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“Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” That was the prayer of a man who was flirting with Christianity, but who was also flirting with a lot of other things. Yet he became one of the greatest, most influential authors the church has ever known.

Who was this complex man? He was Augustinus Aurelius, better known as Augustine. Born in 354 in Tagaste (in what is now Algeria), Augustine had a devout Christian mother named Monica. His pagan father, Patricius, was a Roman official.

Augustine was brilliant, so his parents arranged for the best schooling. He studied rhetoric—persuasive speech—in Carthage. Reading Latin authors such as Cicero convinced him that truth is life’s supreme goal. He couldn’t find truth in Christianity because he saw it as a religion for the simple-minded. In his teens, Augustine took a mistress—a concubine—who bore him a son. In his later Confessions he wrote, “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of unholy loves was sizzling and crackling around me.”

Augustine’s intellectual restlessness led him to embrace Manichaeism, a popular religion of the day that held a dualistic view of the world as a battle between light and dark, flesh and spirit. (Even after his conversion to Christianity, his negative attitude toward sex reflected the Manichaean position.) After nine years of holding to Manichaeism, Augustine became disillusioned by the failure of a leading Manichaean teacher to answer his questions. He gradually drifted into Neoplatonism. Meanwhile, vocationally, he moved from Carthage to Rome to Milan, teaching rhetoric.

In Milan, Augustine met the Christian bishop, Ambrose, who impressed him with his intellect and answered his objections to the Bible. Augustine also learned about saints who had conquered sexual temptation by surrendering themselves to God. This was the right combination: a faith that would overcome his sexual temptations and let him be a thinker.

In the late summer of 386 Augustine sat in a garden in Milan and heard a child’s sing-song voice: “Take it and read it; take it and read it.” He picked up what was nearby, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and began reading Romans 13:13–14, “Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.…”

This was his conversion. On Easter eve in 387, Ambrose baptized him. Augustine returned to his joyful mother and spent time in retreat and study.

Augustine could have been happy living a quiet monastic life. But his reputation spread. While visiting Hippo Regius on the North African coast, he was seized by the people and presented to the bishop to be ordained. He asked for time to develop his knowledge of Scripture, and in 391 he was ordained. Four years later he was consecrated bishop.

Bishop Augustine was involved in every church controversy of the day. One was Donatism, a movement that refused to accept clergy who had handed over Scriptures to the authorities during persecution or even to accept clergy who had been consecrated by such a person. There were thousands of Donatists, especially in Augustine’s area.

Augustine wrote that there could be no rival church; the church is one, though it may include some less-than-holy persons in it. The sacraments—Communion and baptism—are effective not because of the priest’s own righteousness, but because God’s grace operates through the sacraments. (Augustine also defined a sacrament as “a visible sign of an invisible grace,” which has become a standard definition.) Augustine’s view on the Donatists prevailed, and the movement eventually lost momentum.

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