Today is the Feast Day of St. Augustine of Hippo for the Latin churches, among whom I include all the post-Latin churches (like every church but the Roman Catholic Church, and that one is only ambivalently Latinate), and I believe it's the feast day of Augustine for the Orthodox churches as well.  

On this day in 430 AD Augustine died, in the city he had spent the better part of his life serving, briefly as priest and then as bishop.  The city was besieged by Vandals at the time.  The Vandals, I believe, went away in 431 without capturing it, but they captured the city soon thereafter.

I've spent a long time trying to grow acquainted with Augustine and with the scholarly literature surrounding him.  What someone wrote on a bookcase containing a great number of his works in 8th century Spain is as true today as it was then: "Anyone who claims to have read all these things is lying."  It's also true of the enormous body of literature on Augustine.  But we live by faith, I guess, and persevere.

What is it about Augustine that captivates me?  Probably an imperfectly metabolized (and ahistorical and mistaken) adolescent hero-worship.  Perhaps also an over-romanticized sense that I have some sort of sympathy with the way his mind works. Finally, though, it is the profundity, for me, of his apprehension of the tragic goodness of the world.  There is a deep pessimism in him, but I actually think the pessimism is so deep only because it is sustained by a profounder apprehension of the fundamental, and fundamentally unmerited, goodness of the world.  How can I say enough about this?

And even though my Latin is terrible, I still find his writing often heart-breakingly beautiful. After all, the title of my blog is a line of Augustine's, from his Sermon 30: 

“Bad times,” “troublesome times,” men say. Let our lives be good, and the times are good. We are the times; as we are, so will the times be.

Mala tempora, laboriosa tempora, hoc dicunt homines. Bene vivamus, et bona sunt tempora. Nos sumus tempora: quales sumus, talia sunt tempora.

 

Or consider this, the last few sentences of a remarkably brief (especially for him) Christmas Day sermon (# 185) he gave:

What greater grace of God could have shone upon us than that, having an only-begotten Son, God should make Him the Son of Man, and thus, in turn, make the son of man the Son of God?

Ask what merited it; ask its cause; ask its justification; and see whether you can find anything but grace.

Quaere meritum, quaere causam, quaere iustitiam, et vide utrum inventas nisi gratiam. 

He's a human, East of Eden, and therefore imperfect in many ways.  But what a wonder he is, and what a remarkable--we might say glorious--reminder of what the human mind, and spirit, can achieve.  

Happy feast day, Gus.  Things around here are pretty much what you would expect them to be.