 Welcome to The Spiritual Masters, a podcast from Tan Books and Tan Direction in which we look at the greatest and holiest writers from Catholic history. Join us as we explore the life and times in which they lived, an overview and study of their greatest works, and how we as Catholics can look to these masters as models for our own holiness on our journey to heaven. Welcome back Tan fans to the continuation of our wonderful series on the Spiritual Masters. And today we have two very special guests. First is Saint Augustine of Hippo. He's our honored guest today and we're going to try our very best to get inspiration from his life and works through a number of episodes in this mini series. But to help us do that we have our other very special guest, my very close friend, Dr. Paul Thigpen. Thank you for being here, Paul. God, it's a delight not just to be here with you, but with Saint Augustine. He's one of my best friends. Yeah. We go way back now, Paul. I mean, we, let's see, we first met a number of years ago and stayed close in touch and then you came and worked at Tan as our editor for a number of years. And since then and before then and since then you've been one of our bestselling authors, one of our most prolific authors. So let's talk just a little bit before we get to Augustine. Let's talk about you. So why don't you give our audience a little bit about your educational background and your very prolific publishing career and what you're doing these days? Well, I guess I'll focus on the stuff that has to do actually with Saint Augustine. Because there's too much to cover actually. You've done so much. He's true. But I, I'm twice a convert, I like to say that I was raised in a Presbyterian home, kind of nominal. The age of 12 became an atheist six years. I was an atheist till my senior of high school, came back to Christian faith. And then some years later decided to go to grad school to get a PhD, master's in PhD in historical theology. And so I had historical theology. This, if you're just kind of straight theology, then you you're kind of doing theological projects, you might say. Historical theology focuses on the history of Christian doctrine, the development of Christian thought. And you can't do that for more than about five minutes before bumping into Augustine, I suspect. Well, as a matter of fact, my first semester at Emory University had a wonderful professor, Dr. Mallard, with an entire course in Augustine. And that changed my life really. He, I had to read, someone has once said that any man who says that he's read everything Augustine has written is a liar. And that's true. So we couldn't read everything. It was his first biographer who was there with him at his death. And yeah, he said that in the very first biographer. Five and a half million words now we've, that we have surviving. More than Paul Thicke, I think. Oh, let's just jump to it. You've published how many books now? Sixty. Sixty books. Oh my goodness. But yeah, still not as, still not five million, still not five million words, not five million words. That's right. So anyway, I encountered Augustine as an evangelical Protestant then. And he was after that course, it was a pastor in a church for a while, associate pastor for a while. But Augustine and others, when I began reading church history, and going back to the church fathers, everything began to change. I saw that so many of the things I've been told about Catholic faith that it was some, something that came after Constantine or that kind of thing, that wasn't the case. And you, you read these folks and you realize they were Catholic. And, and even beginning with the generation right after the apostles who received their faith from the apostles, like Saint Ignatius of Antioch, very clearly all the teaching of the Eucharist and on the bishops and other things. Chewed up in the mouth of the lions like wheat. Was that, was that Ignatius of Antioch? I think he famously said something like that. So. But with the Eucharist, he said it is the same body and blood that was on the cross. And those who don't believe that, they've left this. Wow. And, and he was, he probably knew Saint Peter and Saint Andrew and some of the others in Antioch. So, but I began reading Augustine and, and he began to show me all kinds of things that deepened the faith I already had, but also began to say, knock on my door, store my soul. There's a whole new realm out here. You need to start looking at Catholic teaching and even practices. I remember the whole thing of praying to the saints. I'd never been hostile to that, but it just seemed like an alien thought. And I remember how I'm reading Saint Augustine and we talk a little bit later about the Donuts of Teresy, but he's reading this, I'm reading this essay against the Donuts of Teresy. And as I'm reading what he says about their sins against charity and against the unity of the church, I remember saying to myself, Augustine, you're right. Get them. You tell them, that's right. And all of a sudden I stopped and said, Oh my Lord, I am a Donutist because I had this notion of the church having to be pure. And we'll talk more about that later. But, but things like that. And, and also I remember one day thinking, I am talking to a saint because I really, I wasn't just kind of commenting on what I was reading. I would actually ask him questions and say, Is that what you meant? And I stopped at one time and said, I'm praying to a saint. And it feels so natural. So in so many ways, Augustine was instrumental to my conversion to become Catholic then back in, wow, it'll be 30 years. Thank you. Well, in a sense, that's not unique, is it? It's happened so many times ever since Augustine. It happened in his, in his life, which we'll get to, but his influence on people was immediate and persistent. And it's still happening today, especially when people read the Confessions. And we're going to have an entire episode just on the Confessions. But it's just, it's the work