To Be Saint, He Had to Become Ordinary
Joseph Ratzinger - Nietzsche said he couldn't stand him: he seemed plebeian and common. But this is precisely the true Christian greatness of the Bishop of Hippo. For us, he has become a window through which we contemplate the Eternal One.
In the Baroque churches of our Bavarian homeland, the altarpieces that define the interior space resemble doors that, rather than delimiting and isolating the space, open it up to vaster and truer realms. The Eucharist we celebrate on our altars does not revolve around itself but is, so to speak, the threshold through which the Church, in the midst of this world, can continually enter the world of God.
In the same way, the saints depicted in those paintings are not great figures in their own right; they are not, as a historian of religions once said, the successors of the gods—autonomous rescuers, so to speak, to whom we turn in times of need, believing that God, the Eternal One, has no time for our concerns or does not understand them. No: those saints are not entities in themselves but a door, a window that opens beyond itself to the eternity of God. In the world of the saints we encounter during the liturgical year, the simple and inconceivable light of God is, as it were, refracted through the prism of our history, so that we can encounter the eternal glory and light of God in the midst of our world, in our brothers and sisters.
The saints are, so to speak, our older brothers and sisters in the family of God, who take us by the hand to guide us, as if to say, “If we could do it, why can't you?” These are the very words that Augustine, today's saint, believed he heard at the moment of his conversion, and they were one of the final encouragements he needed to dare take the leap of faith into God's love.
Across the centuries, few saints are as close to us and as understandable as St. Augustine, in whose works we encounter all the depths and heights of the human condition—all the questions, the searching, and the inquiry that still move us today. He has rightly been called the first modern man. He was born in a time of crisis and change very similar to our own, a time when faith was not a matter of course but had to be sought and found by traversing all the abysses of the human soul.
Augustine did not become a Christian by birth, but only through conversion. And in the two great conversions that mark the two phases of his life, the task and meaning of being a Christian are still evident today, even for us. It is always true that one does not become a Christian by birth but only through conversion.
Just as the waters of this world, obeying the force of gravity, flow naturally downward yet can be harnessed by the spiritual forces of technology to change their course, so too the waters of human existence flow naturally downward; only by virtue of conversion to faith, hope, and love can they receive the new orientation by which a person acquires true humanity. Augustine became a Christian through conversion: let us pause for a moment on the two conversions of his life so that we may understand in a new way the mission of our Christian life today.
The first conversion is broadly known. According to the custom of the time, Augustine had not received baptism as a child but the salt of the catechumenate, and thus had been provisionally accepted into the Church. He had learned to know and love Jesus Christ and had invoked Him in his small and great needs as a boy. It still moves us today to read in his Confessions how often, in the morning, he prayed ardently and insistently to God that he might be spared a beating at school that day. But then he became a student.
He encountered the advanced scholarship of his time, and compared to this great knowledge of antiquity, the Bible seemed to him a silly book of fables, unworthy of his vast and enlightened culture. He first adhered to Manichean rationalism and then to academic skepticism. But his heart remained empty. He thus reached that inner anguish that would ultimately lead him to the garden of his conversion—the turmoil between his heart's yearning for eternity and the obstacles posed by his passions and intellectual doubt.
He tells us that one day in the garden, he moved away from his friend Alipius to be alone with his suffering, his inner struggle, and his torment. And in that moment of extreme inner battle, he thought he heard a child's voice repeating to him several times, “Tolle, lege—take and read!” He wondered if it might be some nursery rhyme or children's game. But since nothing of the sort came to mind, he sensed that the voice was meant for him, that it was a call to reverse the direction of his life.
He got up, found the Holy Scriptures, and read these words: “Put on the Lord Jesus” (Romans 13:14). It was the turning point of his life. However one may wish to explain it historically, those words spoken by a child—“Take and read!”—truly became the guiding principle of his life. At that moment, he truly discovered the Word of God, and from then on, he remained a listener to the Word, continually allowing it to illuminate his life and give him direction. At that moment, he experienced anew in his own person the original situation of Adam in the Garden of Eden. And in this original situation—Adam's moment of decision—Augustine found in the Word of God the tree of life that gave him the closeness to God, the communion with God that Adam lost when he tried to reach God by his own efforts and be like God.
