14 November—I must beg forgiveness of Saint Augustine, late Bishop of Hippo, who would have celebrated his 1,668^th birthday yesterday. Maybe he did. Who knows? In all events, even though he became quite a respected Latin teacher and theologian, most of us remember Augustine of Hippo fondly and primarily (only?) for his heart-wrenching supplication to God, as he tells us in his “Confessions”: “Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.” What Latin! What a guy!

What a guy indeed. Augustine’s family were North African Berbers, but they were quite Romanized, so they likely spoke Latin at home. Except perhaps when parents Monica and Patricius didn’t want little Gus and brother Navigius and sister Perpetua to know what they were talking about. (In my family Yiddish was the language for parental secrets. Our everyday language was Latin.)

Mother Monica was canonized herself, by the way, in part, we’re told, because husband Pat—a pagan who allegedly converted to Christianity on his deathbed—tended to screw around. We’ve all heard of Santa Monica.

Since the apple don’t fall far from the tree, Augustine started sowing his wild oats as a teenager and, ignoring his saintly mama’s admonitions, took up with a girl in Carthage. Santa Monica had wanted her brilliant son to avoid fornication (what mother wouldn’t?) and marry a person of at least his own class (what mother wouldn’t?).

Evidently, though, Augustine and his concubine (a.k.a. inamorata) read a leaked copy of Clarence Thomas’s infamous Dobbs concurring decision, didn’t take precautions, and, when Gus was 18, had a son, Adeodatus. Adeodatus means Gift of God in Latin, like Theodore in Greek, which language Augustine the Latin belles-lettrist wasn’t too comfortable in.

To his credit, Augustine maintained a presumably cordial relationship with his son’s mother for 15 years and confessed that he felt guilty when, no fool he, he decided to marry a teen-aged heiress. Kind of like . . . no, I won’t go there. Teen-aged like eleven years old, by the way. And Gus felt guilty when he broke off that engagement, too.

But Augustine jilted his prepubescent heiress only because he had decided to become a priest and by that time celibacy had begun to infect the Roman Catholic priesthood. Go figure. Augustine and the church. Gus regarded his family-way relationship as equivalent to marriage. To prove it, he wrote that it produced a decreased sensitivity to pain. He also confessed that, rather than a lover of marriage, as he put it, he was a slave to lust. Evidently a happy, enthusiastic slave.

But the fun ended when Augustine was 31, just about the time he got himself baptized, when, as he put it rather obliquely, he was “roused to a desire for wisdom, yet still was delaying to reject mere worldly happiness.” He hadn’t even been thinking of the priesthood at the time.

But that’s when Augustine begged God in the most elegant Latin, “Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.” In English, we’d put it, “Give me chastity and self-control. But not yet.”

Sounds so much better in Latin. Doesn’t everything? We don’t know if Augustine actually gave up the flesh in favor of celibate wisdom, as it were, except that he told us he did. And if you can’t believe a saint, whom can you believe?

Incidentally, Saint Augustine of Hippo is not to be confused with Saint Augustine of Canterbury. That Augustine’s claims to fame are that he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury and that Austin cars are named after him. Unfortunately, the Austin marque is now owned by the red Chinese, along with MG and Rover.

Da mihi patientiam . . .

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