Pastor and Preacher

Augustine never intended to be a bishop. Visiting Hippo Regius in 391, he was seized by the congregation and pressed into ordination as a priest; four years later he was consecrated bishop of that minor coastal town, and there he remained for thirty-five years until his death. This file describes Augustine the working churchman — the monastic clergy-house he founded, the relentless labor of preaching that produced hundreds of surviving sermons, the bishop’s tribunal where he spent his mornings judging the disputes of his people, and the vast correspondence — the daily texture of a life that has too often been read only through its great books.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

The Forced Ordination

After his return to Africa and the founding of his ascetic community at Thagaste, Augustine took care to avoid towns that lacked a bishop, lest he be drafted into the office against his will — for it was the custom of the African Church for congregations to seize suitable men and have them ordained on the spot (Possidius, Vita 4; Brown 2000, ch. 12). The precaution failed. Visiting Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria) in 391 on what he thought was safe business — to speak with a man about the monastic life — Augustine was recognized in the church, where the aged Greek-speaking bishop Valerius happened to be preaching on the need for a priest. The congregation laid hold of Augustine, presented him for ordination, and would not be denied; Augustine, by his own and Possidius’s account, wept as he was ordained, foreseeing the loss of the contemplative leisure he had sought (Possidius, Vita 4; trans. Hoare 1954).

Valerius, an unusual bishop, soon did two further unusual things: he gave his priest a garden in which to found a monastery, and — because his own Latin and Greek were imperfect — he allowed Augustine to preach in his presence, a privilege normally reserved to bishops in the African Church (Possidius, Vita 5; Brown 2000, ch. 12). Then, fearing that some other church would carry off his gifted priest, Valerius arranged for Augustine to be consecrated bishop of Hippo as his coadjutor in 395 or 396, so that he should succeed on Valerius’s death, which followed soon after (Possidius, Vita 8). The consecration was technically irregular — it appeared to violate the eighth canon of Nicaea forbidding two bishops in one city — and Augustine, learning this later, was troubled by it; but it stood, and he became sole bishop of Hippo (Brown 2000, ch. 12; the irregularity is noted in Letter 213).

The Monastery of Clergy

Augustine carried his monastic ideal into his episcopate. He established his clergy-house as a monastery, in which the bishop and his priests and deacons lived in common, holding no private property, sharing a common table and a common purse, under a rule of poverty and chastity (Possidius, Vita 5, 25; Brown 2000, ch. 13). This community of “servants of God” became a seminary in fact: a remarkable number of Augustine’s companions were drawn from it to become bishops of other African sees — Possidius himself became bishop of Calama, and by Possidius’s count some ten of Augustine’s circle were raised to the episcopate (Possidius, Vita 11). The Rule later attributed to Augustine, which became one of the foundational documents of Western monasticism and canonical life, grew from the practice of this house, though the precise textual history of the Regula is complex [Disputed: the authenticity and exact form of the "Rule of St. Augustine" are debated; Luc Verheijen's critical work (*La Règle de saint Augustin*, 1967) defended an Augustinian core, in particular the *Praeceptum*, as genuine, while the relation of the several recensions and their attribution remain discussed among scholars].

The Preacher

Preaching was the center of Augustine’s pastoral labor, and it is in the sermons that the working bishop is most vividly seen. He preached frequently — often daily in the great seasons, sometimes for days running — extempore, with a stenographer (notarius) taking the words down as he spoke, so that what survives is in many cases the living voice of Augustine before his African congregation (Brown 2000, ch. 19; on the sermons, see The Vast Corpus). More than five hundred sermons survive, and the discovery in 1990 of a previously unknown collection (the Dolbeau sermons) and in the twentieth century of new letters (the Divjak letters) showed how much of his pastoral output the centuries had lost and continued to recover (Brown 2000, new epilogue; the Dolbeau and Divjak finds are landmarks of recent scholarship).

