Their story
Augustine was born on November 13, 354, in Thagaste, in present-day Algeria. His father Patricius was pagan and his mother Monica Christian. A brilliant student, he studied in Carthage, where he took a concubine and fathered a son, Adeodatus. Reading Cicero awoke a hunger for wisdom; for about nine years he followed the Manichaeans (followers of Mani, who taught that the world is a battle between equal powers of good and evil), who claimed reason alone explained good and evil.
He became a professor of rhetoric in Milan. Bishop Ambrose's sermons showed him how to read Scripture. In August 386, in a garden, torn between faith and his old life, he heard a child's voice chanting, “Take up and read.” He opened Paul's letter to the Romans at chapter 13: “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh.” He was baptized by Ambrose at Easter 387, with Adeodatus.
Back in Africa he was ordained, against his will, in Hippo in 391, and became its bishop in 395 or 396. He wrote the Confessions, The City of God, On the Trinity and hundreds of sermons and letters, shaping Western theology for centuries. He died on August 28, 430, as the Vandals (a Germanic people who conquered Roman North Africa) besieged Hippo. People follow him because he was honest about his own resistance: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new.”
