Augustine: The Restless Heart

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) is the largest figure between the apostles and the Reformation, the mind the whole Western church, Catholic and Protestant alike, has argued with ever since. He deserves to be honored, and he deserves to be weighed, with the same honesty he taught us to use. So this page does both: it tells the story of a brilliant, restless man who chased everything and found rest only in God, and it names plainly where, late in life, his answer to one heresy bent the stream toward another error this site gently disputes. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.

The restless heart

He was a North African, gifted past his peers and ruled by his appetites, who spent his youth chasing sex, status, and clever philosophies, drifting for years through the Manichees and the fashionable skepticism of his day. He could see the better thing and not will it; his own famous prayer from those years was, "give me chastity, but not yet." His mother Monica prayed for him without ceasing. And then, in a garden in Milan, undone and weeping, he heard a child's voice chanting tolle lege, "take up and read." He took up Paul's letters, and his eyes fell on the words:

"Let us walk honestly, as in the day… But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof" (Romans 13:13-14).

He did not need to read further. The long flight was over. He wrote the whole story down in the Confessions, the first real spiritual autobiography, a book that is really one long prayer, and its opening line has named the human condition for sixteen centuries:

Grace against self-salvation

Augustine's great and lasting gift was his defense of grace. A British monk named Pelagius taught that human beings can, by their own unaided will, choose God and live righteously, that grace is mostly good example and good teaching. Augustine, who knew from the inside that he could see the good and still not do it, answered that no one lifts himself out of the pit; God's grace must come first, awaken the dead will, and carry it. On this the church agreed with him, condemning Pelagianism, and on this this site agrees too: salvation is God's initiative, not a self-help project; we are saved by grace, not by mustering our own goodness. That conviction is the floor under every page here.

Where the stream bent

But weigh honestly. Pressing his case against Pelagius ever harder in his later years, Augustine moved past "grace comes first" toward conclusions the early church had not drawn: a guilt inherited so totally that infants are damned without baptism; an eternal election fixed for a chosen few with the rest justly passed over; a grace, in his sternest writings, that the chosen cannot finally resist and that decides all. A thousand years later Calvin would quarry that later Augustine for the full system of unconditional election and irresistible grace. As the church's own history puts it: Augustine planted the seed; Calvin raised the structure.

The two cities

His other monument came as the world fell apart. When Rome was sacked in 410 and pagans blamed the Christians, Augustine answered with The City of God: history is the story of two cities woven together, the City of Man built on love of self, and the City of God built on love of God, and no earthly empire, not even Rome, is the Kingdom. The church is a pilgrim people passing through, its hope fixed beyond every flag and frontier. It is one of the wisest things ever written about living as a Christian inside a civilization that is not your home, and it has aged better than the empire it outlived.

Where this lands

Take the whole man. From Augustine we have the truest sentence about the human heart, that it is restless until it rests in God; the bedrock truth that grace comes first and we cannot save ourselves; and the sober wisdom that no nation is the Kingdom. Honor him for all of it. And on the one point where his late zeal hardened into a decree the earlier church never taught, weigh him the way he taught us to weigh everyone, against the text, with open hands, the very honesty that makes him worth reading at all.

Related: Predestination & Free Will, TULIP, Free Will, and Did the Church Get It Wrong? (the longer weighing); The Witnesses; What the Early Church Confessed; and the wider story in The Church, One Story. Drawn from Augustine's Confessions and City of God (public-domain translations). The Council of Orange (529) is the church's own correction. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub.