of Hippo Saint Augustine - The mestizo Augustine: a theologian between two cultures

I have been personally interested in Augustine for a long time. I was barely six or seven years old when the Bible societies launched a campaign under the theme of the famous words that Augustine heard in the garden in Milan: tolle, legetake and read. Shortly thereafter I first heard the famous words that we have been created for God, and our hearts will be restless until they rest in God. Later, when as a zealous Protestant in Latin America I sought weapons against Roman Catholicism, I was told that in the writings of Augustine I would find many weapons. At about the same time the reading of Augustines Confessions was for me both an inspiration and a challenge. Quite a few years later, when I was a student at Yale University, I was able to do some further and prolonged study of St. Augustine. And even more recently, in both personal and written dialogue with friends and companions such as Orlando Costas, Virgilio Elizondo, Ada Maria Isasi-Daz, Daisy Machado and several others, I began to suspect that Augustines restlessness was not due only to his distance from God, as he tells us in his Confessions, but also to the inner struggles of a person in whom two cultures, two legacies, two world visions clashed and mingledin short, of a mestizo. It was this insight that led to the present book, which seeks to be a fairly simple introduction to Augustines thought, but reading him from a perspective reflecting the context of a mestizaje similar to that which is experienced today in the United States by people of Spanish speech and Latino culture. This context is so unique and significant that I am told that soon the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language will include in its official dictionary the word hispanounidense (a strange compound word meaning something like Hispanic United [States]ian), since hispanoamericano is anyone born in the former colonies of Spain in America. The new term proposed to the academy reflects the experience of mestizaje that is so significant for us.

In the pages that follow I have not paid much attention to matters that are currently debated among specialists, and have also resisted the inclination to constantly quote secondary sources or scholarly works. Rather, I have tried to employ as much as possible the words of Augustine himself. Those other works and sources that I have not mentioned can easily be found on the Internet.

Finally, a word of gratitude not only to the friends and colleagues I have mentioned above but also to the two main companions that I have had in this task: Augustine himself through his works, and my wife, Catherine, professor emerita of church history at Columbia Theological Seminary, who has not only accompanied me in the task but also helped me understand Augustine himself. Thus, although sixteen centuries stand between them, both Augustine and Catherine speak in the pages that follow.