(Editors’ Note: The author composed a series on three great bishops of the early church for midweek Advent services last year. As both biographical and spiritual stories, they are a good way to incorporate the history of the church into the present life of the church. The stories of Athanasius and Ambrose have already appeared.)

I am Aurelius Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, North Africa. I was born and grew up in the small town Tagaste, fifty miles inland from the coastal town of Hippo, but I went to the university in Carthage—the big city that the Romans centuries before had completely destroyed as only the Romans could. I was of a dark complexion because my parents were Berber Africans, but because of my father Patricius’s influence and my classic education, I was culturally Roman through and through. Nothing would destroy my identity with Rome, even though I spent most of my life in North Africa.

I came to know Ambrose shortly after he had become the bishop of Milan. My mother, Monica, had much to do with it. She found me in Milan. To this day I don’t know how she did it, because I had fooled her when I left North Africa, saying she should meet me at the shrine of the martyrs. I wasn’t going to any shrine of the martyrs like my mother did to pray. I was going to Rome to teach rhetoric to the sons of the Roman senators. It was a step forward, and I didn’t want my Scripture-pounding mother to follow me and interfering in my life. I had had enough.

Eventually, I secured a position as a teacher of rhetoric through an acquaintance of mine in Milan. There is where my mother found me. Soon after she arrived, she urged me to go with her to Milan’s basilica. There Bishop Ambrose preached every Sunday. For the first time in my life I heard coherent, well-developed sermons that reasoned through the Christian message. Ambrose’s sermons were persuasive, yet what I appreciated even more was Ambrose’s gentle manner as he carried out his duties as the bishop. Ambrose knew my name and would say it as I left worship. This left a deep impression on me. What an amazing man Ambrose was!  I can still recall how he looked. He was small of stature, had a dark complexion though not as dark as mine, and God had placed one of his eyes higher than the other. His asymmetrical face made him look very austere, but his heart was gentle as a lamb.

I met Ambrose when I was thirty-two. I was working in my talk-shop; that is, I taught young men the craft of presenting speeches in order to educate, delight, and to persuade others. Any one of those skills could make an impact. I remember giving an assignment to aspiring orators when I first started teaching rhetoric back in Carthage. The assignment was to persuade classmates why a dead fly that I had placed on a desk in front of them deserved immortality. What many students did with the assignment was amusing. They made up names for the fly and gave it an imaginative life story. I can recall one student saying that the fly had spent the entire six months of his life staying away from the dung heaps and living off fallen fruit from the fruit trees. For the student, this proved a superior fly intelligence. Would it not guarantee for the fly immortality?

What I taught my students, however, is what they did in later life. As lawyers or statesmen, they would be asked to give panegyrics or funeral eulogies. People are gullible. Many will be persuaded by well-crafted words. They will believe that a senator or other statesman can gain immortality by how people remember them. You can imagine what some of my students would say. They would use hyperboles or overstatements when talking about the deceased’s life and accomplishments. These statements weren’t anywhere near the truth. This lack of truth found in so many speeches in my day is what attracted me, by contrast, to Ambrose. He was gifted with words, but he was concerned about truth. His sermons had a ring of authenticity to them. He didn’t speak just to show off his vast learning or make someone immortal through his words. He spoke the truth of God. He said God the Father could not be God in solitude; the Father was God with His Son and the Holy Spirit. He was the only one that was immortal. He was profoundly impressed that the uncreated, immortal, incorruptible God became flesh. He who created all things out of nothing became one of those he created. Only if Jesus had been from all eternity could he through his birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection be Ambrose’s savior.

My mother had believed this all throughout her life, although she did not have the refined way of saying it as Ambrose did. She persistently wanted me to read the Scriptures. She attempted to pound one Scripture passage after another into my head. When I was younger, I didn’t want to hear what she said, plus I already had seen the tension that was in my parents’ marriage. There were constant arguments about religion. My father resisted much like I did. And he, like many of the husbands in my day, was not faithful to my mother. He was, however, an upstanding Roman citizen in our small town of Tagaste, North Africa. He was a skeptical, self-made man and felt that he didn’t need any god—either the Roman gods or the God who my mother worshipped. He resisted until he was near death, when my mother finally got her way, and he was baptized into Christ.

I suppose I inherited from him my rebellious streak. As I have said, we were a Berber family, not really considered Romans, just North Africans. My parents wanted more for me. They wanted me to be educated in the best schools that the Romans offered. At the age of eighteen I was sent off to the large city of Carthage. In spite of the past destruction, a leading university had sprung up in it.

You could say it was because I was a searcher that my young life had so many twists and turns. I was looking for the truth. My father was that way, too. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? My father wanted me to be a Roman lawyer much like Cicero centuries before. I probably had the native gifts to do it, but I was a stubborn young man. Nobody could tell me what to think and believe. Nobody.

Having not the anchor from which to base my decisions, I became vulnerable to many of the philosophies in universities at the time. The first group I was attracted to was the Manicheans, named after Mani the Persian, who started this sect in Persia. This sect and their teachings swept across the Roman Empire like a storm on the Mediterranean Sea. I was attracted to them because they gave an answer to a puzzling question that lingered in my mind throughout my life: if God is good, where did evil come from? The Manicheans neatly divided all things into one of two categories. They taught that all material was created by a demiurge. God created spiritual things. Material things were evil; spiritual things were good. Certain foods were spiritual, like melons. If we ate them and followed the Manichean teachings, we could overcome evil. This answer to the origin of evil made sense to me. Besides, many of my classmates had accepted the teachings of Mani. I preferred them to the heavy-handed approach my mother had when she quoted those Scripture passages. Besides this, her way of believing did not explain the source of evil.

