Please Join the
Villanova Community in Celebration
of the Feast of St. Augustine and Welcome Mass on SUNDAY, AUGUST 29th - 6:15 PM on MENDEL FIELD
The Augustinians, sponsors
of Villanova University, are the spiritual descendants of Saint Augustine, who is
generally regarded as the greatest thinker of both Christian antiquity and Western
intellectual thought.
Almost sixteen and a half
centuries separate us from St. Augustine, as Henri Marrou in his classic biography of
Augustine reminds us. But is "separate" really an appropriate term? he asks. Do
not these centuries instead "unite us" to Augustine? After all, these centuries
are not an empty gap; they are penetrated through and through with Augustine's presence,
with his greatness and influence, to say nothing of the debates that have been generated
by the interpretations of his thought.
Augustine's influence comes from his writings, which are prodigious. His books number ninety-three, and there are almost three
hundred letters and four hundred sermons--out of an estimated eight thousand that he
preached--that have survived to this day, and more are being discovered.
His unique synthesis of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage set the pattern and defined the
problems of religion and culture for fifteen hundred years. Theology and philosophy, as we
know it, would be inconceivable without his Confessions, his The City of God,
his treatises and his sermons. .
Without him we would be at a loss to understand such luminaries as Bonaventure, Thomas
Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Luther, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Cardinal Newman, Marcel,
Blondel, Heidegger, Arendt, Rahner, and so many other great minds down to our own day. He
remains one of the few Christian thinkers of whose existence non-Christians are aware, and
whose influence on the evolution of the human mind is acknowledged by believers and
non-believers alike. Less than nine months after Augustine's death in 430, Pope Celestine
pronounced the first of a long series of tributes to him that continue down to our own
time: "We remember [Augustine] as a man of such great wisdom that he was always
counted by my predecessors to be one of the greatest teachers."
Augustine, named Aurelius Augustinus, was born in 354 A.D.
of parents of comfortable means in the North African town of Thagaste. At the age of
sixteen he went to Carthage to finish his education. In 375, on reading Cicero's Hortensus,
he became deeply interested in philosophy and later a convert to the Manichean religion.
Augustine was a brilliant and passionate scholar. He taught rhetoric in Carthage and
founded his own school of rhetoric at Rome, in 383. Offered a professorship at Milan,
Augustine came under the influence both of Neoplatonism and of the preaching of St.
Ambrose. After enduring inward conflicts and intense struggles with sexual temptations,
Augustine renounced his unorthodox beliefs and converted to Christianity at the age of
thirty two.
After his conversion, Augustine returned to North Africa
where he established a monastic community for himself and his friends in his parents' home
at Thagaste. He devoted a joyful three years to study, dialogue, and prayer, and it is at
this time that Augustine wrote his famous Rule for the monks who lived with him.
The scope of Augustine's intellectual and apostolic
achievement is staggering. In addition to his literary output, he was a priest and bishop
who traveled thousands of miles in the Church's service and fought tirelessly against the
people who were dividing Catholics to the point of physical violence. But in the midst of
these demanding activities, Augustine's life had a very different side; he was at heart a
monk.
When he became a bishop of Hippo, where he was to spend
the remainder of his forty-four years, Augustine was determined not to abandon a way of
life that he had found so fulfilling. He established a monastery for priests in his
bishop's residence. There they lived together in a religious community according to the Rule.
Augustine's monastery took monasticism in a new direction.
Monks had pastoral duties, and they could not abandon those duties for a life of
contemplation. Augustine had come to believe that a monk could lead both a contemplative
life and a life of action, as expressed in his work The City of God. A monk's
first responsibility was serving the Church; but study, scholarship and contemplation
would make that service all the more meaningful.
Since its establishment in the thirteenth century, the
Augustinian Order has been characterized by Augustine's blending of the active and
contemplative styles of life. For Augustinians and the institutions they sponsor, this is
perhaps the most distinctive and challenging feature of their community and its tradition.
Source: The Mission and Heritage of Villanova
University: Catholic and Augustinian (2000),
