He borrowed a friend’s country villa, brought his mother and his students, and spent the time arguing about happiness. A model for any summer retreat.
It happened in November, not July. But the spirit of what Augustine did at Cassiciacum in 386 is exactly what summer is for—and what most of us, with our phones and our half-read novels and our inability to stop checking email, fail to manage even when we have the time.
He had stepped away from his career. Augustine had been teaching rhetoric in Milan, one of the most prestigious academic posts in the late Roman world, and in the late summer of 386 he resigned—ostensibly because of a chest illness, but really because the conversion he had undergone in a Milan garden had made the old life impossible to continue. A friend named Verecundus, a grammarian who could not himself join the retreat because he was married and not yet baptized, offered the use of his country villa at Cassiciacum, north of the city. Augustine accepted, gathered his people, and left.
The company was intimate: Monica, his mother; Adeodatus, his brilliant young son; his brother Navigius; his closest friend Alypius; his cousins Lastidianus and Rusticus; and two pupils, Licentius and Trygetius. A shorthand writer came too, recording conversations that would become Augustine’s first Christian books. What he would later call otium philosophandi—philosophical leisure—was the animating principle of the whole stay. Not idleness, not tourism, not distraction. A deliberate slowing down in order to think more carefully about what mattered most.
Augustine would remember Verecundus with tenderness for the rest of his life. In Confessions, he prays that God would “reward Verecundus for that country house at Cassiciacum, where we found rest in thee from the fever of the world.” That phrase—the fever of the world—is worth sitting with. Augustine did not leave Milan because he was lazy or irresponsible. He left because the noise and pressure of professional life had become a kind of illness, and the country was the cure.
On the 13th of November—his 32nd birthday—he gathered the company in the balneum, the bathhouse, served them a birthday cake made of spelt flour, almonds, and honey, and proposed a three-day conversation on the question of happiness. He had worried about his brother Navigius, who was supposed to avoid sweets because of liver trouble. Navigius was not about to miss the cake. “On the contrary, it will be good for me,” he said—the honey from the Greek region of Imetto was bitter-sweet and wouldn’t cause problems.
The dialogue that followed became the De Beata Vita — On the Happy Life—the first work Augustine completed as a Christian. Monica, who had received no formal philosophical education, participated fully, and at one point gave an answer so precise that her son exclaimed it was worthy of Cicero. The question she had been asked was: what is the happy life? Her answer: to know God.
As Augustine explores throughout Confessions, happiness was a hunger built into the structure of the human person: “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” The De Beata Vita is his first sustained attempt, after conversion, to think that restlessness through—and it arrived not in a lecture hall but around a birthday table, in a country house borrowed from a friend, in the company of people he loved.
Cassiciacum is now identified with Cassago Brianza, a small town in the Brianza region of Lombardy. The mountains Augustine looked at are still there. The village adopted him as patron saint in 1631. Local people still make, on occasion, a cake said to follow the recipe from that November birthday.
The model Cassiciacum offers is simple and demanding in equal measure. Step away from the work. Go somewhere that is not your desk. Bring people worth talking to. Slow down enough to ask the questions that the ordinary week never leaves room for. Augustine did not waste his holiday on distraction. He used it to think more clearly than he had been able to think in months—and what he thought about was the question that, as Pope Leo XIV has noted in his reading of Augustine, has never stopped being urgent: what does the happy life actually look like, and where is it found?
He got his answer over birthday cake, in a bathhouse, in November. Summer will do just as well.
