The Passionate Professor
Aurelius Augustine
"Sh, boy. Don't wake your mother. I don't want to hear one of her sermons."
Father and son quietly tiptoed into their Roman house, but she heard them in spite of their efforts. Monica had been hurt many times before by her husband who spent his nights in debauchery. Now she felt the hurt more deeply because her son Aurelius, who was barely seventeen, had accompanied his father in his revelry.
Aurelius looked at his tearful mother in pity, but said, "We had a good time." He was insensitive to her efforts to convert him to Christianity.
A year later Aurelius fathered an illegitimate child and shattered Monica by continuing to live with the child's mother for thirteen years without ever marrying her.
When his father died, Aurelius was well established in his life of immorality. Monica continued to pray for her son.
Aurelius became a professor and set up his own school in Carthage, North Africa. In those days most teaching was conducted in homes and rented halls, with tuition from the pupils paying the teacher's salary and other school expenses. His school, located on
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the Street of Bankers in the leading city of Africa, prospered. His pupils were the young blue bloods of the city. Someday, he mused, they would be government leaders. They would remember him with a choice appointment. Everything seemed to be fine.
Then Aurelius' school was destroyed by a marauding band. The frightening experience caused him to flee Africa. Next he set up a school in Rome where it seemed safer.
A pseudo-Christian group there, called the Manicheans, attracted the young professor. Aurelius became a zealous student of the cult that based its doctrines on a strange mixture of biblical and Greek philosophy. But he became disillusioned after talking to Bishop Faustus, a famous Manichean teacher. Aurelius decided that the man was nothing more than a cheap propagandist so he deserted the belief which he had held for nine years.
A year after arriving in Rome, the government appointed him professor of rhetoric in Milan. Aurelius invited his mother to join him. She had never stopped praying for his conversion.
In Milan, Aurelius was welcomed by Bishop Ambrose, a dedicated Christian leader and the city's most influential citizen. "Come hear me preach," the celebrated preacher invited.
Aurelius went indifferently to hear Bishop Ambrose. But the minister's polished way of speaking was so pleasing to Aurelius that he returned again and again. One day Ambrose preached about King David. "That David sinned is human, that he repented is exceptional," he said. "Men follow David into his sin; but they leave him when he rises into confession and repentance."
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Aurelius' past immoral living rose to haunt him. Like David, he had sinned, but unlike David, he had not repented.
As feelings of personal guilt grew stronger, his doubts about Christianity began crumbling. Finally he could say sincerely that the Scriptures were inspired and that Jesus was the Son of God. Still his sinful passions led him to continue in his life of immorality.
His hungry heart wrestled with his sin until one day he entered a garden and threw himself under a fig tree, and cried, "O Lord, this hour make an end of my vileness."
That very moment he heard a child's voice outside the garden chanting, "Tolle lege! Tolle lege! Take and read! Take and read!"
Aurelius looked down,. Before him was a copy of Romans, which he had left earlier. His eyes glanced upon the passage "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, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature" (Romans 13:13-14).
Joyously, Aurelius showed his close friend, Alypius, the passage. "I have put on Christ," he declared. "My heart is filled with peace."
Aurelius next hurried to tell his mother, Monica, that her long years of praying had been answered. Then after special study, Aurelius was baptized by Bishop Ambrose.
Professor Aurelius Augustine spent forty-four fruitful years in the service of Christ during which he wrote seventy Christian books. One of his books, The Confessions of St. Augustine, has been ranked by
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literary experts as one of the one hundred great books of all time. The Confessions are addressed to God and contain the frequently quoted phrase, "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You."
Augustine died peacefully in the year 430, shortly after Rome had fallen to the barbarians. He was then Bishop of Hippo in North Africa. When he died, the city was under siege by the Vandals from the North.
But his spiritual influence and teaching lived on through the Dark Ages, inspiring such Reformation leaders as Luther and Calvin to rebel against the hierarchy of corrupt Christendom.
Aurelius Augustine, the formerly pagan professor who put on Christ in an Italian garden, is remembered today by many church historians as the most influential Christian since the time of the apostle Paul.
