Today’s homily: St Augustine of Hippo

The Restless Heart, the Conquered Will, and the City That Cannot Fall

MASS In médio Ecclésiæ
LESSON 2 Timothy 4: 1-8
GOSPEL St Matthew 5: 13-19
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV

Beloved in Christ,

Saint Augustine is one of those saints whom almost everyone thinks he knows. We know the phrases: the restless heart, the tears of Saint Monica, the voice saying tolle, lege—“take and read”—the brilliant sinner who became a great bishop and Doctor of the Church. But the Church gives us Augustine today not merely as an interesting convert, nor even chiefly as a psychological study in the search for meaning. She gives him to us as a witness to something far more fundamental: the sovereignty of divine grace over the rebellious human heart.

The Introit gives us the key immediately: “In the midst of the Church the Lord opened his mouth: and filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” Augustine possessed a mouth before his conversion. Indeed, he made his living by it. Born at Tagaste in Roman North Africa in 354, he became a brilliant rhetorician, ambitious, intellectually restless, intensely conscious of his own gifts. He could argue, persuade, charm, demolish an opponent. Yet the liturgy does not praise the brilliance of Augustine. It says that the Lord opened his mouth. Nature had given Augustine eloquence. Grace made that eloquence Catholic. Nature gave him intelligence. Grace subjected that intelligence to Truth. Nature gave him an immense capacity for love. Grace taught him what, and above all Whom, he ought to love.

This is why Augustine’s life cannot be reduced to the sentimental formula that a bad man became good. His great problem was not that he lacked desire; it was that his desires were disordered. He loved many good things—friendship, beauty, learning, human affection—but he loved them without order, as though created things could give what only the Creator can give. Augustine would later teach that virtue consists in the ordo amoris, the right ordering of love. Sin is not merely doing forbidden things. Sin is loving lesser things as though they were ultimate things; loving ourselves above God; loving pleasure above purity; human approval above truth; temporal advantage above eternal beatitude.

And therefore the famous sentence with which Augustine begins the Confessions is not a piece of religious poetry. It is a diagnosis of the human condition: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” Our civilisation is perhaps more Augustinian than it knows because it is so profoundly restless. We have multiplied amusements, communications, entertainments, identities, therapies, experiences and conveniences, yet the characteristic condition of modern man remains dissatisfaction. Why? Because no created thing can bear the weight of the human desire for beatitude. We ask creatures to do the work of God, and then complain when they collapse beneath the burden.

Augustine tried ideas. He tried Manichaeism. He tried ambition. He tried sensuality. He tried intellectual sophistication. He fathered a son, Adeodatus, in the long relationship in which he lived outside Christian marriage. He sought wisdom while resisting the implications of wisdom. And this is perhaps the most penetrating thing about his conversion: Augustine did not principally lack evidence for Christianity. He lacked the willingness to surrender. He knew increasingly where truth pointed; what he feared was what truth might demand.

How modern that is. Many say today, “I cannot believe the Church teaches this,” when what they mean is, “I do not wish to live as though the Church’s teaching were true.” The obstacle is often presented as intellectual when its deepest root is moral. Augustine understood this from within. The intellect may discover the road, but the will must consent to walk it.

Hence his enormous importance in the controversies about grace. Against Pelagius, Augustine defended what our fallen pride perpetually resists: we do not save ourselves. Christianity is not a programme of self-improvement with divine encouragement added afterwards. Fallen man does not merely need better information. He needs healing. The intellect is darkened; the will is weakened; desire is disordered. Grace must precede, awaken, heal, strengthen and elevate us.

That does not mean that grace destroys freedom. Precisely the opposite: grace makes genuine freedom possible. The drunkard who “freely” chooses another drink is less free than the sober man who can refuse it. The adulterer enslaved to passion is less free than the chaste man who commands himself. Freedom is not simply the capacity to choose between alternatives. True freedom is the increasing capacity to choose the good because we have been liberated from slavery to sin.

Augustine knew what it was to say, in effect, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” He knew divided willing: wanting holiness and simultaneously clinging to what holiness required him to surrender. And so when grace finally conquered him, it did not crush Augustine’s personality. It liberated Augustine from the tyranny of Augustine.

That truth is desperately needed because modernity has turned self-assertion into a creed. We are told that authenticity means discovering our desires and obeying them. Augustine tells us that some desires must be converted, some denied, some crucified, and all subordinated to God. Christianity does not ask, “What do you feel yourself to be?” It asks, “What has God made you to be, and what by grace does He command you to become?”

This brings us directly to today’s Epistle. Saint Paul warns Timothy that the time will come when men “will not endure sound doctrine; but according to their own desires they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.” That is an extraordinarily precise description of the perennial temptation in religion. The problem is not that men cease wanting teachers. They want teachers very much. They simply choose teachers who will confirm what they have already decided to desire.

Against this, Paul gives the bishop his command: “Preach the word: be instant in season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.” Augustine fulfilled precisely this ministry. He preached against Manichaeism, Donatism, Pelagianism and other errors not because controversy delighted him, but because error harms souls. If a physician discovers poison in a medicine bottle, charity does not require him to alter the label so as not to upset the patient. Charity requires him to tell the truth.

There is a lesson here for the Church in every age, and particularly our own. The temptation is always to imagine that doctrine becomes pastoral by becoming negotiable. But Christ in today’s Gospel says exactly the contrary: “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the law.” Then comes the tremendous warning: he who breaks even the least commandments and teaches others to do so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does and teaches them shall be called great.

