Saint Augustine of Hippo’s 3-Stage Path to the Divine

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) found his path to God through language. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

When 16-year-old Saint Augustine of Hippo stole and ate a handful of pears from his neighbor’s orchard, he felt a nagging remorse. In his “Confessions,” he wondered why he stole food even though he wasn’t hungry. He concluded that no one desires evil for evil’s sake. Rather, we desire lesser, immediately gratifying goods over greater ones. This insight into the nature of sin prompted the reflections that later became his most famous work.

British academic and theologian Henry Chadwick described the “Confessions” as one of “the great masterpieces of western literature.” After a series of candid reflections on his youth, the book traces Augustine’s struggles with sin and paganism in adulthood. Augustine’s progression from sin to virtue is clear through three stages of his relationship to language, which, as he eventually discovered, was the same as his relationship to God.

“St. Augustine,” between 1645 and 1650, by Philippe de Champaigne. Oil on Canvas; 30 7/8 inches by 24 2/5 inches. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public Domain

Augustine and Rhetoric

Augustine was born in A.D. 354 in Thagaste, in the Roman Empire’s province of Numidia, modern-day Algeria. At 11, he began to attend school, where he became familiar with Latin literature and Roman pagan beliefs. When he was 17, he moved to Carthage to study rhetoric. Enticed by the lure of a bustling town, Augustine associated with unruly teenagers, developing an addiction to lustful behavior. This issue persisted until adulthood, when Augustine became a professor of rhetoric at the imperial court in Milan.

Although Augustine excelled at teaching and public speaking, rhetoric’s concern with earthly gains slowly wore him down. His vain pursuits of status were the source of self-loathing. He saw how rhetoric taught people to conceal lies with clever speech, deceiving the masses to judge elegantly articulated wrongs more favorably than good deeds. If rhetors “described their lusts in a rich vocabulary of well-constructed prose with a copious and ornate style, they received praise and congratulated themselves.”

The world of rhetoric in which Augustine flourished prized material glory over anything else. Augustine’s excellent linguistic skills earned him status as one of the best rhetoricians in the Roman Empire. His rise to fame, however, was solely due to a pursuit of the “lesser goods” he associated with the theft of the pears: vanity, money, celebrity.

Fortunately, Augustine’s intoxicating immersion in this world had a silver lining, which he recognized when he first read philosophy.

Augustine and Philosophy 

When Augustine read Cicero’s “Hortensius,” he was struck. The Roman statesman’s dialogue talks about Cicero’s friendly rival, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. Despite being his competitor in the legal arena of the Roman Republic, Cicero admired Hortensius’s breadth of knowledge. In the dialogue, the two discussed the best use of free time, settling on “philosophy” as their answer.

It wasn’t Cicero’s style that inspired Augustine but his ideas. Cicero exhorted the reader to pursue “wisdom, wherever found,” with a curious and staunch mind. This encouragement moved Augustine to reconsider his flimsy spiritual commitments: “Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise.”

The same was true for the Platonic books that Augustine read as a teen. Through pagan philosophy, he slowly turned away from earthbound rhetoric.

Yet philosophy wasn’t enough to help Augustine heal his moral malaise. As he realized later, pagan authors said nothing about the Incarnation: “that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there.” Even though he wasn’t  aiming at higher wisdom, Augustine only recognized the essential importance of the Christian faith after meeting Saint Ambrose.

Saint Ambrose and Augustine’s Conversion

Saint Ambrose was a theologian who served as Bishop of Milan from 374 to 397. Ambrose taught Augustine to read scripture allegorically, focusing on symbols and metaphors instead of literal claims. He would “expound spiritually” on passages whose literal explanations “seemed to contain perverse teaching.” The last chapter of the “Confessions” provides an example of such an allegorical reading. There Augustine discussed Genesis’s mentions of “fish and whales,” which for him “symbolize the sacraments of initiation and miraculous wonder necessary to initiate and convert ‘uninstructed and unbelieving people.’”

Even though Augustine was already familiar with the Bible by the time he met Ambrose, he'd lost hope in the teachings of the Catholic Church. As he admitted, he began to love Ambrose “not at the first as a teacher of the truth, for I had entirely despaired of finding that in thy Church—but as a friendly man.” Their friendship marked the last paradigm shift in Augustine’s relationship to language. So far, Augustine had used words either for material gains or to study pagan philosophy. Now, he was ready to understand the highest and most profound language produced by humankind: in sacred scripture.

In 386, Augustine converted to Christianity. As he recounts in the “Confessions,” he heard a child’s voice inviting him to “take up and read.” He opened a letter of Saint Paul at random, which exhorted him to abandon drunkenness and lust. What he read resonated with him so strongly that he decided to devote the rest of his life to preaching the Gospel. After his conversion, he left his position as a rhetoric teacher. He was ordained a priest in his hometown of Hippo in 391.

"Scenes from the Life of Saint Augustine of Hippo," 1490, by Master of the Legend of St. Augustine. Oil, gold, and silver on wood; 54 1/4 inches by 59 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain

Through Words to God

Augustine’s lifelong struggle with language and its applications is implicit in the very beginning of the “Confessions.” After praising God with an introductory poem, Augustine asks: “But in these words what have I said, my God, my life, my holy sweetness? What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you?” The bishop knew that descriptions of God reduced His unfathomable nature to finite concepts. Yet, he also knew that words were necessary to exalt God’s creation: “Yet woe to those who are silent about you because, though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say.”

Throughout his life, Augustine learned that language for its own sake is fatally flawed. He went from practicing and teaching rhetoric for material gains, to studying classical philosophy as a source of pagan wisdom, to converting to Christianity and embracing sacred language as its highest use. Augustine learned from 2 Timothy 2:14 that people shouldn’t “quarrel about words, for that is good for nothing but the subversion of the hearers.” Rather, we should use language as a tool to know ourselves and our place in the sacred cosmos. Despite their limits, it’s only through words, and ultimately through the Word, that Augustine came to a partial but fulfilling understanding of God.

Whatever our religious affiliations may be, Augustine’s life offers us a timely example of what a spiritual journey through language looks like, so that we, too, may know the secrets of our heart.

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