A Saint for Our Time: Terrorism, Invasion, and Political Upheaval Marked St. Augustine's Life!

Today is St. Augustine's feast day. I generally do a little research about the saint whose feast day we're celebrating. Today it was St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo. His early life of licentiousness certainly is a common mark of many in our time. His embrace of heresy certainly links him even to many of our clergy, although that was before his conversion unlike his bishop brethren of the modern age whose careers of lust and greed have so scandalized the faithful.

Augustine lived in tumultuous times. That's another link to us. Here's what I read at the Columbia College website:

When Augustines' pupil Possidius came to compose a biography of his master (which still survives), he spent little time detailing his master’s ideas; instead, he wanted to highlight for posterity all of the manifold controversies and personal dangers faced by Augustine throughout his life. So we hear, for example, about terrorists called Circumcellions from the so-called Donatist heresy, who launched raids on Catholic churches with a crude tear gas made of lime juice and vinegar, and allegedly laid an ambush to kill Augustine himself. Finally, Augustine lived to see the catastrophic invasion of Africa by the Vandals, and Possidius gives a vivid picture of the struggle to assemble and safeguard his works amidst the general destruction. Possidius’ biography also appends a letter in which Augustine encourages anxious bishops not to flee, so as to provide a ‘place of refuge’ for the displaced. The psychological conflicts depicted in the Confessions are intense, but also largely interior and personal. It is salutary, then, to remember that Augustine was far from detached from the political upheavals that marked the period in which he lived.