A. D. 383: an ambitious twenty-nine-year-old provincial teacher of rhetoric boarded a ship in Carthage. He was bound for Rome, where powerful friends promised “better earnings,” “high honors,” and, above all, an escape from the unruly students of North Africa. Unfortunately, he had failed to reckon with his formidable mother: “She, indeed, was in dreadful grief at my going and followed me right to the coast, passionately determined that I should either go back home with her or take her to Rome.” Instead, he deceived her in order to get away, persuading her to stay overnight in a nearby chapel: “I lied to my mother—and such a mother.” As she wept and prayed on land, “the wind blew and filled our sails and the shore dropped from our sight. She went home and I to Rome.” Thus, in his own rueful words, we begin to know Aurelius Augustinus, the man who would become St. Augustine.

Of course, the students in Rome proved no better. After an unhappy year, Augustine moved to Milan. There, under the patronage of Symmachus, a senator and Milan’s pagan prefect, Augustine was appointed professor of rhetoric. More important, he came under the influence of Symmachus’s cousin Ambrose, the Christian bishop of Milan. It was in Milan—now joined by his mother, Monnica—that Augustine heard the fateful words, “Tolle, lege,” that finally led to his baptism (387) and to his embrace of the celibate life. Returning to Africa (388) in the hopes of founding a monastic