SAINT AUGUSTINE, b. 354; d. 430.
Saint Augustine's works include (autobiographical) “Confessions,” cir. 397, "Retractations," 427-8, to which may be added "Letters"; (philosophical) "Contra Academicos," 386; "De Vita Beata," 386; "Soliloquia," 387; "De Musica," 387-9; "De Magistro," 389; "De anima et ejus origine," 419; and others, including his works on Grammar, Geometry, Rhetoric, etc.; (critical and polemical) "De Doctrina Christiana,' 397; "De Civitate Dei," 413-426; "Enchiridion," or "De Fide," 421; "De Vera Religione," 390, etc. (among these the Anti-Pelagian contain what is known as the Augustinian System of Theology); (exegetical, etc.), "De Genesi ad literam," 401-15; "Enarrationes in Psalmos," Homilies, and a Harmony of the Gospels. Three hundred and ninety-six Sermons and various treatises on moral virtues are still to be added. Works, edited by Pilkington and others, "Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,” vols. i.-viii., 1887-92. Dr. Pusey's translation of the "Confessions," based upon an earlier English version, first appeared in 1838 as a volume in his "Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church."
Confessions of the greatness and unsearchableness of God, of
God's mercies in infancy and boyhood, and human wilful-
ness; of his own sins of idleness, abuse of his studies, and
of God's gifts up to his fifteenth year
Object of these Confessions. Further ills of idleness developed
in his sixteenth year. Evils of ill society, which betrayed
him into theft
His residence at Carthage from his seventeenth to his nineteenth
year. Source of his disorders.
Love of shows. Advance
Distaste for Scripture.
Refutation of some of their
in studies, and love of wisdom.
Led astray to the Manichæans.
tenets. Grief of his mother Monnica at his heresy, and
prayers for his conversion. Her vision from God, and
answer through a Bishop
Ang.'s life from nineteen to eight and twenty; himself a
Manichæan, and seducing others to the same heresy;
partial obedience amidst vanity and sin; consulting astro-
logers, only partially shaken herein; loss of an early
friend, who is converted by being baptized when in a
swoon; reflections on grief, on real and unreal friendship,
and love of fame; writes on "the fair and fit," yet cannot
rightly, though God had given him great talents, since he
entertained wrong notions of God; and so
even his
knowledge he applied ill
S. Aug.'s twenty-ninth year. Faustus, a snare of Satan to
many, made an instrument of deliverance to S. Aug., by
shewing the ignorance of the Manichees on those things,
wherein they professed to have divine knowledge. Aug.
gives up all thought of going further among the Manichees:
is guided to Rome and Milan, where he hears S. Ambrose,
leaves the Manichees, and becomes again a Catechumen in
the Church Catholic.
Arrival of Monnica at Milan; her obedience to S. Ambrose,
and his value for her; S. Ambrose's habits; Aug.'s gradual
abandonment of error; finds that he has blamed the Church
Catholic wrongly; desire of absolute certainty, but struck
with the contrary analogy of God's natural Providence; how
shaken in his worldly pursuits; God's guidance of his friend
Alypius; Aug. debates with himself and his friends about
their mode of life; his inveterate sins, and dread of
judgment
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Aug.'s thirty-first year; gradually extricated from his errors,
but still with material conceptions of God; much aided by
an argument of Nebridius; sees that the cause of sin lies in
free-will, rejects the Manichæan heresy, but cannot altogether
embrace the doctrine of the Church; recovered from the
belief in Astrology, but miserably perplexed about the
origin of evil; is led to find in the Platonists the seeds of
the doctrine of the Divinity of the WORD, but not of His
humiliation; hence he obtains clearer notions of God's
majesty, but, not knowing Christ to be the Mediator, re-
mains estranged from Him; all his doubts removed by the
study of Holy Scripture, especially S. Paul.
Aug.'s thirty-second year. He consults Simplicianus; from him
hears the history of the conversion of Victorinus, and longs
to devote himself entirely to God, but is mastered by his
old habits; is still further roused by the history of S. Antony,
and of the conversion of two courtiers; during a severe
struggle, hears a voice from heaven, opens Scripture, and is
converted, with his friend Alypius. His mother's visions
fulfilled
Aug. determines to devote his life to God, and to abandon his
profession of Rhetoric, quietly however; retires to the
country to prepare himself to receive the grace of Baptism,
and is baptized with Alypius, and his son Adeodatus. At
Ostia, in his way to Africa, his mother Monnica dies, in
her fifty-sixth year, the thirty-third of Augustine. Her
life and character ·
Having in the former books spoken of himself before his
receiving the grace of Baptism, in this Aug. confesses
what he then was. But first, he enquires by what faculty
we can know God at all; whence he enlarges on the
mysterious character of the memory, wherein God, being
made known, dwells, but which could not discover IIim.
Then he examines his own trials under the triple division
of temptation, "lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and
pride;" what Christian continency prescribes as to each.
On Christ the Only Mediator, who heals and will heal all
infirmities
Aug. breaks off the history of the mode whereby God led him
to holy Orders, in order to "confess" God's mercies in
opening to him the Scripture. Moses is not to be under-
stood, but in Christ, not even the first words In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Answer
to cavillers who asked, "what did God before He created
the heaven and the earth, and whence willed He at length
to make them, whereas He did not make them before?"
Inquiry into the nature of Time
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