of her musicians. He shed tears at the plays of Menander and Terence; he lamented upon the misfortunes of separated lovers; he shared their quarrels, rejoiced and despaired with them. And still he awaited the epiphany of Love–that Love which the performance of the actors shewed him to be so touching and fine.
Such then was Augustin, given over to the irresponsibility of his eighteen years–a heart spoiled by romantic literature, a mind impatient to try every sort of intellectual adventure in the most corrupting and bewitching city known to the pagan centuries, set amidst one of the most entrancing landscapes in the world.
II
THE AFRICAN ROME
Carthage did not offer only pleasures to Augustin; it was besides an extraordinary subject to think about for an understanding so alert and all-embracing as his.
At Carthage he understood the Roman grandeur as he could not at Madaura and the Numidian towns. Here, as elsewhere, the Romans made a point of impressing the minds of conquered races by the display of their strength and magnificence. Above all, they aimed at the immense. The towns built by them offered the same decorative and monumental character of the Greek cities of the Hellenistic period, which the Romans had further exaggerated–a character not without emphasis and over-elaboration, but which was bound to astonish, and that was the main thing in their view. In short, their ideal was not perceptibly different from that of our modern town councillors. To lay out streets which intersected at right angles; to create towns cut into even blocks like chessboards; to multiply prospects and huge architectural masses–all the Roman cities of this period revealed such an aim, with an almost identical plan.
Erected after this type, the new Carthage caused the old to be forgotten. Everybody agreed that it was second only to Rome. The African writers squandered the most hyperbolical praises upon it. For them it is “The splendid, the august, the sublime Carthage.” Although there may well be a certain amount of triviality or of patriotic exaggeration in these praises, it is certain that the Roman capital of the Province of Africa was no less considerable than the old metropolis of the Hanno and Barcine factions. With a population almost as large as that of Rome, it had almost as great a circumference. It must further be recalled that as it had no ramparts till the Vandal invasion, the city overflowed into the country. With its gardens, villas, and burial-places of the dead, it covered nearly the entire peninsula, to-day depopulated.
Carthage, as well as Rome, had her Capitol and Palatine upon Mount Byrsa, where rose no doubt a temple consecrated to the Capitolean triune deities, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, not far from the great temple of AEsculapius, a modern transformation of the old Punic Eschmoum. Hard by these sanctuaries, the Proconsul’s palace dominated Carthage from the height of the acclivity of the Acropolis. The Forum was at the foot of the hill, probably in the neighbourhood of the ports–a Forum built and arranged in the Roman way, with its shops of bankers and money-changers placed under the circular galleries, with the traditional image of Marsyas, and a number of statues of local celebrities. Apuleius no doubt had his there. Further off was the Harbour Square, where gathered foreigners recently landed and the idlers of the city in search of news, and where the booksellers offered the new books and pamphlets. There was to be seen one of the curiosities of Carthage–a mosaic representing fabulous monsters, men without heads, and men with only one leg and one foot–a huge foot under which, lying upon their backs, they sheltered from the sun, as under a parasol. On account of this feature they were called the _sciapodes_. Augustin, who like everybody else had paused before these grotesque figures, recalls them somewhere to his readers…. Beside the sea, in the lower town and upon the two near hills of the Acropolis, were a number of detached buildings that the old authors have preserved the names of and briefly described. Thanks to the zeal of archaeologists, it is now become impossible to tell where they stood.
The pagan sanctuaries were numerous. That of the goddess Coelestis, the great patroness of Carthage, occupied a space of five thousand feet. It comprised, besides the actual [Greek: hieron], where stood the image of the goddess, gardens, sacred groves, and courts surrounded with columns. The ancient Phoenician Moloch had also his temple under the name of Saturn. They called him _The Old One_, so Augustin tells us, and his worshippers were falling away. On the other hand, Carthage had another sanctuary which was very fashionable, a _Serapeum_ as at Alexandria, where were manifested the pomps of the Egyptian ritual, celebrated by Apuleius. Neighbouring the holy places, came the places of amusement: the theatre, the Odeum, circus, stadium, and amphitheatre–this last, of equal dimensions with the Colosseum at Rome, its gallery rising upon gallery, and its realistic sculptures of animals and artisans. Then there were the buildings for the public service: the immense cisterns of the East and the Malga, the great aqueduct, which, after being carried along a distance of fifty-five miles, emptied the water of the Zaghouan into the reservoirs at Carthage. Finally, there were the Baths, some of which we know–those of Antoninus and of Maximianus, and those of Gargilius, where one of the most important Councils known to the history of the African Church assembled. There were likewise many Christian basilicas at the time of Augustin. The authors mention seventeen: it is likely there were more. That of Damous-el-Karita, the only one of which considerable traces have been found, was vast and richly decorated, and was perhaps the cathedral of Carthage.