The sermons reveal a pastor of immense rhetorical skill turned wholly to the cure of souls — explaining Scripture, rebuking the persistence of pagan festivals and the abuses of the martyr-cult, comforting, exhorting, arguing down the Donatists, all in a Latin pitched to be understood by the unlettered crowd before him. The vast Expositions on the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), preached and dictated over decades, and the Homilies on the Gospel of John are the great monuments of this preaching ministry, and among the works of Augustine most warmly received in the Eastern tradition for their spiritual and Christ-centered depth (Brown 2000, ch. 19).

The Bishop’s Court

A late-Roman bishop was also a judge. By imperial law the audientia episcopalis — the bishop’s tribunal — had become a recognized court, to which Christians and even non-Christians brought their civil disputes, and whose decisions carried legal force (Brown 2000, ch. 17). Augustine spent the better part of his mornings on this wearisome work, settling quarrels over property, inheritances, debts, and the endless litigations of his flock — labor he found tedious and time-consuming but accepted as part of the bishop’s charge to make peace among his people (Letter 213; Possidius, Vita 19; Brown 2000, ch. 17). He used his standing, too, to intercede with the civil power on behalf of the condemned, repeatedly urging mercy and the sparing of even guilty men from torture and death — a pastoral mercy that sits in instructive tension with his contested support of coercion against the Donatists (see Against the Donatists; Letters 133, 134 plead for clemency).

The Letters and the Network

The bishop of a minor see, Augustine became through his correspondence one of the central figures of the Western Church. His surviving letters — more than three hundred, swelled by the Divjak discoveries — show him in constant exchange with bishops, monks, officials, and inquirers across the Mediterranean: corresponding (sometimes sharply) with Jerome over the interpretation of Scripture and the relation of grace and merit, advising correspondents on every question of faith and conduct, and conducting from Hippo the controversies that would make his name (Brown 2000, chs. 17, 27). It was largely through this network — and through the African councils at Carthage, in which he was a leading voice — that the provincial bishop of Hippo came to shape the doctrine of the whole Latin Church.

The Last Days

Augustine remained at his post to the end. As the Vandals under Genseric, having crossed from Spain, swept across Roman Africa, the aged bishop counseled his clergy not to abandon their flocks while any remained to be served (Possidius, Vita 30, preserving Augustine’s letter to Honoratus on whether clergy should flee). In the summer of 430 the Vandals laid siege to Hippo itself. Augustine fell ill during the siege, spent his last days in penitential prayer with the penitential Psalms of David written out and hung on the wall before his bed, and died on 28 August 430, in the third month of the siege, aged seventy-five, having been a bishop for nearly thirty-five years (Possidius, Vita 29, 31; trans. Hoare 1954). Possidius records that he left no will, “for as one of God’s poor he had nothing to leave,” but bequeathed to the Church his library — the great corpus of his works (Possidius, Vita 31). Hippo fell to the Vandals soon after, and was burned; but the library, and Possidius’s catalogue of it, survived to carry Augustine to the future (see The Vast Corpus).

The working bishop, not the systematic theologian, is the man Possidius knew and drew — the pastor who preached daily, judged his people’s quarrels, fed the poor from the church’s goods, ransomed captives, kept open table, and died at his post as the barbarians came. It is a portrait worth holding alongside the controversialist of the later sections, for the doctrine of grace was hammered out by a man whose days were spent in the cure of actual souls.

References

Possidius. The Life of Saint Augustine (Vita Augustini). Trans. F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The forced ordination at 4; preaching and the monastery at 5; the consecration at 8; the bishop’s court at 19; the siege and death at 28–31.)
Augustine of Hippo. Letters. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1. 1886. (Letter 213 on the consecration; Letters 133–134 pleading clemency.)
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. with epilogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 12–13, 17, 19, 27; the epilogue on the Dolbeau sermons and Divjak letters.)
Verheijen, Luc. La Règle de saint Augustin. 2 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967. (The critical study of the Regula.)