A recent trip to Italy afforded me the opportunity to visit both the baptismal site and the final resting place of St Augustine of Hippo. The former is accessed by descending below Milan’s magnificent duomo. There one discovers the ruins of the ancient baptistery where St Ambrose baptised Augustine at the Easter Vigil of AD 387.

The location of Augustine’s tomb in Pavia, a small city just south of Milan, is a quirk of history. The North African bishop died in his native Hippo, but in the sixth century his relics were moved to Sardinia to escape the Vandals. In the eighth century, Augustine’s remains were again under threat – this time from Arab raiders – which prompted the king of the Lombards to bring them to Pavia for safekeeping. Today Augustine rests in an ornate medieval shrine behind the main altar of the basilica. Curiously, the basilica also houses the remains of the early medieval philosopher Boethius, whose tomb is located in the crypt.

Following a moment of silent prayer in the Milan baptistery, my friend suggested that we read something from the great Doctor of Grace. I complied by pulling up the opening paragraph of the Confessions on my phone, in which Augustine proclaims the greatness of God: “You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

As we recited these words, I was reminded of another point in Book IX of the Confessions when Augustine offers a reflection on his own restless heart. It comes in his treatment of Psalm 4, which readers might recognise from the Church’s Night Prayer for Saturday. As Augustine explains in the Latin–English edition published by Emmaus Road, “[F]or so long I… had loved emptiness and chased falsehood, and so I trembled as I heard these words, for they are addressed to the kind of person I remembered myself to have been.”

The psalm begins with a plaintive cry. “When I call, answer me, O God of justice; from anguish you released me, have mercy and hear me!” The student of Augustine is immediately taken back to the question he poses at the very beginning of his Confessions. Which comes first: praising God or calling upon Him? Perhaps the answer is that to call upon Him is itself a form of praise, for in petitioning Him we affirm that we consider Him to be a God worth trusting.

The next verse is poignant. “O men, how long will your hearts be closed, will you love what is futile and seek what is false?” Looking back on a life of self-centred hedonism, Augustine felt pierced by these words. Those who seek joy in temporal things “all too easily grow empty themselves”. In their desperate spiritual hunger, they pour themselves out on things that are passing away, and they “lick even the images of these things with their famished imagination”. If only they would grow weary of their starvation, observes Augustine, then they might have the humility to call upon the name of the Lord.

Here the psalmist reminds us that the Lord is always listening. “It is the Lord who grants favours to those whom he loves; the Lord hears me whenever I call him.” In his commentary on the Psalms, Augustine interprets this verse as summoning us to pray “with great earnestness of heart, that is, with an inward and incorporeal cry”. Our weary hearts will discover the rest that they desire only when they have learned to encounter the God who dwells inside our souls: “Ah, if only they could see the eternal reality within!” As one spiritual writer put it, in His extraordinary condescension, ours is a God who waits to be wanted.

Then the psalm switches to the imperative. “Fear him; do not sin: ponder on your bed and be still. Make justice your sacrifice, and trust in the Lord.” Augustine recalls how in the inner chamber of his being, where he was “pierced with sorrow”, he made the decision to slay his old sinful nature and thus offer sacrifice to God. Upon giving himself over to this new life, he began to feel the Lord’s sweetness and, for the first time, “joy in my heart”.

The psalmist continues. “‘What can bring us happiness?’ many say. Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord.” In the Greek Septuagint, the verb for “shine” is the much stronger esēmeiōthē, meaning to be signed or marked (the Vulgate renders it signatum est). In his commentary, Augustine sees great significance in this language. The light of the divine countenance doesn’t merely shine upon us; it imprints itself on our very souls. True happiness, therefore, is found when we begin to live in the radiance of God’s presence. “[B]y you we are illumined,” Augustine muses, “so that we who were once darkness may become light in you” (see Eph 5:8).

The psalm nears its conclusion: “You have put into my heart a greater joy than they have from abundance of corn and new wine.” Corn and new wine represent worldly goods in all their alluring yet dissatisfying glamour. Augustine had often tasted these goods, yet he always came away hungry. This is why the inspired words of Scripture moved him so deeply: “As I read these words outwardly and experienced their truth inwardly I shouted with joy, and lost my desire to dissipate myself amid a profusion of earthly goods… for in your eternal simplicity I now had a different wheat and wine and oil.”

Our psalm ends with one of the most beautiful lines in the Bible. “I will lie down in peace and sleep comes at once for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” Peace is the fruit of the Spirit, anxiety is the fruit of sin. Hence if we wish to receive the peace which passes all understanding – a peace that the world cannot give – then we must learn to fix our hearts on the Blessed Trinity by whom and for whom our hearts were made.

According to the Hebrew text, the reception of this peace is what enables us to “dwell in safety”, but the Greek and Latin renditions prefer “dwell in hope”. As Augustine discovered, the whole of Psalm 4 is really about hope, and we leave the last word to him: “In truth you are Being itself, unchangeable, and in you is found the rest that is mindful no more of its labors, for there is no one else beside you, nor need our rest concern itself with striving for a host of other things that are not what you are; rather it is you, you, Lord, who through hope establish me in unity.”

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