Latest / Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast / St. Perpetua — The Catholic Martyr Who Wrote Her Own Death Sentence
Transcript
- : It is the summer of 386 AD, a garden in Milan, Italy. A man is lying under a fig tree, weeping, not quietly, but loudly, uncontrollably. He has been pulling at his hair, throwing his arms around. He is 32 years old, one of the most brilliant minds in the Roman Empire, a professor of rhetoric whose career is the envy of his peers. And he... is face down in the dirt crying like a child. He has been running from this moment for 15 years. Running from his mother's prayers. Running from the faith he grew up near but never quite entered. Running from the quiet voice in the back of his own brilliant mind that kept telling him, you know the truth, you know it, stop running. From somewhere beyond the garden walls comes the sound of a child's voice, singing a phrase over and over like a game. Tole, lei-je. Tole, lei-je. Latin, take up and read. Augustine gets up off the ground. He walks back to where he had left a copy of Paul's letters. He opens it at random. His eyes fall on a single sentence and everything. 15 years of running, 15 years of brilliant excuses, and philosophical detours and spiritual delays ends right there, under a fig tree in a garden in Milan. Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. If you are new here, welcome aboard. Stick around and if this connects with you, subscribe so you don't miss next week. We drop a new saint every Thursday. Today we are talking about a man whose name you almost certainly know, Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western civilization, a man who shaped Christian theology, Western philosophy, and the concept of autobiography itself, and a man who spent 15 years knowing exactly what he should do and refusing to do it. His story is yours, I promise you that. Whether you are a lifelong believer, someone who drifted, someone who has never set foot in a church, or someone who is sitting right now with a truth you have been avoiding, Augustine's story is yours. This is St. Augustine of Hippo. We are starting in the year 354 AD. The Roman province of Numidia in North Africa. The region that is now Algeria. A boy is born into a small town called Thagaste. to a family caught between two worlds. His father, Patricius, is a pagan, a man of modest local standing, not wealthy, not powerful, but ambitious for his son in the way only parents who grew up with nothing can be. Patricius is a hot-tempered man, kind in his way, but very difficult. He has affairs, he drinks, he is in the polished language of Augustine's own later writing, a man of earthly appetites and no particular spiritual depth. His mother, Monica, is something else entirely. Monica is a Christian, a devout, serious, praying Christian in a time and place where that combination of words meant something specific. It meant real sacrifice, real commitment, and real faith under pressure. She married a pagan because that was what her parents arranged. She managed a difficult husband with a patience that Augustine himself described as extraordinary. She raised her children in the faith with the quiet, relentless persistence of someone who genuinely believed that prayer moved things. She prayed for Patricius his entire life. He was baptized on his deathbed. Then Monica turned the full weight of her prayers toward her eldest son. She would need them. Augustine was brilliant from the beginning. The kind of brilliance that people notice from the time you are very young and that shapes everything about how you grow up. He was sent to school, then to better schools, then, when his father scraped together the money, to Carthage, the great city of North Africa, one of the most vibrant, dangerous. exciting places in the Roman Empire. He was 16 years old. He was extraordinarily talented and he had just been let loose in one of the greatest cities in the ancient world with no supervision and a burning need to prove himself. You can probably see where this is going. This city in 370 AD is everything that a 16 year old boy from a small town in North Africa would find overwhelming and intoxicating and impossible to resist. Picture it. The noise. The crowds. The theater. The intellectual energy of a major Roman city. Students from all over the empire competing with each other in rhetoric and philosophy and wit. The best teachers. The best arguments. The best parties. Augustine threw himself into all of it. He was brilliant in the classroom. first in everything, always. He had the kind of mind that absorbed ideas whole and then spat them back out sharper than they had arrived. He was charming. He was competitive. He was the kind of young man who walked into a room and made everyone else feel slightly less interesting. He was also, by his own later admission, a young man who gave himself to pleasure with the full force of his considerable energy. He was not cruel or violent. But he was pursuing everything the world had to offer. Intellectual glory, social status, physical pleasure, with the same relentless ambition he brought to everything else. At 17, he began a relationship with a young woman whose name we do not know. Augustine never names her in his writings, which is one of the most poignant details in the whole story. She was not from his social class. A proper marriage was out of the question. But he loved her in his way. He would stay with her for 13 years. And in 372, when he was 18 years old, she bore him a son. Augustine named the boy Adeodatus. It means given by God. He would describe his son as extremely intelligent and by all accounts he adored him. But The son was also a