It would be difficult to exaggerate Saint Augustine’s influence on Christian theology, especially theology in the Western/Latin/Church. Augustine, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries. He was a native of North Africa, which at that time was ruled by Rome. Without a doubt, he is the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers.
Augustine’s mother was Saint Monica, whose memorial the Church observes the day before that of her son. Next to the Blessed Mother, Monica is probably the best model of Christian motherhood in the history of the Church. A devoted Christian who was married to a non-Christian, she sought to bring Augustine up as a Christian. Instead, as a young man, Augustine fell in with the Manicheans.
Manicheism was a gnostic sect. One feature of Gnosticism is its pitting of spirit over and against matter. According to this view, spirit is good, and matter is bad. Beyond this, Augustine was also greatly influenced by the philosophy of Plato, which also tends toward body/spirit dualism. It was not until, as a grown man, Augustine, a professor of rhetoric, went to Milan that he converted. Monica accompanied him there. Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, was influential in Augustine becoming a Christian.
After returning home to North Africa, during which trip his mother died, Augustine was named the Bishop of Hippo-Regius, an ancient city, the ruins of which are in the modern country of Algeria.
Without a doubt, Augustine’s best-known work is his Confessions. Even today, it is considered a masterwork, not just of Christian or religious literature, but of world literature. It remains a highly influential and, hence, much-read and commented-upon text. Next to his Confessions, he is best known for his work The City of God.
While Saint Augustine's work remains magisterial in many ways, he was never able to entirely shake off the Manichean-Platonic dualism. I suggest, a bit controversially, that this can be seen, at least to some degree in the two-kingdom polity he set forth in The City of God, which, until the latter third of the last century, was highly influential in political theology for both Catholics and Protestants, even if, starting with Martin Luther, it has been applied with much more rigor in the latter.
Augustine’s personal experience of God is well-expressed in our first reading from 1 John, which reveals to us something quite astounding and beautiful: “God is love.” His response to God’s loving initiative toward him is love. We speak a lot about the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. But you can’t really have faith without having love and love is what gives us hope. These three, like the persons of the Blessed Trinity, while distinguishable, are inextricably bound together.
In his Confessions, all of which are addressed to God, Augustine asked “What does love look like?” He answers- “It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”
That also strikes me as a good way to summarize today’s Gospel.
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