After years of searching for God, Augustine lay crying under a fig tree in his yard. Suddenly he heard a child-like voice repeating, "Take it and read." He thought children were playing next door, but he couldn't remember any such phrase in a child's game.
Finally he decided God was speaking to him, so he picked up a Bible, opened it at random and read Romans 13:13-14. It seemed to speak so directly to him that "my heart was filled with the light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubt were swept away."
This climactic description of Augustine's conversion is in the story of his life, "The Confessions of St. Augustine" (397-401 AD).
From this and other sources we know Augustine was born in 354 AD in Tagaste, a small town in what is now Tunisia, apparently of Berber parents. He was educated in classical literature and public speaking and joined a sect called the Manicheans. But he left it, disappointed, and went to Milan, Italy, where he became a teacher.
After his conversion, Augustine became a leader in the church and by 396 AD was bishop of Hippo (a city in North Africa). During his lifetime wrote 118 works, including "Confessions" and "City of God" (413-426 AD), a defense against the accusation that Christians were causing the collapse of the Roman Empire by teaching people to "turn the other cheek."
Though Augustine is one of the most influential Christian theologians, respected in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles, he was not always very systematic in his writings. The philosophy in "Confessions," for example, is mixed in with the story of his life and "City of God" often goes off on long tangents. Nevertheless, Augustine's thoughts are interesting and poetically expressed. Here is a sampling:
On evil: "As the beauty of a picture is not dimmed by the dark colors, in their proper place, so the beauty of the universe of creatures is not marred by sins, even though sin itself is an ugly blotch."
On beauty: "Shave off one eyebrow and the loss to the mere mass of the body is insignificant. But what a blow to beauty! For beauty is not a matter of bulk but of symmetry and proportion of the members."
On self-existence: "I know that I am (and) if (the skeptics) say; `What if you are mistaken?' -- well, if I am mistaken, I am. For, if one does not exist, he can by no means be mistaken." (This may be the source of Descartes' similar proof of self-existence.)
On people: "Men are a race very inquisitive about other people's lives, very lazy in improving their own."