that has had the biggest impact on people's personal lives. Well, for me, again, talking about when I started reading that, and I've heard so many people say the same thing. I'm reading it. Oh my goodness, this sounds like my life. I mean, this is so much better and deeper. We're vivid in so many ways, but my life feels like a, like a faint echo of his life over all these centuries. I don't know what he meant when he said that. It's, it's so true about me as well. And I'm not the only person, so many people have had that same experience. I'm, he's, he's telling my life for those words. All right, I, I have to say it because we were at dinner the other night, kind of talking about this. And you've made a great analogy and, and it was, and it was actually a, about a song that I've actually been listening to a lot recently, which I'll fill in in a minute, but you gotta tell us, you gotta tell us about the song. Well, when it would have been the 60s, early 70s, maybe, where Roberta Flack recorded the song, I didn't know until you told me, then it was a Sinatra. It was originally Frank Sinatra, and that blew my mind, but it's the song, killing me so long. Killing me softly. Killing me softly. But the words, right, what was it, strumming my pain with his fingers. With his fingers telling my life with his words. Killing me softly with his song. Killing me softly. And I thought about that. He's, he's telling my life with his words. It's like I'm, I'm listening to this song of Augustine, and it's my story. It's amazing. Yeah, I love, it's, it's, when you told me that, we're talking about St. Augustine, we're sitting at Starbucks, I think, and, and you told me about that song kind of reminded you of your experience with the Confessions. And I had just recently, you know, when I was in high school, I would think it was the Fuji's who came out with kind of a, a modern version of that, and we didn't know that it came from the 60s, but the people listening to it in the 60s really didn't know that it was Frank Sinatra who actually wrote this about a woman. So it's a, it's an awesome song anyway, and there's a million covers out there on YouTube, and I, I just love all of them, but it is fitting. It's, it was almost like providential. I've listened to that song probably 10 times in the last couple months, and then we're getting ready to do Augustine and you make an analogy to it. So I got a kick out of that, but things like that happen all the time when you're dealing with God and the Saints. So anyway. Providence is the Providence, too. And we're going to talk about Providence and how Augustine saw that work, divine Providence working throughout all of human history, particularly when we talk about the city of God. But on that note, let's kind of shift to Augustine, you know, who was this man? I mean, just a few introductory notes. He was born in 354, and he's a doctor of the church. There's only 37 doctors of the church now. I think we're at 37 because Pope Francis has had a couple recently. He's also known as the Doctor of Grace, and so maybe we'll get to why that's the fact. And he's one of the most prolific saints of all time. We know that. And Saint Jerome, who I'm a big fan of, said that Augustine established anew the ancient faith. Ancient faith. I mean, it was not that ancient at that time. You know, we're talking 400 AD, but... And it's especially interesting coming from Jerome because they ended up having tensions. Yeah, they had some beef with each other, which I think is funny and wonderful. Well, it's heard about somewhere in Europe there's a church that has a big mural painting of Augustine and Jerome staying together, two doctors, fathers of the church, contemporaries, and they have the halos and they're looking so sweet. I remember thinking, no, they really ought to have them with fisticuffs going. Duking it out a little bit. That's awesome. Well, let's start at his beginning, okay? So, yeah, he was born in 354. Why don't you kind of take us from there and we'll talk about his life? Yeah, just in broad strokes because it's interesting enough it's been said that we know more about this ancient man's life, personal life than probably any other figure from the ancient world because of his writing the confessions that he told all these details and then his biography right after he died. But 354, he's born in Tagaste, North Africa, which is in the area that's now called Algeria. Some debate about his ethnicity, his father's name was Patricius, which is a Roman, you know, Latin name. His mother's name was Monaco, which was a Berber name. Berber being the native people of that part of Africa. That very tip Northern Africa, kind of running along the tip Northern Africa, going down towards the east where Carthage is, which was not very far. Take the Mediterranean Sea, I guess, across and you get to Europe. So, it was kind of African but heavily influenced by the Roman Empire. And that's, yeah, and that's why it's a little hard to know that it's not like his father, you know, was Roman and his mother was native Berber. But rather, it was such a highly Romanized part of the world. Like Romans had taken over long time before, it was, North Africa was their breadbasket and so highly cultivated agricultural lands there. So, it was important. But they retained a certain African culture and that's very clear in Augustine's writings. Yeah. And so, because of that, his father could well have been Berber too, but just took on, you know, a Roman name. A Roman name. Because he was a town counselor, kind of like you might say. So, the elites for sure would have been as Romanized as they could appear. And Patricius was a pagan though. And he was pagan, right. Yeah. And I read somewhere in preparing for this that he converted on his deathbed, but I had never actually heard that before, so. Yes, he did. And so, he kind of grew up in a home where there's rather devout Christian mother and pagan father. It's not all that unusual today, is it? It's not. It's not. And he makes all kinds of interesting comments about Monaco. It's a classic story of, you know, mother and son and all the way into adulthood, the kind of, you know, interactions they have. And she was amazing because, well, in so many ways, she prayed him into the kingdom, you know, convinced. Some patron of mothers, I believe, or something like that. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And of wayward children. Yeah. Yeah. He comments once in his confessions that his mother, with regard to religion, his mother did everything she could to make God his father and not Patricia's. And. Well, when I screw up and my children see it, I'll tell them, no, you know, I'm not your role model. God, the father's your role model. Okay. So, I kind of used the same tactic. I tried to point their eyes somewhere else. Yeah. So. So he, he grows up in that situation. They don't, they're probably, I guess, what we might call middle class, that you can really use that term then. But he, not wealthy, for sure, he has to have a patron to help him get an education. And he goes to another, an area not far away for, to begin his education and finally goes to Carthage for, to study rhetoric. And the goal in mind of being a professor of rhetoric, but it was kind of a stepping stone to better things. Carthage at the time, you know, was one of the, was beautiful, probably, and impressive cities in that part of the empire. And so, according to, to his recall, it was also a cauldron of immorality. And so while he was there. Big city life. Yep. Right. He's a little boy from little town, town this way. And he gets there and, and he talks about how he was just pulled into all that. And people have debated, scholars have debated how, how bad he really was, that maybe he made it sound worse than it was compared to what it could have been. But in any case, from his own art collection, it's, it's, he's pulled into just a whirlpool of, of immorality and other things. But he gets that studies there. And while he's there, his, his father dies, but as you said, does have a deathbed conversion. And the other thing that happens is, he takes a mistress. And what we call a mistress, but probably better to call it a common law wife. And in those days in Roman culture and law, where he, where he was, you could not contract a normal marriage with someone who is not of your social class. She was apparently of a lower social class. And there were still, the relationship was still governed by law. So that she, she had certain rights as a kind of a common law wife. And not long after that, then they had a son together, Adeodotus. So those things happen in Carthage. And then also while he's in Carthage, he becomes a manatee. Yeah. We're going to have a discussion later on about what is that heresy, but yeah, we'll just briefly touch on it because it's critical for his biography. Yeah. So it's, it was a religion that, I mean, some would say a branch of Christianity and it used Christian terms and some of the scriptures, but basically heavily influenced by Eastern thought. And was, was quite contrary to, you know, to the received tradition from the apostles. And, but very influential. It ended up spreading all the way to China and all kinds of places. There's a great competitor for the Christian faith. They're very aggressive in there, proselytizing. And he was looking for a faith that would be very rational for him that could explain everything. And that was their promise anyway. And so that's kind of, he got, might say, roped into that. They had, again, we'll go into it more, but it has elements of narcissism in it. And so I could see a guy as an intellectually curious, as, as a gust and desperate desperately seeking truth. I mean, clearly he was seeking truth. And when somebody comes along and promises you this secret Gnostic knowledge, you're going to be intrigued. And yeah, I mean, the reason the Gnostic, all the different Gnostic religions are called Gnostic, it's from the Greek word Gnosis for knowledge. And it promises salvation through knowledge. So that would be very, very appealing to someone like this. It'd be a lot easier, actually. As long as you have a decent IQ. Because I have a few, yeah, a few algorithms. This kind of thing, it would be saved. We'd have to bother with that moral conversion stuff. Yeah, yeah. So now he, so he's a, so he's a well-trained rhetoricician. He, I'm not sure exactly where we are in that, but eventually he's trained in Carthage, but he moves to Rome and Milan at some point as a pretty well-recognized proficient professor. Yeah, by that time he had taught back in his hometown, and then he had actually gone to Carthage to teach. But he kept kind of moving up the... So he was, yeah. And each time, as it is today, you have something to put on your resume, right? So he sails to Rome, and he lives in Monica behind, and he wants another one of the comments he makes about her. Yeah, all mothers really desire to be with their sons, but she really dares to be with them. She's more than those. That's funny. And she wants to go with them. He doesn't want her to go. And so he actually tricks her into leaving at a time when she wasn't expecting, and he goes on ahead and she's a little crazy over it. But little Monica in her persistence. Mother hen, Monica. She goes anyway. You know, I mean, she finds another ship to go and she actually goes and follows it. Wow. Right. Yeah. So... Is it... Where does he get Neo-Platonism? Is that more in Rome or Milan or is just kind of like an ongoing process where he starts really tapping into that? It's coming next. He gets it more in Milan. He becomes... After he's in Rome, it's so funny. Some things never change. Everywhere he teaches, he has problems with his students. Not because he's a bad teacher, but because either they're rowdy and not paying attention. That was the problem in Carthage. In Rome, they wouldn't pay their bills. They pay their bills. So he taught the whole