What other buildings there were are utterly lost to history. It may be conjectured, however, that Carthage, as well as Rome, had a _septizonium_–a decorative building with peristyles one above the other which surrounded a reservoir. In fact, it is claimed that the one at Rome was copied from Carthage. Straight streets paved with large flags intersected around these buildings, forming a network of long avenues, very bright and ventilated. Some of them were celebrated in the ancient world either for their beauty or the animation of their trade: the street of the Jewellers, the street of Health, of Saturn, of Coelestis, too, or of Juno. The fig and vegetable markets and the public granaries were also some of the main centres of Carthaginian life.
It is unquestionable that Carthage, with its buildings and statues, its squares, avenues and public gardens, looked like a large capital, and was a perfect example of that ideal of rather brutal magnificence and strength which the Romans obtruded everywhere.
And even while it dazzled the young provincial from Thagaste, the African Rome shewed him the virtue of order–social and political order. Carthage, the metropolis of Western Africa, maintained an army of officials who handled the government in its smallest details. First of all, there were the representatives of the central power, the imperial rulers–the Proconsul, a sort of vice-emperor, who was surrounded by a full court, a civil and military staff, a privy council, an _officium_ which included a crowd of dignitaries and subaltern clerks. Then there was the Propraetor of Africa who, being in control of the government of the whole African province, had an _officium_ still larger perhaps than the Proconsul’s. After them came the city magistrates, who were aided in their functions by the Council of the Decurions–the Senate of Carthage. These Carthaginian senators cut a considerable figure: for them their colleagues at Rome were full of airs and graces, and the Emperors endeavoured to keep them in a good-humour. All the details of city government came under their supervision: the slaughter-houses, buildings, the gathering of municipal taxes, and the police, which comprised even the guardians of the Forum. Then there were the army and navy. The home port of a grain-carrying fleet which conveyed the African cereals to Ostia, Carthage could starve Rome if she liked. The grain and oil of all countries lay in her docks–the storehouses of the state provisions, which were in charge of a special prefect who had under his orders a whole corporation of overseers and clerks.
Augustin must have heard a good deal of grumbling at Carthage against this excess of officialism. But, all the same, so well-governed a city was a very good school for a young man who was to combine later the duties of bishop, judge, and governor. The blessings of order, of what was called “the Roman peace” no doubt impressed him the more, as he himself came from a turbulent district often turned upside down by the quarrels of religious sects and by the depredations of the nomads–a boundary-land of the Sahara regions where it was much harder to bring the central government into play than in Carthage and the coast-towns. To appreciate the beauty of government, there is nothing like living in a country where all is at the mercy of force or the first-comer’s will. Such of the Barbarians who came in contact with Roman civilization were overcome with admiration for the good order that it established. But what astonished them more than anything else was that the Empire was everywhere.
No man, whatever his race or country, could help feeling proud to belong to the Roman city. He was at home in all the countries in the world subject to Rome. Our Europe, split into nationalities, can hardly understand now this feeling of pride, so different from our narrow patriotisms. The way to feel something of it is to go to the colonies: out there the least of us may believe himself a sovereign, simply from the fact that he is a subject of the governing country. This feeling was very strong in the old world. Carthage, where the striking effect of the Empire appeared in all its brilliancy, would increase it in Augustin. He had only to look around him to value the extent of the privilege conferred by Rome on her citizens. Men coming from all countries, without exception of race, were, so to speak, made partners of the Empire and collaborated in the grandeur of the Roman scheme. If the Proconsul who then occupied the Byrsa palace, the celebrated Symmachus, belonged to an old Italian family, he whom he represented, the Emperor Valentinian, was the son of a Pannonian soldier. The Count Theodosius, the general who suppressed the insurrection of Firmus in Mauretania, was a Spaniard, and the army he led into Africa was made up, for the most part, of Gauls. Later on, under Arcadius, another Gaul, Rufinus, shall be master of the whole of the East.
An active mind like Augustin’s could not remain indifferent before this spectacle of the world thrown open by Rome to all men of talent. He had the soul of a poet, quick to enthusiasm; the sight of the Eagles planted on the Acropolis at Carthage moved him in a way he never forgot. He acquired the habit of seeing big, and began to cast off race prejudices and all the petty narrowness of a local spirit. When he became a Christian he did not close himself up, like the Donatists, within the African Church. His dream was that Christ’s Empire upon earth should equal the Empire of the Caesars.
