Indeed, father and son prepared for baptism together, and were baptised, along with Alypius, at Easter 387 by the Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose.
Augustine wrote that Adeodatus had to be consoled afterwards. The journey back to North Africa was postponed, and father and son then spent over a year in Rome.
Adeodatus accompanied Augustine back to Thagsate, where Augustine sold the family property and began a lay Christian community.
The early writings of Augustine from this period covered his dialogues with his son.
As a proud parent Augustine wrote that Adeodatus was intellectually advanced for person of only seventeen years of age.
In the year 390 Adeodatus died before reaching his eighteenth birthday. He had been the object of the tender solitude of his father.
Within a period of three years, Augustine had lost both his beloved mother and his son through death.
Augustine always fondly remembered his son, who he believed surpassed many educated persons: “The brilliance he evinced filled me with awe,” and added, “I remember him without anxiety, I have nothing to fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for him.” Confessions 9,6,14
Augustine the parent, even in the evening of his life expressed poignant regrets for the unachieved promise that was cut short by the early death of Adeodatus.
Augustine’s thoughts of the child he admired, grievously present in his absence, like a lost limb, is revealed by a sentence in his last book, where Cicero speaks for him: ‘Do not these words of Cicero for his son come from the viscera of every father, when he says to him in a letter: “Of all people, you are the only one I would wish to surpass me in everything.”
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