semester. Right. And they pay their bill to the end and they just disappear. And they would just run to... Yeah, wouldn't go to the final class. That sounds about right. I've been a professor before. Maybe that's why today's colleges make you pay... Yeah, up front. When it'd be up front. Yeah. So what happens he... From Rome then, he becomes a professor of rhetoric in Milan. And a lot of us wouldn't maybe realize today that at that point, the emperor was actually living in Milan. Really? It was the kind of Serga-Roman capitals. Rather than Rome. He's still a manarchy, but he meets St. Ambrose. Ambrose. The Bishop of Milan. And Ambrose's preaching just intrigues him. Because he's a rhetorician, he wants to... He hears that Ambrose is a great preacher and he wants to see what he can learn from him in that regard. So he doesn't go, first of all, probably because he's interested in Catholic teaching. He's going to hear how a good preacher does it. Yeah. Yeah. And he goes and he starts hearing the stuff that's making a difference in his thinking. And also just a one note is Ambrose was really the last Western father who really understood Greek and had read the Greek resources. Augusta never mastered Greek and the others after him, I mean, all the way up to the Middle Ages, they didn't do Greek. So Ambrose did kind of have a unique kind of twist on him because he had read these great Greek texts and the Latin texts. He was totally proficient in both. Kind of ended after him. And I bet you that it just made him a little different and a little bit more compelling for a curious mind like Augusta. There were times until Augusta will drop a comment that makes you think like he still feels like he's a little inferior because he didn't learn the Greek the way everybody wanted him to and he should have. You should have paid more attention to it when he was learning it, he said. I think he said, I think there was a Greek professor when he was young that was real hard on him and beat him up and so on. He would flog them and kind of thing. So Augusta being the strong-willed child that he was, he just said, I've refused to learn Greek then. So with that going on, that would have made him kind of admire and even maybe Ambrose some too. As well, he's got all that going on. Ambrose, I think Augusta in the Confession says that Ambrose took him in like a father or like a son. I mean, he just, he treated him. He wasn't just a bishop. He played a fatherly role to him. So they really formed sounds like a close relationship which is amazing. Whenever you have a saint mentoring a saint, that's kind of amazing. Here we have a doctor the church mentoring a doctor. Goodness gracious. And then we got the Monica thing going on. I'm not putting her down. She's a wonderful saint. We prayed to her many times for our family. But we have this great episode in the Confessions where he says that she, she went to Ambrose and she was just crying and saying, oh my son, he's in the medicaid. He's got all this stuff going on. I want you to talk to him. I want you to have this happen before. Yeah, I want you to talk to him. I'm sure you can talk about it this. And Ambrose just kind of, he doesn't brush her off, but he's saying, he's going to have to want it. Oh, I can't just talk about it. He's going to have to want it. And she presses and presses. And finally, Augustine says, he's kind of worried over it. He says, look, the son of a mother of so many tears, surely will not lose his way or will be saved or however he put it. And she just starts up and says, oh, thanks. Because as Augustine said, she took it as a prophetic word from God. Prophetic word, yeah. And it was. But I also heard read somewhere that Ambrose is funny. I just can't remember one-tenth of, you know, where I got information. But I read somewhere that Ambrose told her, if you would pray for your son more than you complain about him, he would be more likely to convert. That's a great one. That's a great one for Augustine. I know, I know. She took it to heart. So it's wonderful. So what's happening then is, while he's there, he's moving away from the manatees. And part of that is under the influence of Platonism. He begins to understand what we will go more into that with the manatees. But they posit this God of pure evil along with the God of good. Dualistic. Yes. And he comes to say, you know, my understanding of good is that it's real. And evil is a privation of good. It's a lack of good. It's a deficit of good. And to exist is good. And to be intelligent is good. And to love have a will. All those things are good. If you take everything away that's good and make it pure evil, it ceases to exist. And that and other things, he began to realize that the manatees were not, in his case, fulfilling the promise to give him this great, highly rational belief system for the world. So he's moving away from them and becoming something of a skeptic. But he's also beginning to read more of the Platonist work. So in particular, Plotinus, the new Platonist. I enjoy Plotinus. I'm porphyry, yeah. I really enjoyed them. You know what I mean? I'm going to kind of consider myself more of a Platonist kind of quasi-philosopher than Aristotelian. And I've taught Plotinus and I'm intrigued. I see the way he talks about certain things and I can see how Augustine, over time, sort of plucking things out of that to help explain the trinity and all kinds of things. So I'm very sympathetic to the Neoplatonist of the day. And it was a bridge of sorts in that, ironically, the larger Gnostic tradition and some of the manatees actually themselves have drawn from that tradition some. I don't know that they were obvious about it, but if you read their works, I had a whole course at Yale on Gnosticism. That's they were reading a lot of that stuff too. So for him, the ideas would have he would have already been introduced to some of them, but he found the manatees they just weren't satisfying intellectually. So he begins reading those