Religion: The Second Founder of the Faith

The clever young North African was a teacher of rhetoric who, in his 32 years, had explored such fashionable beliefs as Manicheism and skepticism. Lately, living in Milan, he had been drawn intellectually toward Christianity through the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, but resisted full commitment, partly because of personal circumstances. He had fathered a son out of wedlock by one mistress and had recently begun living with another while he was waiting for the woman with whom he had arranged a social-climbing betrothal to reach marriageable age.

Though Aurelius Augustinus had won a bit of renown, he would surely be unknown to history were it not for the celebrated September day in A.D. 386 when he seemed to hear a child's singsong voice chanting "Tolle lege, tolle lege" (Take up and read, take up and read). Snatching the Bible, which he had once disdained, he read the first words his eyes fell upon: St. Paul's admonition in Romans 13 to abandon wanton living and "put on the Lord Jesus Christ." Instantly, he later wrote, "a light of certainty pierced my heart and all the shadow of doubt vanished." From that moment on, he was a zealous Christian.

That sudden conversion was fateful not only for St. Augustine, who forsook his ambitions and his women to undertake an early form of monastic life, but for the subsequent development of the West. Pope John Paul II, in an anniversary pronouncement, terms Augustine the "common father of our Christian civilization." Only a handful of thinkers have had equivalent influence over such a span of years. Yale Historian Jaroslav Pelikan observes in The Mystery of Continuity (University Press of Virginia, $14.95), a new work on the saint, that in each of the 16 centuries since his conversion, Augustine has been a "major intellectual, spiritual and cultural force." Even scholars who find the influence more bane than blessing grant the point.

In this 1,600th anniversary year, few tourists in Milan notice the halfconcealed cathedral doorway leading to the remains of the baptistry where a naked Augustine was immersed by St. Ambrose. In Annaba, Algeria, near the site of ancient Hippo, where Augustine served as priest and bishop, the occasion is being largely ignored. But in other places around the world, numerous conferences on Augustine's thought are marking the anniversary, including last week's assemblage of 500 scholars from 19 nations at the Rome headquarters of the Augustinian order. One notable in attendance, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal overseer, says that through Augustine "I learned to believe, to know faith and to love the church."

Augustine was an "absolute thinking machine," says Father John Quinn of Pennsylvania's Villanova University. During his 35 years as bishop, he not only supervised a turbulent diocese but spent long hours judging disputes, preached daily (500 sermons survive) and managed to write 100 treatises and hundreds of letters on doctrine. Five million of his words are indexed in computers at West Germany's Wurzburg University.