Still, it is desirable not to fall into error upon this Roman unity. Behind the imposing front it shewed from one end to the other of the Mediterranean, the variety of peoples, with their manners, traditions, special religions, was always there, and in Africa more than elsewhere. The population of Carthage was astonishingly mixed. The hybrid character of this country without unity was illustrated by the streaks found in the Carthaginian crowds. All the specimens of African races elbowed one another in the streets, from the nigger, brought from his native Soudan by the slave-merchant, to the Romanized Numidian. The inflow, continually renewed, of traffickers and cosmopolitan adventurers increased this confusion. And so Carthage was a Babel of races, of costumes, of beliefs and ideas. Augustin, who was at heart a mystic, but also a dialectician extremely fond of showy discussions, found in Carthage a lively summary of the religions and philosophies of his day. During these years of study and reflection he captured booty of knowledge and observation which he would know how to make use of in the future.
In the Carthage sanctuaries and schools, in the squares and the streets, he could see pass the disciples of all the systems, the props of all the superstitions, the devotees of all the religions. He heard the shrill clamour of disputes, the tumult of fights and riots. When a man was at the end of his arguments, he knocked down his opponent. The authorities had a good deal of trouble to keep order. Augustin, who was an intrepid logician, must have longed to take his share in these rows. But one cannot exactly improvise a faith between to-day and to-morrow. While he awaited the enlightenment of the truth, he studied the Carthaginian Babel.
First of all, there was the official religion, the most obvious and perhaps the most brilliant, that of the Divinity of the Emperors, which was still kept up even under the Christian Caesars. Each year, at the end of October, the elected delegates of the entire province, having at their head the _Sacerdos province_, the provincial priest, arrived at Carthage. Their leader, clad in a robe broidered with palms, gold crown on head, made his solemn entry into the city. It was a perfect invasion, each member dragging in his wake a mob of clients and servants. The Africans, with their taste for pomp and colour, seized the chance to give themselves over to a display of ruinous sumptuosities: rich dresses, expensive horses splendidly caparisoned, processions, sacrifices, public banquets, games at the circus and amphitheatre. These strangers so overcrowded the city that the imperial Government had to forbid them, under severe penalties, to stay longer than five days. A very prudent measure! At these times, collisions were inevitable between pagans and Christians. It was desirable to scatter such crowds as soon as possible, for riots were always smouldering in their midst.
No less thronged were the festivals of the Virgin of Heaven. A survival of the national religion, these feasts were dear to the hearts of the Carthaginians. Augustin went to them with his fellow-students. “We trooped there from every quarter,” he says. There was a great gathering of people in the interior court which led up to the temple. The statue, taken from its sanctuary, was placed before the peristyle upon a kind of repository. Wantons, arrayed with barbarous lavishness, danced around the holy image; actors performed and sang hymns. “Our eager eyes,” Augustin adds maliciously, “rested in turn on the goddess, and on the girls, her adorers.” The Great Mother of the Gods, the Goddess of Mount Berecyntus, was worshipped with similar license. Every year the people of Carthage went to wash her solemnly in the sea. Her statue, carried in a splendid litter, robed with precious stuffs, curled and farded, passed through the streets of the city, with its guard of mummers and Corybants. These last, “with hair greasy from pomade, pale faces, and a loose and effeminate walk, held out bowls for alms to the onlookers.”
The devotion to Isis was yet another excuse for processions: the _Serapeum_ was a rival attraction to the temple of the Heavenly Maiden. If we may trust Tertullian, the Africans swore only by Serapis. Possibly Mithras had also worshippers in Carthage. Anyhow, the occult religions were fully represented there. Miracle-working was becoming more and more the basis even of paganism. Never had the soothsayers been more flourishing. Everybody, in secret, pried into the entrails of the sacrificial victims, or used magic spells. As to the wizards and astrologists, they did business openly. Augustin himself consulted them, like all the Carthaginians. The public credulity had no limits.