things and as he says later, he does find all these wonderful insights that they had a sense of the word of God, the logos of God, the reason of God. But what they didn't have was that the logos became flesh and dwelt among us. Yeah. Or personal, I think that's the things like logic for me gets that there's a God, but it doesn't get that he's a personable God. And that's just the difference. And in fact, yeah, a lot of it with Eastern roots tends to make God an impersonal force. I was like, you know, the force in Star Wars kind of. Yeah, I mean, that's the one, you know, Plotinus with the one. I mean, I've there's a lot of truth in how he says of this ultimate unity, you know, but it's totally far removed from us for Plotinus and those guys, it was impossible for something so perfect. So one to like degrade itself by interacting with us. And so the Demiurge, that's the entity that ends up creating the world is begotten, not made, consubstantial with the one. And we have some of that language in our creed, don't we? So, I mean, there really are these little connections. And Augustine was masterful at kind of baptizing some of these, you know, pre-Christian or, you know, pagan or philosophical things. And he was not above bringing that into the faith to using it. And it was masterful. It was, I think, it was just masterful. Sorry to interrupt, but. Oh, no, that's good. So that's going on. And his mind is being converted in certain ways into more Neoplatanist form. But then there's Ambrose and there's the Christian preaching. And he gives a, he gives a look at Christian Scripture to try to, you know, see what I can find here. And he's, it kind of leaves him cold, probably mostly the Old Testament especially, that it, he doesn't find it intellectually satisfying. There's got to be something going on here that I don't get. And Ambrose's preaching helped him to see kind of how you look at that material. And that you, you draw an allergy from it. That's, that's something that's been going on in, you know, Christian interpretation for a while. And I think it was, I think it was Origen who was the first one to bring the allegorical meaning of Scripture. And people were really struggling. That was very early on. But I think Origen had a significant impact. So, I mean, all of this was just, what amazes me, Paul, is we're, we're in 400, you know, late 300s. And all of this was so new. I mean, it was just a couple of hundred years old because the first 150 years of the church or whatever, there's, you know, the things were written, but it was just a little pamphlets. It was all oral tradition. And it was only the last 100, 200 years when Augustine's there that there's more Scripture to read, the canon's being organized. And here he goes, you know, learning to, to read Scripture. And later on, we're going to talk about on Christian doctrine, which is really his masterpiece on how to read Scripture. But I'm, I'm amazed at how this academic philosophy driven rhetoricition takes all of those skills and really masters and teaches us how to read Holy Scripture. And that kind of began with Ambrose. I just find that to be a fascinating thing. And I can see how with his knowledge of Virgil and Cicero, when he sat down to read the Old Testament for the first time, he must have been like, what is this? What is this? And so he had to have a conversion to understand it. You know, I find that fascinating. And the interesting thing is, once he gets, you know, fully into the Galactic faith in you through his preaching we'll be looking at some of his homilies, his sermons that his native African tradition begins to come out because that stuff, you know, wasn't kind of part of the native culture. It was being introduced by folks who were being influenced by Roman and Greek culture. But the African, North African way of looking at things and talking about things was much more concrete, much more vivid, much more narrative. And it was witty, it was colorful. And so I can imagine, too, that that might have pressed on him in certain ways because he obviously was that way himself that he would read all that stuff and he'd appreciate the Neoplatonist works. But it's probably still was lacking for it. It's not concrete. And once he begins to hear from Ambrose and others, he says, oh, now I get it. You know, that's why these texts, the concrete, that's why they're vivid, that's why they tell stories, all those things. You still have to put it with the deeper theology and what it represents. But that convergence he already had within himself the Berber culture and the Roman culture, the classical culture. So that brings us up to his conversion, you know? I mean, so what, how does that come about? He's hearing Ambrose, he's talking to Ambrose and then kind of what's the next step in that conversion? Well, he's in a home with some friends and they have some guests that remember all the details, but they end up talking about the lives of the monks of the desert and how they've given up everything, their celibate, they eat almost nothing and they've given up their lives for the kingdom. In particular, the life of St. Anthony at the desert, which we publish. I was looking around see do we have it laying around here, but it's one of my favorite works. I just taught it to the, we teach this high school class on Fridays and just taught that, but boy that. St. Athanasius is really right. Yeah. Yeah. What a great story. I can see this, I can see this hitting a guy who's been living the big city life for a while now. He's kind of moved up in the world and he's probably got a nice little concubine and he's got a nice job and then he reads about this crazy story of this monk battling the devil in the desert for like 50 years, 60 years and you know that had to rock him. He's like, if a third of this is true, this changes everything. So I can imagine that this just totally rocked his world. That should mention by now he had given up his common law wife. Yeah. And because