When the elderly Augustine wrote the story of his life, that childhood song—“Tolle, lege—take and read!”—perhaps also brought to his mind the voices of his altar boys who stood near him, the bishop, proclaiming to the faithful from the lectern the Gospel on which he would then preach. With the account of that episode, it is as if he wanted to say to the faithful: “In the voices of the altar boys who read the Word of God to you, the invitation of that child also resounds for you: ‘Tolle, lege—take and read!’ Indeed, all of you are at a moment of decision, in the garden of decision; no one is spared Adam's original situation.
Everyone must relive it, suffer it again, overcome it again. That child's voice addresses all of you and tells you where the tree of life is: in the Word of God.” That day Augustine discovered the Word of God. If we now reflect on ourselves—because all this applies to us too—we should blush to admit how shamefully little we have discovered it. How much time and patience we spend reading second-rate magazines and God only knows what else, and how little we care about the Word of God! If we had never heard of it and one day learned that somewhere there is a book in which the Word of God Himself comes to us, what would we not do to have that book! That book is among us, yet we are not interested in it, as if it did not concern us.
Let this moment, therefore, become an invitation for us as well: “Tolle, lege!”—an invitation to rediscover the Word of God as the light of our days and the tree of life. For Augustine, the discovery of the Word of God was the decision of his life and, at the same time, the decision for the invisible. Until that moment, the visible, with all its means and power, had so dominated him that he did not dare take the leap toward the invisible. At that moment, he understood that the invisible is what is truly real and what truly sustains us.
I believe this is our very condition today. In our age, the pressure of the visible and the audible has increased even more. The clamor and loudspeakers of this world have become so powerful that we hardly have the strength to perceive God in silence. And if we sometimes delude ourselves into thinking we have become wiser because we take only the visible seriously, we should admit that this is actually a diminishment of our heart's capacity to see; we must admit that we are no longer able to look beyond, to the invisible and the eternal, without which the visible could not exist. For us too, this moment should be an exhortation to trust in the invisible, to recognize in it what is authentically real and truly sustaining.
After his conversion, Augustine returned to Africa with his relatives and friends. Years of happy life followed, during which they formed a kind of monastic community and began to nourish themselves fully on the Word of God, on beauty and truth. Only truth, the listening to the Word, should have been the content of their lives and the source of their joy. But things turned out differently, and Augustine was forced to abandon this path.
One day, while visiting Hippo, the great port city of North Africa, he entered the church and heard the elderly bishop Valerius preaching. Among other things, Valerius said that he was old and that, being Greek by birth, he found it very difficult to preach and had long been looking for a priest to help him. At that very moment, a tumultuous cry arose in the church: “Let Augustine be our bishop!” He was seized, and his physical resistance, his tears, and his attempts to defend himself were to no avail. He was dragged to the front row, and Bishop Valerius confirmed the unanimous desire. And so, completely against his will, Augustine was ordained a priest.
We have an impressive document from those days: a letter he wrote to Bishop Valerius shortly after his ordination, in which he begged to be granted a period of retreat to prepare himself adequately for the priestly ministry. In it, we read: “I feel like someone who has never learned to hold an oar and is suddenly assigned to the helm of a large ship.
For this reason, at my priestly ordination, I wept silently…” This seems very strange to us: a man becomes a priest against his will and weeps at his ordination. But precisely here lies Augustine's greatness: he accepted this new turn in his life with obedience, giving himself completely to the new task entrusted to him. From that moment on, the time for silent immersion in the Word and contemplation that he had chosen as his destiny came to an end. Now, instead, from early morning to evening, the whole spectrum of human needs unfolded before him. His doorbell rang incessantly: he had to settle disputes and console the afflicted—in short, he had to do everything a priest must do. Furthermore, according to the legal system of the time, Augustine had jurisdiction over all civil disputes in his city; in other words, he was the one who had to confront the full range of his fellow citizens' human affairs.
