Augustine of Hippo - By Dr. A. Sokolovski

On June 28, the Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Augustine is one of the twelve Fathers of the Church, on whose theology, according to the decrees of the Fifth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople (553), the teaching of the Church is based.

Saint Augustine left behind an extensive written legacy. His works have survived. Augustine wrote more than all the Greek Fathers of the Church together. According to Possidius of Calama (+437), a disciple and author of the Life of Augustine, a human life is not enough to read all his works.

Thus, the modern French edition of Augustine with commentary is 100 volumes. Like his great predecessors, the heroes of the Carthaginian Church Tertullian (160-220) and the martyr Cyprian (200-258), Augustine wrote in Latin. Like them, he was an African. "I am an African - Africanus sum," Augustine wrote of himself.

Tradition calls him "the father of the Christian West." Named after the city of Hippo Regius, now Annaba, a large Algerian port where the saint was bishop for about 35 years, he is most often called "Augustine of Hippo." In the memory of the Universal Church, Augustine is the "Teacher of Grace." He is often depicted in paintings and statues, for example, on the famous Charles Bridge in Prague. How can we immediately recognize that this is Augustine and not, for example, St. Nicholas? Augustine holds a burning heart in his hand.

This flaming heart is a symbol of his theology. After all, Saint Augustine taught that faith is a gift from God. He claimed that faith is grace. And grace is always given freely. There is no human reason for grace. There is a reason given by God. But it is inaccessible to humanity. This dialectic between the search for a cause and the impossibility of finding one gives Augustine's thought an extraordinary tragic quality. This aspect of his personality makes him particularly modern.

He also teaches humility very much. After all, we do not deserve to believe in Christ. Man is an "unworthy being" - not just a rhetorical construction, a figure of speech or a way of edification, as it was perhaps with the Greek Fathers of the Church, but a complete, incontestable and unquestionable truth.

On the feast day of St. Augustine, the Church, as the Society of the faithful, thanks God for the gift of faith and asks Him to grant it to those who do not believe, or who do not yet believe in Christ. Through the prayers of St. Augustine, may God help them, may God help us all.