Augustine's Confessions opens with words that capture his entire spiritual journey: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
A Brilliant Mind Rejects Faith
Born in 354 AD in North Africa, Augustine was brilliant, ambitious, and spiritually adrift. Though his mother Monica raised him as a Christian, Augustine rejected the faith as intellectually unsophisticated. He pursued rhetoric, philosophy, and pleasure with equal vigor. For nine years, he followed the Manichaean heresy. He took a mistress and fathered a son outside marriage. He prayed, famously, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."
His mother's tears followed him from Carthage to Rome to Milan. There, under the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, Augustine's intellectual objections to Christianity began to dissolve. But his will remained divided. He could see the truth but could not embrace it.
Crisis in the Garden
The crisis came in August 386. Visiting a friend named Ponticianus, Augustine heard the story of two imperial agents who had abandoned promising careers after reading the Life of Anthony. Augustine was devastated by his own weakness: these men had found the courage he lacked.
In anguish, he fled to the garden of the house where he was staying. There, under a fig tree, he wept. His will was at war with itself. He could not take the final step.
God Spoke Through Scripture
Then he heard a child's voice from a neighboring house, chanting: "Tolle lege, tolle lege"—"Take and read, take and read."
Augustine picked up the copy of Paul's letters lying nearby and read the first passage his eyes fell upon: "Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."
"No further would I read," Augustine later wrote, "nor had I any need. Instantly, at the end of this sentence, a clear light flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away."
A Life Transformed Forever
He was baptized by Ambrose the following Easter. His mother Monica, who had prayed and wept for him for seventeen years, lived just long enough to see her son's conversion before her death later that year.
Augustine would become Bishop of Hippo, the most influential theologian in Western Christianity, and the author of works that shaped civilization for the next millennium. But it all began in a garden, with a child's voice and a verse of Scripture.