That was because Monica wanted to have a regulation for marriage, you know, for marriage. Well, and I think that I want to read a little passage from the Confessions here because we can all be sympathetic to this concubine, this woman you know and and it was it was not as foreign to them as it is to us. But I want to read this. So Augustine wrote after he's talking about how Monica set him up for like an arranged marriage and he couldn't marry that the young woman yet because she was too young. So he had to wait for her to become of age. So he for the arranged marriage for the arranged marriage. But he said this in his very Augustinian way, I guess. My mistress being torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, my heart which claved her was wracked and wounded and bleeding. You know what I mean? So this hurt him. This was not just some meaningless woman to him. This tore him apart. And then he confesses that you know, he was still a man of the flesh and was, you know, used to having this woman in his life. And so he calls himself a slave of lust and so he procured another concubine as he had to wait two more years for his the young and fiance, I guess, to to be of age. But he says his emotional wound was not healed. And this is when St. Augustin when he had these these other ladies, this is when he famously said to the Lord, grant me chastity and continence but not yet. Wow. I just had to share that because it's really shows he was struggling. He was struggling. He loved this woman. She left but he hadn't detached from all those sexual desires yet. And they had a son together. They had a son. They had a son. Yeah. So he was, yeah. Anyway, I just find that kind of a beautiful story in a way. A sad tragic story but beautiful at the same time. Sorry. But that's a that's good. And so we get back to he's reading Anthony in the desert. The the the concubine's gone. And his conversion kind of starts to begin. So they're talking about that life and he I guess you could say in modern terms begins to come into conviction that, you know, what am I doing? These guys are taking the kingdom by storm. And the guy's out in the desert. Yeah. The guy's out in the desert. And he begins to have this inner struggle and he begins to weep and he's kind of embarrassed by that and makes makes his friend uncomfortable that he's with so he has to leave the house and go outside and he's into this garden. It's a famous kind of garden. Yes. Yeah. And under a fig tree. Under a fig tree which is so difficult. I know it is. It's just. And while he's there and got a port as hard out that way, he hears the sound of a child. He said to know if there's a boy or girl but you know because little child is going to have a high voice saying in Latin To le le je To le le je Take up and read. Take up and read. And somehow it seems to him that this is God talking to him. Not that God was the child but through this God was talking to him. And he wouldn't even I don't think he even knew of any game that would have had those words that they would be playing but it sounded like these children saying that. So we went back in and they had a scroll of Scripture and he opened it up in the first place that he looked at. It was Romans 13, 13, 14. And I can't don't have all those words memorized but it's basically St. Paul saying stop living in lewdness and licentiousness and all those other things and put on Christ and His Holiness. And he says, oh my goodness this is God speaking directly to me through this this is His Word and He's speaking to me. And so that becomes kind of a moral conversion for him the intellectual conversion that I've already been going on but kind of moral conversion. So then he enters a long process of RCIA and has to show up at the church every Wednesday. No, it's Ambrose. But it isn't exactly right. I mean, he doesn't go right away. I think it's into the next year. Yeah, it takes a while but it was the ancient version of RCIA, right? And Ambrose eventually baptizes him. So he has to go back to Milan for that. And he's baptized by Ambrose and then they're going to be returning to Africa and they're at Ostea which is basically the port that served Rome. And they're waiting and they get delayed. This is after he's converted, though. Yes, right. He's been baptized a lot and now they're all preparing to go back to Rome. This would have been 387, I guess. And while they're waiting to return, he and Monica have this vision you could call an ecstasy, a mystical experience. He talks about it. It's a little hard to know for sure whether they're seeing things externally or internally but it's as if they're caught up to heaven together. Wow. And a beautiful thing. So he has had his mystical side as well. And then after that, she falls ill and she realizes that she's going to die. And among other things what's so powerful to me in that story is that he reports that all through her life she had made it really clear she wanted to be buried back in Africa next to her husband when she died. And seemed to be some concern to her that had to happen. So here they are. Well, they're very ecstasy. It's the Africans very attached to the land. They have this real sense of homeland that may be more of a Mediterranean type of European sense that didn't have. Or the American South. I've always seen that as a part of traditional Southern culture. You're very tied to the land. Yeah. I mean, if you told me I was going to be buried up somewhere up in the North I'd be like, what are you talking about? I already got my spot picked out. But the amazing thing was that she said when they brought that up and she said, no, it's okay. Bury me here on resurrection. I'm paraphrasing, but on resurrection day the Lord will know where to find me. Wow. That's beautiful. That's what the perspective I should have. Exactly. But I'm still sitting there saying, yeah. Yeah, I was talking. No. Bury me here. So she does die there. But then they're finally able to make it back to Africa