bed, tell God the truth about your day: what went well, what you got wrong, and what you’re thankful for.
  • At your next family meal, try Augustine’s table rule: nobody says anything unkind about someone who isn’t there.

A prayer

St Augustine, you searched everywhere for happiness and found it in God. When our hearts are restless, help us to turn to him. Pray for us.

For grown-ups: more about St Augustine of Hippo

Augustine (354 to 430) was born in Thagaste in Roman North Africa to a pagan father, Patricius, and a Christian mother, Monica. He studied in Carthage, spent nine years among the Manichees, and lived with a woman for about fifteen years; their son Adeodatus (“given by God”) was baptised with him by St Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387.

He was ordained priest in Hippo in 391 and became its bishop around 395, and he died in August 430 while the Vandals besieged the city. A Doctor of the Church, he wrote Confessions, The City of God and On the Trinity, which shaped Western Christianity. The story of the child on the beach is a medieval legend; it appears nowhere in Augustine’s own writings.

Where these stories come from

  1. St Augustine, Confessions, Book 1 (tr. J. G. Pilkington)
  2. St Augustine, Confessions, Book 2
  3. St Augustine, Confessions, Book 8
  4. St Possidius, Life of St Augustine (tr. H. T. Weiskotten, 1919)
  5. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 30
  6. Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience on St Augustine, 9 January 2008
  7. National Catholic Register, “Why is the seashell the symbol for St Augustine?”