complication, a reminder that the brilliant trajectory Augustine was building had edges and consequences he had not entirely planned for. He kept building the trajectory anyway. He completed his studies. He began to teach rhetoric, first in Thagaste and back in Carthage. He was successful in ways that his father, who had died before seeing it, had always dreamed for him. He was going somewhere. Everyone could see it. And underneath all of it, something was quietly eating at him. He searched for years he searched. Through philosophy, through rival religions, through every intellectual framework his brilliant mind could find. None of it was enough. Eventually he moved to Rome, then to Milan, where he landed the most prestigious academic appointment in the Western Roman Empire. Professor of rhetoric, peak of the career, top of the mountain, but he is still running. I want to stop the story here for a moment and give Monica the moment she deserves because her story runs alongside Augustine's for his entire life and it is its own kind of extraordinary. Monica followed her son everywhere. When Augustine moved to Rome, she followed him. and he moved to Milan. She followed him. She was not clingy or controlling. She was a mother who had been praying for this man's soul for decades and was not going to stop while there was still breath in her body. There is a scene in Augustine's own telling, one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the Confessions, where he decides to leave Africa for Rome. He knows Monica will try to stop him or insist on coming immediately. So he lies to her. He tells her that the ship is not leaving that night. He convinces her to stay in a chapel near the harbor, to pray, to rest, to wait. And then, in the darkness, he slips away and boards the ship without her. Monica wakes in the morning to find him gone, out to sea, gone. Augustine writes about this moment with the raw honesty that makes the Confessions unlike almost anything else ever written. He tells us that when he looks back on it, he can see that God was in it, that going to Rome and then to Milan was how he ended up hearing Ambrose preach and being led toward the truth he had been running from. But he also does not excuse himself. He lied to his mother. He left her weeping on the dock and he knows it. Monica, because Monica was Monica, did not give up. She followed him to Milan anyway. And there in Milan, she began attending the sermons of Bishop Ambrose, one of the greatest preachers of the ancient world. She sat in the front. She waited for after every sermon. She was absolutely certain that her son was close to something. And she was right. She was always right. We are in Milan. It is the summer of 386 AD. Augustine has been attending Ambrose's sermons. Now, not for spiritual reasons, at least not consciously. Ambrose is a great rhetorical craftsman, and Augustine is a professor of rhetoric. He is studying the technique, or so he tells himself. But something is happening that he cannot entirely control. The intellectual objections are falling away one by one. The philosophical detours have all led back to the same place. He is 32 years old, and the part of his mind that has been arguing against Christianity is running out of arguments. What remains is not intellectual. What remains is the thing he wrote about with devastating self-awareness in the Confessions. He prayed. and this is one of the most searingly honest prayers in the history of human beings, talking to God. Hegel prayed, Lord, make me chaste and continent, but not yet. Not yet. He knew that the conversion would cost him. The relationship, the career trajectory, the life he had built, the pleasures he had organized his existence around for fifteen years. His mind was convinced. His will refused to follow. And so, one afternoon in Milan, Augustine and his friend, Olympius, are sitting in the garden of the house where they are staying. A visitor has just told them of a story about two men who read the life of St. Anthony of the desert. They were overwhelmed and on the spot gave up their careers and followed God completely. Just like that. Two ordinary men who did the one thing Augustine had been unable to do for 15 years. Augustine is undone by this. He rushes out into the garden alone. He is in agony, genuinely, physically in agony. He tears at his hair, he throws his arms around, he falls under a fig tree weeping so hard he cannot speak. Now, picture that man. He's 32 years old, the most brilliant mind of his generation, lying in the dirt under a fig tree in a garden in Milan weeping because he knows the truth and cannot make himself step into it. How long, Lord? How long? And then, from somewhere beyond the garden wall, a child's voice, singing a simple phrase over and over like a game. Tole leje, tole leje. Take up and read, take up and read. Augustine later wrote that he did not know if it was a boy or a girl. He did not know if it was even a real child playing or something else entirely. But he heard it as a word to him specifically. He stopped weeping. He stood up. He walked back to where he had left a copy of Paul's letters lying open next to Olympias. He opened it at random. His eyes fell on Romans 13 verse 13. He read it once. Not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts. He later wrote, No further would I read, nor needed I, for instantly at the end of this sentence A light of serenity infused into my heart, and all the darkness of doubt vanished away. Fifteen years of running, over, just like that, under a fig tree in a garden in Milan. He walked back to Olympius. He showed him the passage. Olympius read the next verse, which spoke of someone weak in faith being