Augustine of Hippo spent 9 years with the Manichaeans despite his mother Monnica’s objections, a stretch of his early life that sits behind the restless-heart line he would open Confessions with. Born in North Africa in 354, he had a son, Adeodatus, with a woman whose name hasn’t survived, and became a rhetoric professor in Milan.
Augustine, a Christian bishop, opened Confessions by asking how people can call on a God they don’t yet know, and why humans want to praise God despite their failings.
In book 1, chapter 1, he wrote, in Henry Chadwick’s translation: “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Paul describes a related struggle in Romans 7:15 and 7:19: wanting to do good while continuing to do what he hates. Read alongside Paul, Augustine’s restless heart speaks to the distance between wanting God and being able to live as one wants.
In book 8 of Confessions, Augustine recalls wanting to change while asking for more time: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” He describes how repeated choices hardened into habit, leaving his will divided over the life he wanted to lead.
In a Milan garden in summer 386, he wept under a fig tree and heard a child’s voice urging him to read. He opened Romans to 13:13–14, where Paul urges readers to put on Christ and stop making provision for the desires of the flesh. The passage addressed the struggle Augustine had been describing.
Ambrose baptized Augustine and Adeodatus at Easter 387.
By his 40s, Augustine was bishop of Hippo. Around 400, he wrote Confessions, looking back on his conversion and Monnica’s death at Ostia. He died in 430 during the Vandal siege of Hippo.
In Rome on August 28, 2013, Pope Francis quoted the line to Augustinians and said it summed up Augustine’s life.