Create in us a
new heart …
St.
Augustine of Hippo, North Africa (13 November 354 – 28 August 430) is, by the
We know
more of his life than of other ancient Christian theologians, thanks to his
autobiography, Confessions. This moving book, which has changed the
direction of many people’s lives, tells us that young Augustine was a
rapscallion. He freely admits it.
Augustine writes (Confessions, translated by F. J.
Sheed, Kindle Edition):
Your law, O Lord, punishes theft;
and this law is so written in the hearts of men. … Yet I chose to steal, and
not because want drove me to it – unless a want of justice and contempt for it
an excess of iniquity. For I stole things which I already had in plenty and of
better quality. Nor had I any desire to enjoy the things I stole, but only the
stealing of them and the sin. There was a pear tree near our vineyard, heavy
with fruit, but fruit that was not particularly tempting either to look at or
to taste. A group of young blackguards, and I among them, went out to knock
down the pears and carry them off late one night, for it was our bad habit to
carry on our games in the streets till very late. We carried off an immense
load of pears, not to eat-for we barely tasted them before throwing them to the
hogs. Our only pleasure in doing it was that it was forbidden. Such was
my heart, O God, such was my heart…” Page 28
This is the most famous example of
Augustine’s pranks, as he grew up in North Africa, in a town not far from the
large city of Carthage. His mother, Monnica, was a Christian, but his father,
who spent heavily to have Augustine trained in Carthage, was not. Augustine was
brilliant in Latin rhetoric, and he was soon teaching it himself, in his late
teens. He became enamored of Manicheanism, but dismissed it when he met a high
ranking priest, and discovered his understanding was superficial. Throughout
Augustine’s teens and twenties, he resisted his mother’s entreaties to become
Christian. Monnica even travelled to Rome to be with her son as he took up
teaching boys in the capital.
Augustine became a disciple of Bishop
St. Ambrose, who was a governor for the civil bureaucracy in Milan as well as
becoming a Christian leader. Augustine studied Platonic philosophy, in its
later form, and became strongly influenced by it, just as most Christian
theologians before him. But the illumination of the faith escaped him until he
was 31 years of age.
At this point in his life, he was
at a tipping point, being drawn to his mother’s faith, but, as he writes:
And You stood in the secret places
of my soul, O Lord, in the harshness of Your mercy redoubling the scourges of
fear and shame lest I should give way again and that small slight tie which
remained should not be broken but should grow again to full strength and bind
me closer than before. For I kept saying within myself, “Let it be now, let it
be now,” and by the mere words I had begun to move towards the resolution, I almost
made it, yet I did not quite make it….Those trifles of all trifles, and
vanities of vanities, my one-time mistresses, held me back, plucking at my
garment of flesh and murmuring softly: ‘Are you sending us away?’ Page 156.
Finally, in early middle age, in a garden in Milan, he heard
what seemed like the sing-song voice of a boy saying “Take and read, take and
read.” Augustine opened the Bible at random and his eyes fell on a passage from
Paul’s letter to the Romans “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering
and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ
and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences. (Romans 13:13 –
14). Augustine describes his change of heart “I had no wish to read further,
and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it
was as though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the
darkness of uncertainty vanished away.”
Augustine
was baptized shortly thereafter, to his mother’s great joy. Augustine became a
bishop in North Africa and the leading theologian of the church. His Confessions
became known as one long prayer to God. He summarizes the conversion of his
heart with this:
Who shall grant me to rest in Thee?
By whose gift shalt Thou enter into my heart and fill it so compellingly
that I shall turn no more to my sins but embrace Thee, my only good?
What art Thou to me? Have mercy, that I may tell. What rather am I to Thee,
that Thou shouldst demand my love and if I do not love Thee be angry and
threaten such great woes? Surely not to love Thee is already a great woe. For
Thy mercies’ sake, O Lord my God, tell me what Thou art to me. Say unto my
soul, I am Thy salvation. So speak that I may hear, Lord, my heart is
listening; open it that it may hear Thee say to my soul I am Thy salvation.
Hearing that word, let me come in haste to lay hold upon Thee. Hide not Thy
face from me. Let me see Thy face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see
it. The house of my soul is too small to receive Thee: let it be enlarged by
Thee.
Let this be the evidence you need that the experience of the
Lord, running deep and running large, will not fade from a heart so enlarged,
and that the experience is so life changing that many things, once seemingly
heavy, now appear light.
-- Bruce Marold
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