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Updated: June 2, 2025
Pagan notions were still very strong in this community, and the place of burial was an important consideration. Monnica, like all other widows, had settled upon hers. At Thagaste she had had her place prepared beside her husband Patricius. And here now she appeared to give that up. Augustin's companions were astonished at such abnegation.
He is truly our spiritual father. He has taught us the language of prayer. The words of Augustin's prayers are still upon the lips of the devout. This universal genius, who during forty years was the speaking-trumpet of Christendom, was also the man of one special century and country. Augustin of Thagaste is the great African.
He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!... And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some desperate step. He was sick of where he was and of those about him.
At Thagaste, he disputes with his brethren, with his son Adeodatus. He is always the master he knows it; but what humility he puts into this dangerous part! The conclusion of his book, The Master, which he wrote then, is that all the words of him who teaches are useless, if the hidden Master reveal not the truth to him who listens.
And even supposing that the life of this child of Thagaste, the son of Monnica, were not intermingled so deeply with ours, though he were for us only a foreigner born in a far-off land, nevertheless he would still remain one of the most fascinating and luminous souls who have shone amid our darkness and warmed our sadness one of the most human and most divine creatures who have trod our highways.
There cannot be the least doubt that Thagaste took its share in these quarrels. To those who urged him to be baptized, the father of Augustin might well answer with ironic politeness: "I am only waiting till you agree among yourselves, to see where the truth lies." In his heart this rather lukewarm pagan had no inveterate dislike to Christianity.
She prevented these girls from drinking even water except at meals. Cruel suffering for little Africans! Thagaste is not far from the country of thirst. But the old woman said to them: "You drink water now because you can't get at the wine.
While Augustin thinks of his son's death with a calm and grave joy which he can scarce hide, those of Port Royal could only think in trembling of the judgment of God. Their faith did not much resemble the luminous and confident faith of Augustin. For him, salvation is the conquest of joy. At Thagaste he lived in joy.
The bishop Augustin, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature. Of course, Thagaste did not pretend to be a capital. It was a free-town of the second or third order; but its distance from the great centres gave it a certain importance.
Forty years afterwards, Augustin, in his Confessions, pondered this slight ordinary fact of his birth, which happened almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Thagaste, and in truth it seems to him a great event, not because it concerns himself, bishop and Father of the Church, but because it is a soul which at this imperceptible point of time comes into the world.
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