There could scarcely be a more Augustinian Gospel. For Augustine learned that Christianity does not begin when Christ accommodates Himself to us. Christianity begins when we surrender ourselves to Christ.

And notice Our Lord’s images: salt and light. Salt preserves because it is different from what it preserves. Light illuminates because it is not identical with darkness. If the Church becomes merely an echo of the world’s assumptions, she loses precisely that which makes her useful to the world. Salt that no longer tastes of anything is not compassionate salt. It is useless salt.

Augustine therefore stands before us not merely as the convert from sexual sin or philosophical error, but as the bishop who understood that the Church serves civilisation by refusing to worship civilisation.

He lived at the end of an age. In 410 Rome itself was sacked by Alaric. Pagans accused Christianity of having weakened the Empire, and Augustine began the monumental De Civitate Dei, The City of God. There he exposed the illusion that any earthly civilisation, however magnificent, can be permanent. There are, he says, ultimately two cities formed by two loves: the earthly city, founded upon love of self even to contempt of God; and the heavenly city, founded upon love of God even to the forgetting of self.

And here Augustine becomes almost prophetic for us. Every political order, every empire, every social arrangement that attempts to become ultimate will eventually demand what belongs to God. Nations matter. Civilisations matter. Laws matter. Culture matters. But none of them is the Kingdom of God. Rome fell. Other empires have fallen. Our own civilisation is not exempt from judgement. When a culture rejects the natural law, despises Christian revelation, corrupts children, mocks chastity, destroys innocent life, redefines the human person and calls its rebellion progress, Catholics must not imagine that survival consists in following it more quickly into the abyss.

Our citizenship is elsewhere.

And Augustine did not merely write this doctrine. Providence required him to die inside it.

In the year 430, the Vandals invaded North Africa and besieged Hippo. Augustine was seventy-five years old. The world he had known was collapsing around him. Roman Africa, with its cities, churches, schools and institutions, seemed to be passing away. Augustine fell ill. In those final days, conscious of approaching judgement, the great Doctor asked that the penitential Psalms be placed where he could read them. The man who had written perhaps more profoundly about grace than almost any Christian theologian did not die congratulating himself upon his achievements. He died doing penance.

Outside the walls stood the barbarians.

Inside lay Augustine.

And what an extraordinary final commentary upon The City of God. One city was visibly falling. Augustine was preparing to enter the other.

That is Christianity.

We do not believe because Christianity guarantees that our civilisation will survive. We do not keep the Faith because fidelity will make us popular. We do not obey God because obedience always brings temporal success. We believe because God is God, truth is truth, Christ has conquered death, and the heavenly Jerusalem cannot be sacked by Vandals, legislated away by governments, compromised by bishops, mocked out of existence by unbelievers, or dissolved by the passing fashions of an age.

And quietly within today’s Mass another saint stands beside Augustine: Saint Hermes, martyr of Rome. We know vastly less about him, yet the Church prays that, strengthened by his example, we may “despise the prosperity of the world” for love of God and “not fear worldly adversity.” How perfectly he completes Augustine. Augustine teaches us what rightly ordered love means. Hermes demonstrates what rightly ordered love can endure.

The Doctor speaks.

The martyr bleeds.

Both testify to the same truth: God must be loved first.

So what does Augustine ask of us today? Not admiration. Conversion.

Ask yourself not simply whether you believe in God, but what actually governs your life. What do you fear losing most? Whose approval matters most? What sin have you renamed so that you need not repent of it? What commandment do you secretly hope the Church will one day cease to teach? What created thing are you asking to give you the happiness that only God can give?

There lies our Manichaeism. There lies our Carthage. There lies our garden at Milan.

And there grace waits.

The same God who pursued Augustine through Monica’s tears, Ambrose’s preaching, disappointment, philosophy, Scripture and the secret movements of conscience has not ceased pursuing souls. But grace calls for surrender. Augustine eventually ceased saying, “Tomorrow.” That is the beginning of sanctity.

The Communion calls the bishop “a faithful and wise steward, whom the Lord set over His family; to give them their measure of wheat in due season.” Augustine gave that wheat abundantly: Scripture, doctrine, sacrament, truth, grace. But the food ultimately comes from another table—the altar of Jesus Christ.

Here the restless heart encounters its rest.

Here the divided will encounters healing.

Here the sinner encounters grace.

Here citizens of the earthly city receive the pledge of the heavenly one.

And when the walls finally fall—and they will; the walls of youth, health, wealth, reputation, nation and eventually life itself—only one question will matter: which city have we loved?

Let Augustine answer with his life.

Let Hermes answer with his blood.

Let Christ answer from the Gospel.

Love God above all things. Keep His commandments. Receive His grace. Refuse the pleasant fables of itching ears. Fight the good fight. Keep the Faith.

For the earthly city passes away.

But the City of God cannot fall.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

---

Homilies Archive

Mass Propers

DAILY MASS ONLINE

One of the earliest online apostolates dedicated to the Traditional Latin Mass, Old Roman TV began broadcasting the Holy Sacrifice on the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 2008. During the COVID-19 pandemic, additional programming — devotions, catechesis, and conferences — was added to support the faithful in prayer and formation.

Support the daily Holy Mass on Old Roman TV by offering a Mass intention — for loved ones, thanksgiving, or the repose of souls. Your intention helps sustain the sacred liturgy and brings grace to those you remember before God’s altar.

Devotional Articles