and with the Adidas and the sun. He has retreats at Tagaste and the sun dies. He had a bad year Augusta. This would have been maybe a couple years later when his son died. But he's about 15, 16 years old when he died, I think. Someone around there. Yeah. Yeah. It's tragic. So, but he's, you know, he's baptized. He's had reputation as a teacher. And so work gets around and there's a bishop who, a hippo who needs assistive bishop and the people's like grab Augusta and he says he's very reluctant that basically press him into being ordained. Mm-hmm. Of course it was God's will and it's obvious, you know, now. But so he was kind of like assistant, adjutant bishop for a while and then full bishop because the other bishop was dying. So he's ordained a priest there. It doesn't happen right away. He doesn't become bishop of till 396. So there's a three or four year gap I think, is that what it was? Yeah. But one interesting note is that as soon as he's as soon as he's ordained a priest he starts preaching which was not coming back then. I think it was mostly the bishops did all the preaching but his mastery of of rhetoric. Of rhetoric. Mm-hmm. People wanted to hear him right away. Yeah. So the good thing is he already begins to get then all kinds of training as a pastor. Every pastor you know if you ask him that's you can learn all you want in seminary but you just got to do it. You got to learn by doing it. And so he begins to be trained for the great pastoral work he had. Yeah. So he's a bishop in 395. And or yeah, a bishop and then the bishop and the bishop like us. Yeah, I'm not sure. Okay, 395. Okay. And the next year Ambrose dies actually. Oh really? Yeah. God, he had a yeah, he had a tough couple years. One of the interesting things that as soon as he was made a bishop, I find this just fascinating and it kind of shapes puts in context the rest of his life with all of his relationships. Bishops usually lived alone kind of a little bit of a life of luxury and he created a different environment from the very get-go. Tell us about that. Well, he's still, you know, he had been convicted by the monastic way of life in that encounter that he had. I mean, it's just a one view into a larger process and and so yet he did develop a model that's having multiple priests live together with the bishop and kind of care for each other, support each other, strengthen each other. It's a model I wish we could have today. All, you know, it happens occasionally. The oratorians do that for instance, I think, not with the bishop, but together. But I've known so many priests who live maybe in rural areas or something. They're alone. They're so scattered. They're alone. It's very difficult and he needs some support. One anecdote from this great biography I read of his by Peter Brown, the one you recommended is in his bishop's house at his big dining room table because he had a lot of priests living with him. He etched into the wood. I can't remember the exact phrase, but it's basically if you use your mouth to gossip at this table, you cannot use your mouth to eat at this table. I love it. I forgot. And it was something. That's great. And so because, you know, priests probably get together and start talking about all the crazy people they had to minister to during the day, you know. Yeah. And so, but he insisted that these priests live a pretty rigorous life. They embrace poverty. He said later in his life that if you were, if you wanted, you had to give all you had away and give it to the poor or else you would not be under his authority. And in fact, there was a scandal later in his life where a priest who had been, that he had ordained and brought his inner circle, they found out he had not sold everything. He had not given everything away. Kind of like that scene in the Acts of the Apostles. But these, I don't think this guy dropped down dead, you know, at the feet of St. Peter, like they did in the Acts. But, you know, but he was really angry. And it was just because he believed that the priests should really live kind of this radical life of Christ. He didn't have to go out into the desert like Anthony of the Desert. But if you wanted to be a priest in his diocese or whatever you called it back then, you had to be poor. You had to be simple. You had to, you had to be very careful in how you spoke about people. It was, he lived as a vegetarian. I mean, he was, he was pretty, he was pretty stern because meat was a luxury, not for animal rights, I don't think, but it was, he was, it was a luxury. He avoided all luxuries and he was, so we tend to forget that because he's such an intellect. He was in a sense an ascetic at the Saint John. Oh yeah, yeah. The amazing thing is by the force of his personality, you know, he still attracted all these men to that, into that life. And it became like a a nursery of bishops, if you want to call it that. So many bishops that went out to North Africa had lived with him at some point in that setting. And so imagine the influence that he was having through these men that he had basically personally discipled them. He's like a kingmaker, you know, and yeah. Okay, so that kind of leads us up. What next? You want to kind of move to the end, like kind of his, his death, you know, he's or his old age. Well, just to, you know, we'll be talking more about the, some of his works, but just around the year, 400 is when he is writing his confessions. There are controversies that come up. The Donuts' Controversy we're going to talk about. Yeah. By the way when he wrote those confessions, he was 43. That's my age. That made me agree. When I realized that way, I'm way behind here. Man, this is crazy. Goodness. Then Jill, we'll just mention briefly again, we'll talk more about it with City of God, but 410, the Sack of Rome, by the Visigoths under Valerie. And that prompts then eventually the writing of the City of God. He writes on the Trinity, some other things. The Pelagian Controversy we'll talk about comes at this. So