Today is the anniversary of Saint Augustine’s birth.  It is a particularly special day for me because no man — with the exception of Jesus — has had as much impact on my life as Augustine.  I have said this before, and I think it is true, that, when I die, Augustine’s feet will be the 2nd I get in line to kiss — that is only after I have spent a day or two wiping tears from the feet of the Lord himself.

About 4 years ago, I picked up a copy of Augustine’s City of God.  Shortly thereafter I began reading the Confessions.  In each of these books I saw for the first time something I had never seen before.  I saw a man desperately, unashamedly in love with God, and he made no attempts to downplay it out of a fear of looking silly or weak.  Augustine was a lover of God, who has only been rivaled in his lavish, penned expression of love for God by King David.

As I read Augustine’s account of his own depraved and sinful life — a story that was routinely interrupted by affectionate praise for the Savior he loved — I was amazed.  I’d never seen anything like it.  His language was so full and overflowing with emotion that it made my own heart “throb with a bewildering passion.”

And at the center of it was one sentence that changed my life:

He loves You too little who loves anything together with You which he loves not for Your sake.

Anything, Augustine? I asked.  Anything, he replied through the pages he’d left me.

I loved a lot of things and a lot of people, and most of them I didn’t love for God’s sake.  Was it for God’s glory that I watched TV, listened to music, or posted on my blog?  Was it with God in mind that I spoke when around my friends?  Was it love for God motivating my love for my family?  Was it for God’s sake that I ate and drank, slept and got out of bed, put on my clothes and breathed?

It wasn’t.  And I was terrified.  More than that, I saw something Augustine had that I wanted.  God became more glorious to me than he had ever been before.  I wanted to know this great God who brought Augustine to his knees before him, tearing his hair and beating his breast.  I found myself on my own knees, mourning over my sin and weeping in joy.  My experience was like that of Augustine 16 centuries earlier:

I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy You, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ.

I thank God for Augustine, for his providence in bringing him to me, and for the sentence that changed my life.

I try really hard not to follow politics, so I don’t have much to say on this, but, in what I have heard, I was reminded of one of the major turning points in Augustine’s life.  When he was 16, Augustine first read Cicero’s Hortensius.  Although Cicero was a pagan philosopher, Augustine believed Hortensius had played a tremendous role in pushing him into the arms of God.  In fact, that time in his life is often referred to as his “first conversion”.  His real conversion didn’t happen for another 16 years when he was 32, but he recalled that Cicero was the one who first taught him to love truth, which eventually led to his embrace of the true God.  Augustine wrote of the incident many years later in his Confessions,

[Hortensius] altered my outlook on life. It changed my prayers to you, O Lord, and provided me with new hopes and aspirations. All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth. I began to climb out of the depths to which I had sunk, in order to return to you. . . . My God, how I burned with longing to have wings to carry me back to you, away from all earthly things, although I had no idea what you would do with me! For yours is the wisdom. In Greek the word “philosophy” means “love of wisdom”, and it was with this love that the Hortensius inflamed me. . . .

I was astonished that although I now loved you . . . I did not persist in enjoyment of my God. Your beauty drew me to you, but soon I was dragged away from you by my own weight and in dismay I plunged again into the things of this world . . . as though I had sensed the fragrance of the fare but was not yet able to eat it. . . .

I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ.

As he saw it, had Augustine not read Hortensius, he never would have become a Christian.  Let’s be thankful for any attempts to teach our children to be lovers of truth.

The following quote from The Confessions of Saint Augustine is something singles and parents in American culture need to keep in mind.  The culture Augustine grew up in was very different from American culture yet also quite similar.  The major difference with respect to marriage was it wasn’t uncommon for marriages to be arranged.  The major similarity was marriage was sometimes delayed to pursue other things.  (As you read this also take note of the unadulterated Christian hedonism of Augustine.)

Now I want to call to mind the foul deeds I committed, those sins of the flesh that corrupted my soul, not in order to love them, but to love you, my God.  Out of love for loving you I do this, recalling my most wicked ways and thinking over the past with bitterness so that you may grow ever sweeter to me; for you are a sweetness that deceives not, a sweetness blissful and serene. . . .

From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust.  The two swirled about together and dragged me, young and weak as I was, over the cliffs of my desires, and engulfed me in a whirlpool of sins. . . .

Who was there to alleviate my distress?  No one took thought to arrange a marriage for me, so that my pursuit of fleeting beauties through most ignoble experiences might be diverted into useful channels.  Some bounds might have been set to my pleasures if only the stormy surge of my adolescence had flung me up onto the shore of matrimony. . . .

But I was far too impetuous, poor wretch, so I went with the floodtide of my nature and abandoned you.  I swept across all your laws, but I did not escape your chastisements, for what mortal can do that?  You were ever present to me, mercifully angry, sprinkling very bitter disappointments over all my unlawful pleasures so that I might seek a pleasure free from all disappointment. . . .  Yet none of my family made any attempt to avert my ruin by arranging a marriage for me; their only concern was that I should learn to excel in rhetoric and persuasive speech. . . .

My natural mother had by this time fled from the center of Babylon, though she still lingered in its suburbs.  She warned me to live chastely, but did not extend her care to restraining within the bounds of conjugal love (if it could not be cut right back to the quick) this behavior of mine, of which she had heard from her husband, even though she judged it to be corrupt already and likely to be dangerous in the future.  Her reluctance to arrange a marriage for me arose from the fear that if I were encumbered with a wife my hope could be dashed—not in you for the world to come, to which she held herself, but my hope of academic success.  Both my parents were very keen on my making progress in study:  my father because he thought next to nothing about you and only vain things about me; and my mother, because she regarded the customary courses of studies as no hindrance, and even a considerable help, toward my gaining you eventually. . . .  Throughout these experiences a dark fog cut me off from your bright truth, my God, and my sin grew sleek on my excesses (Confessions: Book II, emphasis mine).

Compare Augustine’s words to the words of Paul:

Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. . . .  To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion (1 Corinthians 7:2,8-9).

The average age of a person at the time of his first wedding in the US is 26.  Augustine was between the ages of 14 and 16 in the period of his life described above for which he lamented his parents had not arranged him a marriage.

I do not think marriage should be considered normative for Christians in the time since Jesus’ resurrection.  Nor is singleness normative.  Each is a gift.  But woe to those who aren’t given the gift of celibacy (1 Corinthians 7:6-7); America is a dangerous place to grow up.

Not in reveling in drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites (Romans 13:13-14).