A Novena to Saint Augustine
Sero te amavi
Thagaste, 354
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Augustine was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste in Roman North Africa, now Souk Ahras in Algeria, to a Christian mother, Monica, and a father, Patricius, who was a pagan and a modest town official. He was enrolled as a catechumen but not baptized, which was ordinary practice at the time, baptism being commonly delayed until much later in life.
Carthage
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Sent to Carthage at about seventeen to study rhetoric, Augustine took a concubine with whom he lived faithfully for over a decade, and who bore him a son he named Adeodatus, which means given by God.
Nine Years a Manichee
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
At around nineteen Augustine attached himself to the Manichees, a dualist sect that accounted for evil by making it an independent substance at war with good. He stayed with them nine years by his own reckoning, as a hearer rather than one of the elect, and lost confidence in them after their most celebrated teacher, Faustus of Mileve, proved unable to answer his questions.
Professor at Milan
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Augustine taught rhetoric at Carthage and then at Rome, and in 384 was appointed public professor of rhetoric at Milan, then the seat of the imperial court. It was the summit of his profession, and he obtained it partly through the Manichaean connections he had already stopped believing in.
Ambrose
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Augustine first went to hear Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, in order to study his technique as a public speaker, and reports that he was won over by the substance while attending to the style. Ambrose's allegorical reading of the Old Testament dismantled the objections that had kept Augustine from the faith for a decade.
Tolle, Lege
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
In a garden in Milan in the summer of 386, Augustine reports hearing a child's voice over a wall chanting tolle, lege, take up and read. He opened the letters of Paul at random, fell on Romans 13:13 and 14, and wrote that he had no need to read further.
The Easter Vigil, 387
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Ambrose baptized Augustine at the Easter Vigil of 387, along with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius. Monica died that autumn at Ostia while the party waited for a ship back to Africa, and Adeodatus died not long afterward, still in his teens.
Seized for a Bishop
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Visiting the port town of Hippo Regius in 391, Augustine was seized by the congregation and presented to the bishop for ordination, a recognised method at the time of recruiting reluctant clergy. He became bishop of Hippo around 395 and served there for some thirty-five years, most of it occupied with the ordinary business of a small see.
The Siege, 430
The Novena Prayer
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved Thee! For behold Thou wert within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee.
Thou didst call and cry to me and break open my deafness; and Thou didst send forth Thy beams and shine upon me and chase away my blindness; Thou didst breathe fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for Thee; I tasted Thee, and now hunger and thirst for Thee; Thou didst touch me, and I have burned for Thy peace.
O Love, who ever burnest and never consumest, O Charity, my God, kindle me. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt.
Augustine wrote the Confessions around 397, generally reckoned the first autobiography in Western literature, and spent thirteen years on The City of God after Rome was sacked in 410. He died on 28 August 430 while a Vandal army besieged Hippo, and was named a Doctor of the Church in 1298.
The prayer that opens each day is Augustine’s own, from the Confessions in Edward Pusey’s translation of 1876 — both the Latin and the translation long out of copyright. The first two paragraphs are the celebrated lament of Book X.27, Sero te amavi; the third is from X.29 and supplies what the lament by itself does not and a novena prayer needs, an actual petition. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt is also the sentence that Pelagius is said to have reacted against on first hearing it, beginning the long argument over grace. All of it is given in place of the modern novena prayer circulating under his name, which is of recent and uncertain authorship; the precedent for a saint’s own words is St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas, whose novenas likewise open with prayers they wrote. What follows each day is a fact from his life, one per day. His mother’s novena runs a day ahead of this one — see St. Monica, whose every day is drawn from the book he wrote.