One of his writings helps us understand how he was able to spiritually master this completely new situation. He reflects on a poem from the Song of Songs in which the bridegroom knocks late at night on the door of his bride, who does not want to open it, saying, “I have taken off my robe; how can I put it on again? I have washed my feet; how can I soil them again?” Augustine comments: “The Bridegroom and Bride stand for Christ and the Church, but what does it mean that the Church gets her feet dirty by opening the door to Christ? How is it possible that the Church has no desire to open the door to Christ?” He answers: “The Church that has withdrawn into tranquility and does not want to be disturbed is the image of those believers who practice Christianity only for themselves, who want to keep the joy of savoring the Word of God for themselves and do not want to be disturbed by the dirt of this world.”
But Christ does not give us this kind of peace. He knocks on the door of our lives through all who are searching, all who err, all who are in need, and cries out, “Aperi mihi et praedica me! Open to me and preach me!” Christ comes to us, knocks on our door, and waits for us in people with their ordinary and mundane needs. It is for Him that we must always be willing to get our feet dirty with the filth of this world; it is for Him that we must always be ready to abandon the joy of savoring the Word and the satisfaction with what we have, so that we may go out and the Word of the Lord may permeate others.
Nietzsche once said that he could not stand St. Augustine, so plebeian and common did he seem. There is undoubtedly some truth in this observation, but this is precisely where the true Christian greatness of St. Augustine lies. He could have been an aristocrat of the spirit, but for the love of Christ and of mankind, in whom he encountered Christ, he abandoned the ivory tower of high spirituality to be fully a man among men, a servant of the servants of God.
For the love of Christ, who did not disdain to abandon divine glory to be a man like us, he sacrificed his lofty culture and succeeded in bringing the Word of God to his people with ever-greater simplicity and frankness. For love of Him, he became more and more an ordinary man among men, a servant of all, and in this, truly a saint. For Christian holiness does not consist in some superhuman quality or in a talent or greatness that others do not possess. Christian holiness is simply the obedience that makes itself available where God calls, an obedience that does not rely on its own greatness but on the greatness of our God, knowing that it is precisely in serving and losing oneself that one can truly be found.
The basic attitude that underlies both conversions and both turning points—conversion to the Word and placing oneself at the service of others with simplicity and generosity—was what Augustine himself called the restlessness of the heart. It is this restlessness that does not allow a person to find peace in himself or in what he has but keeps him on the path toward eternity, which alone can give him true peace and full satisfaction. He described this restlessness of the heart—which goes beyond all that is earthly and reaches for the eternal—with an unforgettable image based on an experience he had shortly after his conversion.
Together with his friends, he had arrived in Ostia, the large port city at the mouth of the Tiber, to return home to Africa. One evening, he and his mother leaned out of the window overlooking the garden of the house where they were staying and together contemplated the vast sea merging with the blue sky on the horizon. In that moment of great peace, devotion, and sweetness, as they gazed out at the immensity, mother and son conversed about the eternity of God.
They wondered what eternal life will be like: when the sky and the sea disappear and there is no more past or future, but only the eternal present of God. Augustine adds, “In that instant, we were granted for a moment to touch the mystery of eternal life, and with a sigh, we left the first fruits of the spirit captive there.” Five days later, his mother was struck down by malaria, which had by then turned Ostia into a dying city. After nine days, Monica closed her eyes forever. But that image of peace—contemplating the vast sea together and, through its vastness, touching the eternity of God Himself—was never erased from his soul. It remained imprinted on him like a promise, an image of eternity that can never be taken from us.
For us, Augustine himself has become a window through which we contemplate the Eternal One. Let us ask God, the Lord, to grant us too, at least for a moment, to touch this eternity and leave there the first fruits of the spirit, so that our hearts may remain restless, turned toward the eternity of God, in which alone they can find peace.
The homily published here appears in the latest issue of the magazine Vita e Pensiero*, no. 4 (July–August 2025), under the title “Augustine: The First Modern Man.” Joseph Ratzinger's homily, dating to 1965, was translated by Pietro Luca Azzaro, translator and editor of the complete works of Benedict XVI.*
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