Saint Augustine, traits of a contemporary figure

From time to time, one revisits the life and legacy of a historical figure, attempting to discern how their traits and achievements might be brought into our own age. The question, however, lies in whether this effort is merely a way of rendering their memory more approachable, or whether, on the contrary, we encounter what Erasmus of Rotterdam once said of Thomas More: vir omnium horarum—“a man for all seasons.” Erasmus’s phrase, translated into English as such, later served as the title of Robert Bolt’s celebrated play, which the playwright himself helped adapt for the screen under Fred Zinnemann’s direction. In this case, More, by responding fully to the challenges of his own time, has ultimately transcended it.

If we turn to Saint Augustine, we encounter a similar vir omnium horarum. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the parallels between his life and ours are striking. On the one hand, both epochs reveal profound religious transformation: the fourth and fifth centuries witnessed the definitive transition from paganism to Christianity in ancient European societies. Today, the trajectory seems reversed. Yet in both then and now, Christianity has been held accountable for contemporary ills. In Augustine’s time, those loyal to Rome’s ancestral religion claimed that the Empire’s decline and the barbarian invasions were divine retribution for abandoning the ancient cults in favor of the apostles’ faith. Today, though the argument has shifted, it continues to cast Christianity as a source of backwardness, ignorance, and fanaticism—whether in debates on the defense of life, sexual morality, stem-cell research, or the struggle against poverty.

Augustine, like several figures of antiquity—particularly Christian ones—is not remembered by the city of his birth but rather by another place decisive for his life’s course: Semónides of Amorgos, Apollonius of Rhodes, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyon, Paulinus of Nola, Nicholas of Bari… or Jesus of Nazareth. This is hardly foreign to us in an age of mobility, when the environment in which one grows often matters more than the town that first cradled one’s infancy. Between the extremes of cosmopolitanism and globalism, on the one hand, and the yearning for rootedness or the threats of nationalism and xenophobia, on the other, Augustine’s biography—as well as that of many of his contemporaries—can prove instructive. For in Augustine’s life we perceive the personal quest to discern his true roots. He was African and Roman, Christian yet also heir to a pagan tradition he reconsidered time and again.

The debate Augustine waged between the “old man” and the “new man” manifests itself on many levels. His contemporaries—Paulinus of Nola (like Augustine, acclaimed by the community into ecclesial ministry), Jerome (entrusted by Pope Damasus with a revised and rigorous edition of the Latin Bible), or Ausonius—also wrestled with the degree to which becoming Christian should mean forgetting or integrating the cultural inheritance of a world forged under different religious conceptions. It is no accident that Christianity began to be set down in writing, even in the apostolic age, in Greek: Paul and Luke not only committed their thoughts in Greek ink upon Greek papyri but also embodied a high degree of Hellenization. One might ask, as Eusebius of Caesarea did in those days, whether the Hellenization of the ancient world under Roman emperors was precisely what enabled the Gospel to take root and flourish in communities distant from the Temple, destroyed a mere generation after Golgotha. In this respect, Augustine and his peers enlighten us not only through their answers but through their way of posing the questions.

For one inquiry invariably opens onto another. When reading the Confessions, do we not see the connection between the dread with which Augustine recalls his schooling—like Jerome, echoing the Spaniard Quintilian in insisting that education must be motivation rather than punishment—and, conversely, his love of culture? Just as his monastic rule was not conceived as idle contemplation but as both outward and inward labor. “Take up and read!” Without venturing outward, there is no return inward. Without personal experience, the classics cannot be assimilated; without grappling with the sinful man one is, there is no reconciliation with the forgiving God. The same Augustine who endured the lashes of his teachers became the one who most insisted upon the centrality of study and formation.

And yet, perhaps the most impactful feature of Augustine’s legacy is the weight he accorded to personal experience. Confessions are not a blog, nor an Instagram account, nor a social media profile. In this age of the selfie and of frequent exhibitionism, the tone and purpose of the Confessions, of his letters, and of much of his work provide a counterpoint to the wayward and narcissistic style into which our culture sometimes lapses. For the man of Thagaste probes the very meaning of existence—neither stripping away emotion and depth of feeling, nor erecting them as an exclusive foundation. He interrogates the sense of sin, of original sin; and it is his personal journey that leads to the concept of mercy. Without that path, God’s irruption into each life would remain unintelligible. What is “objective” thus requires the subjective bond. Only through personal identity can one arrive at the encounter with that God who is triply personal—in a way beyond comprehension, as Augustine himself admitted. In an age of Artificial Intelligence, Augustine’s anthropological vision may indeed help us discern what we must never delegate to machines.

It is from here that his reflection on the City of God and the City of Man gains clarity, particularly his orientation of this life toward peace and justice founded on charity. “God, as teacher, has given man two fundamental precepts: love of God and love of neighbor. In them, man has discovered three objects of love: God, himself, and his neighbor. Whoever loves God does not err in self-love,” we read in the translation of The City of God (Book XIX, chapter XIV) by Santos Santamarta del Río, OSA, and Miguel Fuertes Lanero, OSA.

In both his life and his vast preaching, Augustine speaks of attention to the poor, and of how God never willed that “man should dominate man,” for in his view slavery is the fruit of sin, the worst form of bondage. It is no coincidence, then, that the first Augustinian pope should have chosen the name Leo, the pontiff of social justice. For if Augustine’s centuries were those of Constantine and Theodosius, of the division of the Empire into East and West, and of the sack of Rome—first by Alaric, and then three more times between the fifth and sixth centuries—ours are those of communism and capitalism, of Xi Jinping’s China, of Trump, Putin, Elon Musk, and the outsourcing imposed by digital giants. Is it providential that Pope Leo should be a mathematician, an Augustinian, an American, and, at once, a citizen of the “Global South”?

And indeed, though Augustine speaks of this world as an “alien life” in expectation of the definitive heavenly City, he never distances himself from the realities and responsibilities of this life. Taking that Kingdom as a model, he sought to engage with the ambiguities of this “passing” world, despite the “limitations of human understanding.” For only through passage within this world may we reach the other, by means of “a harmonious order between thought and action.” Again we read in The City of God: “During its exile in this world, this heavenly city summons citizens of every nation and tongue, forming with them a society in exile, unconcerned with the diversity of customs, laws, or institutions by which earthly peace is pursued or preserved. None of these it abolishes or destroys; rather, it preserves and fosters all that, diverse in different lands, serves the single, common goal of earthly peace” (Book XIX, chapter XVII).