Augustine was famed for his licentious youth. Indeed, the future saint had a mistress for many years and produced an illegitimate son. "Give me chastity and continence," he once remarked, "but not yet."
In his twenty-ninth year, he traveled to Rome, where he became a bishop (and later proved instrumental in the preservation of Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire). Augustine later recalled a seminal moment in his spiritual development:
"I was weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when I heard the voice of children from a neighboring house chanting, 'Take up and read; take up and read.'
"I could not remember ever having heard the like, so checking the torrent of my tears, I arose, interpreting it to be no other than a command from God to open the Book and read the first chapter I should find.
"Eagerly then I returned to the place where I had laid the volume of the Apostle. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell:
"'Not in revelry and drunkenness, not in licentiousness and lewdness, not in strife and envy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts.'
"No further would I read, nor did I need to. For instantly at the end of this sentence, it seemed as if a light of serenity infused into my heart and all the darkness of doubt vanished away."
["I could not distinguish between the clear shining of affection and the darkness of lust," Augustine later recalled. "I could not keep within the kingdom of light, where friendship binds soul to soul... And so I polluted the brook of friendship with the sewage of lust."]Augustine, of Hippo, Saint (354-430) Algerian Christian theologian and philosopher, bishop of Hippo (in Algeria, 396-430) [noted for his profound influence on Christianity, his anti-Manicheanism, and his advocacy of the doctrine of original sin as manifested in such writings as his autobiographical Confessions (397) and the City of God (413-426)] --
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Topic: St. Augustine's Epiphany (Read 718 times)