Rest in Christ

St. Augustine's Conversion

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

— St. Augustine of Hippo

The thing I find most fascinating about St. Augustine is how viscerally relatable his testimony to the grace of God is. That is, after all, why The Confessions has endured the test of time.

Augustine’s life was a circuitous exercise in searching. His life is a narrative of a man who tried to find fulfillment in everything the physical world has to offer, only to find himself at the end of his rope until he eventually surrendered to Christ.

“Restless”

That’s how he described it. Not a lull of restlessness; an inability to find in the structure of his life something of substance or something to hold up his peace.

To understand Augustine, you have to understand the air of competing worldviews in the household he grew up in.

His father, Patricius, was a mid-level administrator in the Roman town of Thagaste in North Africa. He was a man of the Empire, which is to say he was driven by the standard Roman ambitions of wealth, social status, and political leverage. Fitting such a worldview, he worshipped the Roman ancestral gods and studied Roman philosophy.

Then there was Monica, Augustine’s mother. Through an arranged marriage, she became the wife of Patricius, but Monica was a devout Christian. She had been raised in the church, and her life was defined by a quiet endurance in faith. She prayed constantly for her husband, who was unfaithful and prone to an explosive temper.

You have to see the tension here.

For Monica, the ultimate reality was eternity and communion with the person of Jesus.

For Patricius, the ultimate reality was the immediate, tangible achievements of the Roman world.

And stuck right there in the middle of this domestic tug-of-war was their son, Augustine. Their hopes for him were mutually exclusive. Monica prayed continuously for Augustine, wishing he would come to know her God. Patricius envisioned a prestigious life for his son. Training him in philosophy and rhetoric, he aspired for Augustine to become a great leader in the Empire.

As Augustine grew up, he leaned hard into his father’s map of the world, fueled by ambition and visions of success. After all, he was considered by any metric an academic prodigy of his day. He excelled in rhetoric, a high-status skill set in his day.

At eighteen, he moved to Carthage to study, and this is where the searching really kicks into high gear. He hoped that his education would help him secure a position in the high imperial court.

But Augustine didn't just want to be well-educated; he wanted to experience everything the city had to offer. He entered into a long-term, sexually illicit relationship with a woman outside of marriage, eventually having a son with her.

He also explicitly rejected his mother’s Christian faith, viewing it as intellectually simplistic. Eventually, he joined the Manicheans, a dualistic sect with a complex mythology of light versus dark.

Eventually, his talent became impossible to ignore. He was offered the position of public rhetor in Milan, the political “big leagues” of the fourth century. It was the high imperial court. He had finally achieved everything his father had envisioned for him. He had the status, the intellect, and the influence. He was at the absolute top of the Roman food chain.

But the closer he got to the top, the more restlessness he began to feel. The dream job proved to be unfulfilling. He never could quite have enough of anything he sought after. All of it seemed worthless and vain in his eyes.

“Suddenly, all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire, I longed after immortal wisdom.” – Augustine, Confessions III, IV, 4.

In Milan, Augustine began to soften toward Christianity through the influence of the city’s bishop, Ambrose. Ambrose had received a liberal education in Rome and had held prestigious governance in Milan until he was snatched up by the people to be Bishop after the death of the previous Arian bishop, Auxentius.

Ambrose used his education and position to rule from the episcopal chair with power and theological prowess, which sharply contrasted the simplicity Augustine associated with the Christian faith of his mother, Monica.

Augustine’s wrestling with Christianity came to a head when one day, while sitting in a garden, a young boy passed by, chanting over and over again, “Take up and read; take up and read.”

Next to Augustine was an open Bible, and he felt suddenly compelled to take it up and read it. He describes his experience in his Confessions.

“So, holding back my torrent of tears, I got up, interpreting it to be none other than a command from God to open the book and read the first chapter I came to…. I seized [the Bible] and opened it, and in silence read the section on which my eyes first fell: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.’ No further would I read, nor did I need to, for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light, as it were, of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”

At this moment, Augustine’s search for purpose came to an end. Augustine left his prestigious career in rhetoric right away and chose to be baptized and devote his life to serving the Christian God.

The life of Augustine can serve as far more than a testimony of God’s grace; his life demonstrates how someone can find purpose in life. Early in his life, he sought purpose in academic success, status, drunkenness, and lust, all of which never satisfied him, no matter how much he excelled.

“I sought pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in His creatures, in myself and other men, and so I fell headlong into sorrows, confusions, and errors.” (Confessions I, 20)

Man’s natural disposition is to put his “self” at the center of his life; everything must bow to the needs of the self. It is natural for us to believe that man’s chief end is to glorify and enjoy himself. So, we go about trying to determine our own meaning in successes or experiences, believing we are responsible for creating value in life.

However, Augustine’s life demonstrates how this pursuit is hollow, and no ordinary goal can provide ultimate comfort in life and death. Every worldly pleasure, professional accomplishment, and ambition left him unsatisfied and restless. His story testifies that purpose is found not by looking inward but by looking upward.

The modern world teaches us to define our own purpose, and most go about weary and heavy-laden with the task of finding satisfaction in a career, relationship, or achievement. But all of these turn back on the pursuer to devour them.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.¹

But true rest and satisfaction are not found in the pursuit of self but in coming to Christ. Purpose and satisfaction, then, are not something you can create, but something you must receive. The words of Augustine strike at the heart of the modern busy lives: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

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1. Quote taken from David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.”