For when you have been looking everywhere except where it was. He looked for thirty years — in ambition, in a woman, in a religion that flattered him, in philosophy — and the book he wrote about it is still the template for every account of a life that turned.
Saint Augustine, pray for us.
Born at Thagaste in Roman Africa in 354, to a pagan father and a Christian mother, Monica, who prayed for him for thirty years and followed him across the sea. Brilliant, ambitious, and, in his own telling, dissolute. At Carthage he took a partner he lived with for fifteen years and had a son by, whom he loved; the boy died at seventeen. He joined the Manichees, who explained evil without blaming him for it, and stayed nine years.
Rome, then Milan as the city's professor of rhetoric — the top of the profession — where he went to hear Ambrose preach for the style and stayed for the substance. His partner was sent away for a marriage of advantage that never happened. He wanted to believe and could not make himself. In a garden in Milan in August 386, weeping under a fig tree, he heard a child's voice from a house nearby chanting take up and read, opened Paul at random, and read the sentence that ended it. Ambrose baptized him at Easter 387. Monica died at Ostia that autumn, on the way home, having seen it.
He meant to live quietly. Hippo made him a priest by acclamation in 391 and bishop in 395, and he was bishop for thirty-five years, preaching most days, writing five million words, and arguing with everyone. The Vandals were besieging the city when he died in 430.
The Confessions begin with the sentence the whole book proves: Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee. He had tried everything else first, and he says so, and the saying is the point — the book is a prayer, addressed to God, in which a bishop tells God the truth about what he had been.
The turn is in the eighth book. He wanted to give up the woman and could not; he prayed, and he reports the prayer exactly: Give me chastity and continency, only not yet. Then the garden, the voice, the book, and the sentence from Romans. What it made of him is in the tenth book, on this site as its own page: Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new. Not I found you. You called, and shouted, and burst my deafness. The whole arc is that the searcher was the one being searched for.
And in the ninth book he does the thing that shows the man: he prays for his mother's sins. She had been his saint. He asks God to forgive her anyway, because that is what he now knows people need.
The City of God, after Rome fell in 410 and the pagans said the Christians had caused it. The Rule he wrote for his community, which orders still live by. The theology of grace that the West argued about for a thousand years and split over in the sixteenth century — Luther was an Augustinian friar. The Confessions have never been out of print, and every autobiography that begins by admitting something owes him the form.
His body was carried from Hippo to Sardinia when the Vandals came, and from Sardinia to Pavia in the eighth century by a Lombard king; it is there now, in San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, under a marble ark. Hippo is Annaba, in Algeria, where the ruins of his basilica lie below a nineteenth-century one. Monica's epitaph was found at Ostia in 1945, being used as part of a doorway.