A Month with St Augustine

By Edited by Rima Devereaux

Spend a month in the company of St Augustine, with sixty-two reflections to enrich your mornings and evenings.

‘[The Confessions] has a perennial power to speak, even though written virtually sixteen centuries ago.’ - Henry Chadwick, translator of The Confessions (Oxford World’s Classics)

Praise for the A Month with series:

‘This series helps us to be properly nurtured by the living, radical Christian tradition of faith.’ - Mark Oakley, author and Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, London

St Augustine of Hippo was a Father of the Church. His fourth-century autobiographical work, The Confessions, continues to inspire many people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780281078998

Edited by Rima Devereaux

Rima Devereaux is an editor, writer and translator.

Book preview

A Month with

St Augustine

Edited by Rima Devereaux

Introduction

St Augustine (354–430) was born in North Africa, the son of St Monica. Despite having been brought up as a Christian, in his youth he was devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and was attracted to the Manichaean heresy, which views the world as a battleground between the forces of light and darkness. His conversion at the age of 33 in a garden in Milan marked the turning point of his life. He heard a child singing ‘Take up and read’, and felt that God was asking him to take up the letters of St Paul. He went on to become a priest, bishop, writer and Doctor of the Church.

Most of the extracts in this devotional are taken from the Confessions, which Augustine probably wrote when he was 43. His motivation for writing might have been to allay his contemporaries’ suspicions of his pagan-influenced education. The book is confessional in three senses: it is an account of his sins, a statement of Christian faith and a work praising God. It contains extended prayers that encompass such movements of the heart as repentance, love and thanksgiving, and give a sense of the mystery and mercy of God.

The Confessions is rightly praised as a masterpiece of literature:

The work has a perennial power to speak, even though written virtually sixteen centuries ago . . . The contemporary reader today may find much of it so ‘modern’ that at times it is a shock to discover how very ancient are the presuppositions and the particular context in which the author wrote.¹

The book gives a powerful sense of salvation history: ‘Like other Fathers of the Church, Augustine was vividly conscious of the entire mystery of salvation as embodied in a story that runs from Genesis to Revelation but still continues. He was himself caught up in it.’² Across the centuries, Augustine invites the modern reader to a fresh conversion and a rediscovery of the roots of Christian faith.

A Month with

St Augustine

Morning

You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; your power is great, and your wisdom infinite . . . You awake us to delight in your praise; for you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Grant me, Lord, to know and understand which is first, to call on you or to praise you; and, again, to know you or to call on you. For who can call on you, not