all this is kind of happening during his, his Episcopacy. And Jerome dies and 429, the Vandals invade North Africa and they start their way slowly over. Carthage in that area. And the Vandals are Arian. Yes, they are. They are Arian and they do what? They vandalize everything. That's where we get the word. People don't realize you vandalize something is from the Vandals because when they came through, they sacked, they pillaged, they raped, and they took what they want. They vandalized. And that's where we get the word. And that's where we get the word. Yeah, because they were the Arians. Yeah, they were still Arians. I mean, Ambrose, you know, at Malam with the, we had an Arian emperor who demanded that they turn the cathedral over to the Arians. Yeah, I think Ambrose was ready to be a martyr. He thought he was going to be a martyr. Oh, he called the people together and they got into the cathedral and said, you know, take it from us. Wow. Pretty amazing. Pretty amazing thing. It is amazing. And so there was, there was a time towards the end here when the vandals came through Hippo, I think Augustus, an old man, he thought he was going to be a martyr, too. Of course. Yeah. They were ready. So. And that's when he actually starts, he starts writing at that time, Paul, about perseverance. Like he, he starts writing a lot then about, will God provide the grace to persevere? And he preaches on that. It's a lot of assurance, but it's at that time because they know it's coming. They know the Rome is falling. Well, they had a seat. That's, I mean, they've gotten to the city gates and they're out there. Yeah. And then they're beginning to go hungry because they can't get to the food. So it's not just, oh, we hear they're coming, but they're at the gates. They're there, wow. The barbarians are at the gates. And he's ill. Interestingly enough, one of the few miracles attributed to Augustum was during that time that it was the healing of a sick man and it took place during the siege right before he died. I heard that he joked when somebody came and asked for his healing. He said, well, if I had the gift of healing, I'd heal myself. But then in 430, he dies at Hippo on August 28th. Yeah, but let's say how is a beautiful thing where he, I'm going to do this one day. If I know I'm dying, I'm going to do this. He taped up on the wall all around his room, the penitential psalms of David, which I'm not sure which ones are the penitential psalms, but he taped them up so he could just read and weep, read and weep, and he turned away all the guests and he just wanted to read and weep until the end. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that a great way to go? I got, that's what I got to do. I got to get the sound on. If we get the grace of knowing there we go. I know, I'm saying this, but that's a great way to go. Yeah. God, and it's so, it's so him. It's just perfect. It's just like a perfect ending to a, you know, a remarkable life. And his friend Pasidius, he'd known him for 40 years and they'd been close. He's present at that time. And after his death, he writes the first biography. Yeah. Augustine. Yeah. That's beautiful. So that kind of, you know, that's, that's his life and we're going to cover more of it in, when we go into our next discussion on the confessions and we'll try not to repeat, you know, everything. We'll talk more of the spiritual side of confessions and we haven't talked about the pair. There's certain things we haven't talked about yet. We'll get to some other things but just in closing. Yeah. That was going to say any last thoughts on his life. Yeah. Just that, you know, he dies in 430. 431 was the council of Ephesus, the third ecumenical council convene that year. Oh, really? How different my things have been. I mean, not the outcome of what they taught, but what would it have been like for Augustine could have attended the council of Ephesus? Well, but it was not, not in the plan. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure his teachings influenced the people who were there. Sure. Yeah. Well, it's any last thoughts on his life. I mean, just in closing, before we get to going more into his works, what do you have to say about this remarkable life, a relatively long life? He lived into the 70s, whatever that math is. You know, he was, he was an old man. He'd never wasted time. What do you have to say about just his life and what it means to you? Well, I could go in for hours, but, you know, I love the quote at the beginning of the confessions in the first page. Our hearts are, you know, made for you, Lord. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. And I see him as a restless man, all of his life, because he's searching for truth, which he understands ultimately means he's searching for God and looking for him everywhere. And all these different things he did and all the things he wrote, it was a search. It was, he was on a hunt all of his life. And that's one thing we can learn from to never give up seeking out God by seeking out the truth. Yeah, it's a perfect way to close. I had forgotten about that obvious quote, which we would have gotten to at some point in this mini-series, but our hearts are restless until they rest in you alone, oh Lord. That does summarize this man's life completely. And that's actually, that's how we should open up the next episode when we talk about the confessions, when we come back. That is the one sentence that summarizes the whole book and you put it up there in front. So, well, God bless you, Paul. Thanks for this. It's wonderful. And Saint Augustine, pray for us. Thank you, Connor. What a joy. What a pleasure. All right. Bless you, too. See you next time. This has been an episode of The Spiritual Masters, a podcast from Tan Books and Tan Direction. To follow the show, learn about more inspiring holy men and women, and to get special offers exclusive to Spiritual Masters listeners, sign up at spiritualmasterspodcast.com. And thanks for listening.