received, and he too converted on the spot right there in the garden. Augustine went inside to find Monica. She was overjoyed, but not surprised. She had been praying toward this moment for 17 years. So she was overjoyed. Augustine was baptized the following spring, Easter of 387 AD, by Bishop Ambrose himself. His son, Adeodatus, and his friend, Olympius, were baptized alongside him. They made plans to return to North Africa, but on the way, at the port city of Ostia, outside Rome, Augustine and Monica sat together at a window overlooking a garden, talking quietly about heaven, about eternity, about what was waiting beyond this life. Augustine writes that in that conversation, they seemed to briefly touch something beyond words. Nine days later, Monica died. She was 56 years old. She had spent her entire adult life praying for this man. She died knowing he had found what she always believed was waiting for him. She asked only to be remembered at the altar. He returned to North Africa. Adeodatus died not too long after. Augustine sold his inheritance, gave the money to the poor, and turned his family home into a monastery. In 391, he was ordained a priest in Hippo. dragged out to the front of the congregation while weeping, and was basically told that the people had decided that he was their priest. By 395 AD, he was bishop. He served for 35 years. He wrote 113 books, 218 letters, and 500 sermons. The Confessions, the City of God, works still read and argued over 1,600 years later. He died in 430 as the vandals besieged Hippo outside his window. He had asked his monks to write the penitential Psalms on the walls of his room so he could read them as he lay dying. He died reading Psalms while the empire fell. All right, back on the porch. The prayer. Lord, make me chaste and continent, but not yet. I that is one of the most honest things a human being has ever said to God. And I think a lot of us are praying some version of it right now, whether we would call it that or not. Not yet, Lord. I'll deal with this thing. This habit, this relationship, this truth I've been avoiding, but not yet. When things settle down, when I feel ready. Augustine is not judging you for that prayer. He prayed it for 15 years. He has no standing to judge. But here is what his story says about it. The knot yet did not protect him from the cost. It only delayed it. Every year he spent running from the truth was a year he could not get back. The delay did not make it cheaper. It just made it longer. And this is what gets me most about Augustine. He writes about all of it. He does not hide his failures or clean up his history. The Confessions is one of the most brutally honest documents in human literature. He describes his theft, his pride, his lust, his lie to his mother on the dock, all of it in the book because he believes, having lived it, that the honesty itself is part of the redemption process. You are not too far gone. Augustine was not too far gone. The man who lied to his mother, who spent years in heresy, who prayed not yet for 15 years. That man is a doctor of the church. His mother's tears were not wasted. So, the practical challenge this week. What is your not yet? You don't have to solve it today. Just name it honestly to yourself. And then, when you're ready, take it up and read. Now it is time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for Augustine. Thank you for the fifteen years of running and the one moment under a fig tree and the mother who never stopped praying. For everyone listening right now who is in the middle of their fifteen years, who knows the truth and isn't ready yet, who is brilliant enough to construct an elaborate reason to wait just a little longer, remind them of the garden. Remind them that the voice they kept almost hearing is real. That the moment they have been postponing is not going to be as devastating as they have imagined. And for every moniker listening, every person who has been praying for someone they love without seeing any evidence that it is working, 17 years, Lord. You heard 17 years of her tears. Don't let them lose heart. We love you. Even when we are lying to ourselves about how long we are going to make you wait. Amen. One more thing before we go. Augustine of Hippo is the patron saint of brewers, because of his wild youth, and of printers, theologians, and sore eyes. He is also the patron saint of the Diocese of Hippo and of several religious orders that follow his rule, including the Augustinians. But... The patronage that means the most to me given this story is this. Augustine is the patron saint of those seeking faith, not those who have found it. Those who are still looking, still running, still praying, not yet and meaning it and hating themselves a little for meaning it. The man who ran for 15 years became the patron of everyone still running. His feast day is August 28th and his mother Monica who deserves her own episode and may get one? Her feast day is August 27th, the day before her sons. The church put them right next to each other in the calendar. And that's not an accident. That's episode five of Everyday Saints. If Augustine's story hit close to home, and I suspect it did for more of you than will admit it, share it with one person, someone who might be in their own garden, someone who needs to hear that the running can end. Leave a review if you have a minute, it helps more people find the show. Next week we are going back to unknown territory. A woman. A story from a world most of us know nothing about. And a courage that will make you put down whatever you are doing and just listen. I'm John O'Connor, thanks for sitting on the porch with me and I will see you next week.