Augustine:
What happened to St. Augutine’s family when he converted and was eventually ordained and consecrated bishop in Africa? Did he abandon his family back in Rome or did he marry his common-law wife? What about his son?
TIA
Adeodatus was the Son of St. Augustine. Saint Augustine did not abandon him. St. Augustine was not converted to the Faith until he was thirty-two years of age. At seventeen he contracted an illicit relation with a young woman and Adeodatus was born of this union. Augustine, named him “Adeodatus”, which means the gift of God. When Augustine went to Rome, and, later, to Milan, this young woman and the child went with him, and she and Augustine continued their guilty relations. The young Adeodatus was the pride and hope of his parents, and possessed of an extraordinary mental endowment.St. Monica, Augustine’s mother, wanted him to marry the mother of his child. The name of the mother of Adeodatus has never been discovered and a reason has never been given as to why she and Augustine did not marry. Finally they separated. “She was stronger than I”, wrote St. Augustine, “and made her sacrifice with a courage and a generosity which I was not strong enough to imitate.”
She returned to Carthage, where she had come from, and the grace which had led her to sacrifice the relationship lead her to bury herself in a monastery, where she might atone for the sin’s she had commited. She left the young boy, Adeodatus, with Agustine, his father. Augustine received baptism at the age of thirty-two from the hands of St. Ambrose.
Adeodatus, Alypius, Augustine’s life-long associate, and a number of his closest friends, all became Christians. Monica, Augustine, Adeodatus, who was now fifteen, Lived together in a villa at Cassiciacum, near Milan. Adeodatus appears as interlocutor in his father’s treatise De beata vita (puer ille minimus omnium), and contributed largely to the treatise De Magistro, written two years later. He died soon after, in his sixteenth year.
