Today the Church commemorates the solemnity of Saint Augustine of Hippo. Yesterday we recognized Saint Augustine’s mother who wept and prayed fervently for her son’s conversion experience. As a Bishop and Doctor of the Church, Saint Augustine is influential in setting the foundational theological principles of the early church in which topics of predestination, grace, the sacramental life, the mystery of the Trinity were explained. His well known work, Confessions describes his journey from being a pagan to finding the truth of our Catholic Christian faith with the famous line, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” After his baptism and conversion in 386, he was instrumental in defining and contemplating early church doctrines and principles of the faith. Saint Augustine was influential in discerning the mystery of the Holy Trinity in which the Council of Nicaea and Constantinople. Saint Augustine also wrote about original sin, grace, predestination, just war theory, infant baptism and the formation of religious communities. Saint Ambrose of Milan was also a big part of his conversion experience as an orator. Saint Augustine heard a child’s voice that said “take up and read” in discovering the writings of the monastic Saint Anthony of the Desert.
Late Have I Loved You
Accordingly I looked for a way to gain the strength I needed to enjoy you, but I did not find it until I embraced the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is also God, supreme over all things and blessed for ever. He called out, proclaiming I am the Way and Truth and the Life, nor had I known him as the food which, though I was not yet strong enough to eat it, he had mingled with our flesh, for the Word became flesh so that your Wisdom, through whom you created all things, might become for us the milk adapted to our infancy.
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all.
You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.
Excerpt from the Confessions, Roman Office of Readings for the solemnity of Saint Augustine.
Saint Augustine, Pray for us!
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