Then I fell in love with loving, as I wrote about it in my spiritual autobiography called Confessions. My goal in that book was to show how God leads us through all the different phases of life to the end that He wants for us. When I fell in love with a certain young woman, I was not ready to be led by any God. I was set on taking her as my own. I took her as a mistress, but I treated her as my wife. She soon bore me a son. We called him Adeodatus, a gift from God, as the name means. And he was. I was impressed by his brilliance.

I was only nineteen at the time. It was about at this time that I read Cicero’s Hortenius, a really fine book that urged the pursuit of truth over the rhetorical crafting of clever words. This was an unusual concern from one like Cicero. I had already been sensing that many Roman orators were not concerned with stating the truth. I found that out from the leader of the Manicheans themselves, Faustus. When he came to visit us in Rome, his answers to my questions were empty and unsatisfying. It was then that I left the Manichean sect.

I left Carthage and went to Rome, where I thought I would find more refined and responsive students. They were all from patrician families and aspired to be senators like their fathers. I discovered, however, that I didn’t speak Latin as they did. I spoke a Latin with a North African accent, and those sophisticated Roman young men made fun of my speech and sometimes did not pay their fees.

It was in Rome that I began to question everything. Then I became most vulnerable to my mother’s prayers. She never stopped; she cried while she prayed—much like I did when I preached as bishop of Hippo. I guess our family was always an emotional family. Our hearts were bigger than our heads.

It was through a leading Manichean official that I got an appointment to be a teacher of rhetoric in Milan in north Italy. Off to Milan I went. Of course, I took my mistress and my son, Adeodatus, with me, and several close friends; but not my mother. I didn’t want her interfering. She would have liked to come, but I knew that she was praying for me wherever I went. She prayed, and she cried. She cried and prayed. Even now I could sense it. There was another reason I didn’t want her to come—she didn’t like my mistress. She thought the girl was socially below us. Lots of people thought this way in my day because marriages were often undertaken to gain social advantage.

At this time I was exposed to the teachings of Plato, because there were, to my surprise, some very sophisticated thinkers in Milan. Plato had a notion of God as all-beauty, all-good, all-wise, who could be reached through dialectic rational thinking. He also taught something about the immortality of the soul—a subject I was fascinated by. He also said that evil really wasn’t the opposite of good; rather it was a diminishing of the good, like darkness is to light. Light will always overcome darkness, even though darkness will never go away. Or it is like the dark spots in a painting. They are needed to make the painting complete. So then evil events or evil people somehow fit into God’s overall plan.

It was then that I realized I had been led by the all-powerful, eternal, gracious God through all the phases of my life. It wasn’t any philosopher who led me to seek out Ambrose. It was a child. Doesn’t say in the Scriptures that a little child shall lead them? There I was in the garden in my house in Milan debating with Alypius, my brilliant friend, about the issues of faith. We debated the oneness of God and tried to dismiss the dual nature of God that the Manicheans preached. Then suddenly I heard the voice of a child on the other side of the garden wall say, Tolle lege! Tolle lege! “Take up and read! Take up and read!” On the table was a Bible. I picked up the Scriptures and read from Romans chapter 13. “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.”

It was just the beginning of an amazing journey of faith. God graciously was leading me into the Christian life. I was thirty-two. It was August of 386. Throughout the remainder of the year and into the next year, I thought out and worked through with a group of my friends, my mother and my brilliant son included, God’s beautiful plan rooted in Jesus Christ in the rough and cruel Roman world. This grace-empowering plan was rooted in God’s love for all his creatures, and I was one of them. I called his love caritas. It became the guiding principle that I found all over in the Scriptures.

Quickly I resigned from my teaching of rhetoric because it led too many students to base their lives on the vain pursuit of words without truth. Sadly, I also gave up my mistress and sent her back to North Africa. We cried, as we often did, and she vowed she would never know another man. I have kept her nameless because I wanted to save her reputation. I needed to do this if I were to undergo my baptism with any seriousness. Through it all I attribute my conversion to my Lord’s guiding hand and the prayers of my mother. She constantly prayed and shed tears for me.

The next Easter in the year 387, Ambrose baptized me during the rising of the sun. My son was baptized then, too, and so was my good friend Alypius, who, though trained as a lawyer, became a bishop in a town near to Hippo. Then I was united to the life, death, and resurrection of the eternal God, Whose promises are surer than any promises of the world. Sunrise is a good time to be baptized because it reminds us of the new life we have in Christ, God’s gift of grace to us. The light, which came in Jesus Christ, lit up my darkness. I wouldn’t turn back to my former Manichean ways. Never. I was baptized into Christ, who came graciously in human flesh to release us from the evil darkness we live in.

Perhaps it was because I had one time been a teacher that the people of Hippo chose me to be their bishop. Here for the last forty of my seventy-six years I preached that Christ was the bright light of the world. In his light we see all light. In his Truth we see all truths. His truth and light dispels all darkness, the darkness of my sin. The picture of my life was complete. The picture had its dark moments, but Christ’s light diminished all of them. When I was about to die, I insisted that all seven penitential psalms be placed on the walls of my bedroom. Although I was as social a human being as any, I wanted no visitors. I just wanted to meditate on those psalms.

I had found the Truth, or should I say the Truth had found me. It was Truth I had been looking for all along, and at last I was free—free as I had never been before.

I am Aurelius Augustine, bishop of Hippo.

Gordon Beck is Pastor at Salem Lutheran Church in Florissant, Missouri.