During his audience on Feb. 27, Pope Benedict XVI concluded his series of meditations on St. Augustine. In his catechesis, the Holy Father focused on St. Augustine’s conversion experience. Throughout his series of teachings, Pope Benedict XVI has repeatedly emphasized the profound impact that St. Augustine has had on his own life and ministry.

Dear brothers and sisters,

At today’s gathering, I would like to conclude my presentation on St. Augustine.

After having reflected on his life, his works and some aspects of his thought, today I would like to focus on that interior journey that made him one of the greatest converts in the history of Christianity.

During my pilgrimage to Pavia last year to venerate the mortal remains of this great Doctor of the Church, I devoted my reflections in a special way this experience. By doing so, I wanted to express the respect that the entire Catholic Church owes to him but I also wanted to manifest in a visible way my own personal devotion and gratitude to someone with whom I feel a deep bond for the role that he has had in my life as a theologian, priest and pastor.

Today, it is still possible to follow St. Augustine’s inner journey thanks, above all, to his book, Confessions, which was written as praise to God and which is at the origins of one of the most specifically Western literary genres — the autobiography, a personal expression of one’s awareness of self.

Indeed, whoever delves into this extraordinary and fascinating book, which is still widely read today, quickly realizes that St. Augustine’s conversion was neither sudden nor instantaneous. Rather, it can be truly described as a personal journey that still serves as a model for each one of us.

Of course, this journey culminated with his conversion and later with his baptism, but it did not end at that Easter vigil in 387 when Bishop Ambrose baptized this master of rhetoric from Africa.

Actually, Augustine’s conversion journey continued humbly to the very end of his life, so much so that we can truly say that its various stages — of which we can easily distinguish three — constitute one great conversion.

Quest for Truth

From the very beginning, St. Augustine passionately sought after the truth and did so throughout his entire life. The first stage of his journey to conversion took place as he progressively drew closer to Christianity.

In reality, he had received a Christian education from his mother, with whom he was always close, and, even though he led a disorderly life during his younger years, he always felt a deep attraction to Christ, as he himself pointed out, having imbibed a love for the Name of the Lord with his mother’s milk (see Confessions, III, 4, 8).

Philosophy, especially Platonic philosophy, also made a contribution to drawing him subsequently closer to Christ, demonstrating to him the existence of the Logos, creative reason.

While philosophical works showed him that the entire world stemmed from reason, it did not tell him how to attain this Logos, which seemed so distant. Upon reading the epistles of St. Paul and within the faith of the Catholic Church, truth was fully revealed to him.

St. Augustine summarized this experience in one of the most famous pages of the Confessions where he recounts that, amid the turmoil of his thoughts, he withdrew to a garden where he suddenly heard a child’s voice singing a jingle over and over again that he had never heard before: “tolle, lege, tolle, lege” (Take up and read, take up and read, Confessions, VIII,12, 29).

At that moment, he recalled the conversion of Anthony, the father of monasticism, and he carefully turned his attention once again to Paul’s letters, which had been in his hands a short time before. He opened them and his gaze fell on the passage from the Letter to the Romans where the apostle exhorts the Romans to abandon the works of the flesh and to put on Christ (Romans 13:13-14).

He realized that these words at that particular moment were directed to him personally and came from God through the apostle in order to show him what he should do at that time. He felt the clouds of doubt dissipate and finally felt like he was able to give himself entirely to Christ. “For you so converted me unto yourself,” he noted (Confessions, VIII, 12, 30).

This was his first and most decisive conversion.

Augustine, the master of rhetoric from Africa, was able to arrive at this first and fundamental stage of his long journey, thanks to his passion for mankind and for truth — a passion that led him to seek God, so great and inaccessible.

Faith in Christ led him to understand that God, who seemed so distant, was actually not distant at all. In fact, he drew close to us by becoming one of us.

In this sense, faith in Christ was the culmination of Augustine’s long journey in search of truth. Only a God become “touchable,” one of us, was a God to whom we are able to pray — for whom and with whom one could live.

We have to travel along this path with courage and, at the same time, with humility, as well as with an openness to the ongoing purification that each of us always needs.

