belonged to the Church as a whole; nevertheless his desire was to belong in an
especial manner to the Church in Hippo, and it was in the daily cure of souls
in that locality that he conceived his first duty to lie.

He was to an exemplary degree a resident bishop, and that in a bishopric
considerably the worse for wear. Augustine in Hippo was a figure very like
that of Bossuet, but not the Bossuet of the Court who now and then spent
a little time in Meaux (and that by preference in the little garden house
behind the hornbeams). Rather was he a Bossuet working in Boulogne or
Toulon and daily surrounded by beggars and petitioners. Never again did he
cross the sea to Italy. Alypius attended to that sort of thing for him; or, if
the message he had to send was of minor importance, a simple acolyte or
subdeacon performed the service. Nobody at the Court of Ravenna knew
what he looked like, and Rome, after thirty years, remained equally ignorant;
for the "second founder of the ancient Faith" ⁵ worked upon the spirits of
others by means of his own spirit and not by measures of ecclesiastical policy.

His was no key position in the Church, yet as he wrote at his desk or spoke
from the cathedra in the third-rate place which was his home wave upon wave
went out over the world. What many readers of Augustine's writings do not
realize is that his simple cathedra was more important to him than his pen.
It was the needs and cares of ordinary Christian folk that supplied both the
matter and manner of his loftiest writings, so that the main function of his
genius was to serve the pastor of souls. It is not altogether wrong to say that
we owe Augustine the saint to the strange and surprising fact that Augustine
the genius was little more than a parish priest.

Even that humble task he took on against his will. Indeed, he was literally
forced into it, and ultimately, before the end of his life, he handed over this
all-too-restricted sphere of his work to a younger man, for the councils of his
country now laid greater tasks upon his shoulders. Yet in between these two
events there are thirty-five years of humble labour in one of the Lord's less
prepossessing vineyards, in that same Hippo where his priestly work began.

From 391 till 426, he was every inch a pastor of souls, and this despite the
monastic life which he lived together with his clergy, despite the care for the
churches of all Africa which his metropolitan put upon him, and despite his
growing literary fame. What ultimately compelled him to travel was the con-
crete demands which were made upon him by the necessities of the Church.
It was the fear of seeing truth clouded over and violence done to the purity
of the Church's doctrine, for what was in question was freedom and grace and
the unity and holiness of the Church -- those very matters which most deeply
touched his mind. Of his greater works, one only owes its existence to pure
interest in speculation -- that on the Trinity. The others all came into being to
meet the particular needs of the time.

-xvii-