Contemplation and Service

Nevertheless, St. Augustine’s journey, as we have already noted, did not end at that Easter vigil in 387. He returned to Africa and founded a small monastery to which he withdrew with a few friends in order to devote himself to a life of contemplation and study. This was his life’s dream.

At that point, he felt called to live entirely for the truth and with the truth in friendship with Christ, who is the truth. It was a beautiful dream, but it lasted only three years before he, in spite of his reluctance, was ordained a priest in Hippo and was called to serve the faithful, continuing to live with Christ and for Christ, but in service to all.

This was very hard for him, but he realized from the very beginning that it is only by living for others and not simply a life of personal contemplation that he would truly be able to live with Christ and for Christ. Therefore, by giving up a life focused solely on meditation, Augustine learned, often with difficulty, to place the fruits of his intellect at the service of others.

He learned to communicate his faith to ordinary people and to live for them in the city that had become his home, generously and tirelessly devoting himself to a very burdensome work that he describes in one of his most beautiful sermons: “To preach unceasingly, discuss, reiterate, edify, and be at the disposal of everyone — it is an enormous responsibility, a great weight, an immense effort” (Sermon 339, 4).

But he took this weight upon himself, knowing that in this way he could draw closer to Christ. His second true conversion was to understand that a person is able to reach others through simplicity and humility.

A Life of Humility

However, there is a last step in Augustine’s journey — a third conversion — that led him to ask God for forgiveness every day of his life. At first, he thought that once he was baptized and lived a life in communion with Christ through the sacraments and through the celebration of the Eucharist, he would attain the life that was described in the Sermon on the Mount — a life of perfection that is conferred through baptism and reconfirmed in the Eucharist.

In this latter period of his life, he realized that what he had said in his first homilies on the Sermon on the Mount — that we as Christians live out this ideal in a permanent way — was a mistake.

Only Christ himself truly and completely lived out the Sermon on the Mount.

We always need to be cleansed by Christ, who washes our feet, and to be renewed by him. We need an ongoing conversion. Up until the very end, we need a humility that acknowledges that we are sinners on a journey until the Lord gives us his hand and finally leads us into eternal life. It is with this attitude of humility, lived out day after day, that Augustine died.

This attitude of deep humility before the one Lord Jesus led him to experience an intellectual humility as well.

During the last years of his life, Augustine, who was truly one of the greatest figures in the history of thought, felt a desire to undertake a clear and critical examination of his many works. This was the origin of his Retractationes (Revisions) that situates his theological thinking, which is truly great, within the humble and holy faith which he referred to simply with the word Catholica, that is, of the Church.

“I understood,” he wrote in this very original work, “that only one is truly perfect, and that the words of the Sermon on the Mount are completely fulfilled in only one person — Jesus Christ himself. On the other hand, the whole Church — all of us, including the apostles — must pray every day: ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us’” (Retractationes I, 19, 1-3).

Importance Today

Once he was converted to Christ, who is truth and love, Augustine followed him all his life and became a model for every human being, for all of us who are seeking God.

For this reason, I ended my pilgrimage to Pavia by offering to the Church and the world, before the tomb of this great man who so loved God, my first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love). This encyclical, especially in its first part, is deeply indebted to St. Augustine’s thinking.

Today, like then, humanity needs to know and, above all, to experience this fundamental reality:

God is love and an encounter with him is the only answer to the restlessness of the human heart. A heart where hope dwells, albeit perhaps amid a darkness of which many of our contemporaries are unaware, opens the doors to the future for those of us who are Christian, so much so that St. Paul wrote “in hope we are saved” (Romans 8:24).

I wanted to dedicate my second encyclical, Spe Salvi (On Christian Hope), which also owes a great deal to Augustine and to his encounter with God, to hope.

In a beautiful text, St. Augustine defines prayer as the expression of our desire and tells us that God answers by drawing our hearts closer to him. We, for our part, have to purify our desires and our hopes in order to receive God’s gentleness (see In I Ioannis, 4, 6).

In fact, this alone — opening ourselves up to others as well — can save us.

Let us pray, therefore, that we may be able to follow the example of this great convert every day of our lives, encountering the Lord Jesus in every moment of our lives, the only one who saves us, purifies us, and gives us true joy and true life.

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