On the opposite side from the pagan worship, the sects which had sprung from Christianity sprouted. True, Africa has given birth to but a small number of heresies: the Africans had not the subtle mind of the Orientals and they were not given to theorizing. But a good many of the Eastern heresies had got into Carthage. Augustin must have still met Arians there, although at this period Arianism was dying out in Africa. What is certain is that orthodox Catholicism was in a very critical state. The Donatists captured its congregations and churches; they were unquestionably in the majority. They raised altar against altar. If Genethlius was the Catholic bishop, the Donatist bishop was Parmenianus. And they claimed to be more Catholic than their opponents. They boasted that they were the Church, the single, the unique Church, the Church of Christ. But these schismatics themselves were already splitting up into many sects. At the time Augustin was studying at Carthage, Rogatus, Bishop of Tenes, had just broken publicly with Parmenian’s party. Another Donatist, Tyconius, published books wherein he traversed many principles dear to his fellow-religionists. Doubt darkened consciences. Amid these controversies, where was the truth? Among whom did the Apostolic tradition dwell?
To put the finishing touch on this anarchy, a sect which likewise derived from Christianity–Manicheeism–began to have numerous adepts in Africa. Watched with suspicion by the Government, it concealed part of its doctrine, the most scandalous and subversive. But the very mystery which enveloped it, helped it to get adherents.
Among all these apostles preaching their gospel, these devotees beating the drum before their god, these theologians reciprocally insulting and excommunicating one another, Augustin brought the superficial scepticism of his eighteenth year. He wanted no more of the religion in which his mother had brought him up. He was a good talker, a clever dialectician; he was in a hurry to emancipate himself, to win freedom for his way of thinking as for his way of life; and he meant to enjoy his youth. With such gifts, and with such dispositions, he could only choose among all these doctrines that which would help most the qualities of his mind, at once flattering his intellectual pretensions, and leaving his pleasure-loving instincts a loose rein.
III
THE CARTHAGE STUDENT
However strong were the attractions of the great city, Augustin well knew that he had not been sent there to amuse himself, or to trifle as an amateur with philosophy. He was poor, and he had to secure his future–make his fortune. His family counted on him. Neither was he ignorant of the difficult position of his parents and by what sacrifices they had supplied him with the means to finish his studies. Necessarily he was obliged to be a student who worked.
With his extraordinary facility, he stood out at once among his fellow-students. In the rhetoric school, where he attended lectures, he was, he tells us, not only at the top, but he was the leader of his companions. He led in everything. At that time, rhetoric was extremely far-reaching: it had come to take in all the divisions of education, including science and philosophy. Augustin claims to have learned all that the masters of his time had to teach: rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, music, mathematics. Having gone through the whole scholastic system, he thought of studying law, and aided by his gift of words, to become a barrister. For a gifted young man it was the shortest and surest road to money and honours.
Unhappily for him, hardly was he settled down at Carthage than his father died. This made his future again problematical. How was he to keep up his studies without the sums coming from his father? The affairs of Patricius must have been left in the most parlous condition. But Monnica, clinging to her ambitious plans for her son, knew how to triumph over all difficulties, and she continued to send Augustin money. Romanianus, the Maecenas of Thagaste, who was doubtless applied to by her, came once more to the rescue of the hard-up student. The young man, set at ease about his expenses, resumed light-heartedly his studious and dissipated life.
As a matter of fact, this family bereavement does not seem to have caused him much grief. In the _Confessions_ he mentions the death of his father in a few words, and, so to speak, in parenthesis, as an event long foreseen without much importance. And yet he owed him a great deal. Patricius was hard pressed, and he took immense trouble to provide the means for his son’s education. But with the fine egotism of youth, Augustin perhaps thought it enough to have profited by his father’s sacrifices, and dispensed himself from gratitude. In any case, his affection for his father must have been rather lukewarm; the natural differences between them ran too deep. In these years, Monnica filled all the heart of Augustin.
But the influence of Monnica herself was very slight upon this grown-up youth, eighteen years old. He had forgotten her lessons, and it did not trouble him much if his conduct added to the worries of the widow, who was now struggling with her husband’s creditors. At heart he was a good son and he deeply loved his mother, but inevitably the pressure of the life around him swept him along.
He has pictured his companions for us, after his conversion, as terrible blackguards. No doubt he is too severe. Those young men were neither better nor worse than elsewhere. They were rowdy, as they were in the other cities of the Empire, and as one always is at that age. Imperial regulations enjoined the police to have an eye on the students, to note their conduct and what company they kept. They were not to become members of prohibited societies, not to go too often to the theatre, nor to waste their time in raking and feastings. If their conduct became too outrageous, they were to be beaten with rods and sent back to their parents. At Carthage there was a hard-living set of men who called themselves “The Wreckers.” Their great pleasure was to go and make a row at a professor’s lecture; they would burst noisily into the classroom and smash up anything they could lay hold of. They amused themselves also by “ragging” the freshmen, jeering at their simplicity, and playing them a thousand tricks. Things haven’t much changed since then. The fellow-students of Augustin were so like students of to-day that the most modern terms suggest themselves to describe their performances.
Augustin, who was on the whole well conducted, and, as behoved a future professor, had a respect for discipline, disapproved of “The Wreckers” and their violence. This did not prevent him from enjoying himself in their society. He was overcome with shame because he could not keep pace with them–we must believe it at least, since he tells us so himself. With a certain lack of assurance, blended however with much juvenile vanity, he joined the band. He listened to that counsel of vulgar wisdom which is disastrous to souls like his: “Do as others do.” He accordingly did do as the others; he knew all their debauchery, or he imagined he did, for however low he went, he was never able to do anything mean. He was then so far from the faith that he arranged love-trysts in the churches. “I was not afraid to think of my lust, and plan a scheme for securing the deadly fruit of sin, even within the walls of Thy church during the celebration of Thy mysteries.” We might be reading the confession of a sensualist of to-day. One grows astonished at these morals, at once so old and so modern. What, already! These young Christian basilicas, but newly sprung out of the earth, where the men were strictly separated from the women–were they already become places of assignation, where love-letters were slipped into hands, and procuresses sold their furtive services!…
At length the great happiness for which Augustin had so long been sighing was granted him: he loved and he was loved.
He loved as he indeed was able to love, with all the impetuosity of his nature and all the fire of his temperament, with all his heart and all his senses. “I plunged headlong into love, whose fetters I longed to wear.” But as he went at once to extremes, as he meant to give himself altogether, and expected all in return, he grew irritated at not receiving this same kind of love. It was never enough love for him. Yet he was loved, and the very certainty of this love, always too poor to his mind, exasperated the violence and pertinacity of his desire. “Because I was loved, I proudly riveted round myself the chain of woe, to be soon scourged with the red-hot iron rods of jealousy, torn by suspicions, fears, anger, and quarrels.” This was passion with chorus and orchestra, a little theatrical, with its violences, its alternations between fury and ecstasy, such as an African, steeped in romantic literature, would conceive it. Deceived, he flung himself in desperate pursuit of the ever-flitting love. He had certainly more than one passion. Each one left him more hungry than the last.
He was sensual, and he felt each time how brief is pleasure, in what a limited circle all enjoyment turns. He was tender, eager to give himself; and he saw plainly that one never gives oneself quite altogether, that even in the maddest hours of surrender one always reserves oneself in secret, keeping for oneself something of oneself; and he felt that most of the time his tenderness got no answer. When the joyous heart brings the offering of its love, the heart of her he loves is absent. And when it is there, on the edge of the lips, decked and smiling to meet the loved one, it is the other who is absent. Almost never do they join together, and they never join together altogether. And so this Love, which claims to be constant and even eternal, ought to be, if it would prolong itself, a continual act of faith, and hope, and charity. To believe in it in spite of its darkening and falling away; to hope its return, often against all evidence; to pardon its injustices and sometimes its foul actions–how many are capable of such abnegation? Augustin went through all that. He was in despair about it. And then, the nostalgia of predestined souls took hold of him. He had an indistinct feeling that these human loves were unworthy of him, and that if he must have a master, he was born to serve another Master. He had a desire to shake off the platitude of here below, the melancholy fen where stagnated what he calls “the marsh of the flesh”; to escape, in a word, from the wretched huts wherein for a little he had sheltered his heart; to burn all behind him, and so prevent the weakness of a return; and to go and pitch his tent further, higher, he knew not where–upon some unapproachable mountain where the air is icy, but before the eyes, the vasty stretches of light and space….
These first loves of Augustin were really too fierce to last. They burned up themselves. Augustin did not keep them up long. There was in him, besides, an instinct which counteracted his exuberant, amorous sentimentality–the sense of beauty. That in itself was enough to make him pause on the downhill of riot. The anarchy and commotion of passion was repellent to a mind devoted to clearness and order. But there was still another thing–the son of the Thagaste freeholder had any amount of common sense. That at least was left to him of the paternal heritage. A youth of what we call the lower middle class, strictly brought up in the hard and frugal discipline of the provinces, he felt the effects of his training. The bohemianism in which his friends revelled could not hold him indefinitely. Besides this, the career he desired, that of a barrister or professor, had a preliminary obligation to maintain a certain outward decorum. He himself tells us so; in the midst of his most disreputable performances he aspired to be known for his fashion and wit–_elegans atque urbanus_. Politeness of speech and manners, the courteous mutual deference of the best society–such, was the ideal of this budding professor of rhetoric.
Anxiety about his future, joined to his rapid disenchantments, ere long sobered the student: he just took his fling and then settled down. Love turned for him into sensual habit. His head became clear for study and meditation. The apprentice to rhetoric liked his business. Up to his last breath, despite his efforts to change, he continued, like all his contemporaries, to love rhetoric. He handled words like a worker in verbals who is aware of their price and knows all their resources. Even after his conversion, if he condemns profane literature as a poisoner of souls, he absolves the beauty of language. “I accuse not words,” he says. “Words are choice and precious vessels. I accuse the wine of error that drunken doctors pour out for us into these fair goblets.” At the Rhetoric School he took extreme pleasure in declaiming. He was applauded; the professor gave him as an example to the others. These scholastic triumphs foretold others more celebrated and reverberating. And so, in his heart, literary vanity and ambition disputed the ever-lively illusions of love. And then, above all! he had to live; Monnica’s remittances were necessarily small; the generosity of Romanianus had its limit. So he beat about to enlarge his small student’s purse. He wrote verses for poetic competitions. Perhaps already he was able to act as tutor to certain of his fellow-students, less advanced.
If the need of loving tormented his sentimental heart, he tried to assuage it in friendship. He loved friendship as he loved love. He was a passionate and faithful friend up to his death. At this time of his life, he was riveting friendships which were never to be broken. He had beside him his fellow-countryman, Alypius, the future Bishop of Thagaste, who had followed him to Carthage and would, later on, follow him to Milan; Nebridius, a not less dear companion, fated to die early; Honoratus, whom he drew into his errors and later did his best to enlighten; and, finally, that mysterious young man, whose name he does not tell us, and whose loss he mourned as never any one has mourned the death of a friend.
They lived in daily and hourly intimacy, in continual fervour and enthusiasm. They were great theatre-goers, where Augustin was able to satisfy his desire for tender emotions and romantic adventures. They had musical parties; they tried over again the popular airs heard at the Odeum or some other of the innumerable theatres at Carthage. All the Carthaginians, even the populace, were mad about music. The Bishop of Hippo, in his sermons, recalls a mason upon his scaffolding, or a shoemaker in his stall, singing away the tunes of well-known musicians. Then our students strolled on the quays or in the Harbour Square, contemplating the many-coloured sea, this splendour of waters at the setting sun, which Augustin will extol one day with an inspiration unknown to the ancient poets. Above all, they fell into discussions, commented what they had lately read, or built up astonishing plans for the future. So flowed by a happy and charming life, abruptly interpolated with superb anticipations. With what a full heart the Christian penitent calls it back for us!–“What delighted me in the intercourse of my friends, was the talk, the laughter, the good turns we did each other, the common study of the masters of eloquence, the comradeship, now grave now gay, the differences that left no sting, as of a man differing with himself, the spice of disagreement which seasoned the monotony of consent. Each by turns would instruct or listen; impatiently we missed the absent friend, and savoured the joy of his return. We loved each other with all our hearts, and such tokens of friendship springing from the heart and displayed by a word, a glance, an expression, by a thousand pretty complaisances, supply the heat which welds souls together, and of many make one.”
It is easily understood that such ties as these had given Augustin a permanent disgust for his rowdy comrades of a former time: he went no more with “The Wreckers.” The small circle he took pleasure in was quiet and cheerful. Its merriment was controlled by the African gravity. He and his friends come before my eyes, a little like those students of theology, or those cultivated young Arabs, who discuss poetry, lolling indolently upon the cushions of a divan, while they roll between their fingers the amber beads of their rosary, or walking slowly under the arcades of a mosque, draped in their white-silk simars, with a serious and meditative air, gestures elegant and measured, courteous and harmonious speech, and something discreet, polite, and already clerical in their tone and manners.
In fact, the life which Augustin was at that time relishing was the pagan life on its best and gentlest side. The subtle network of habits and daily occupations enveloped him little by little. There was some risk of his growing torpid in this soft kind of life, when suddenly a rude shock roused him…. It was a chance, but in his eyes a providential chance, which put the _Hortensius_ of Cicero between his hands. Augustin was about nineteen, still a student; according to the order which prevailed in the schools, the time had come for him to read and explain this philosophical dialogue. He had no curiosity about the book. He took it from his sense of duty as a student, because it figured on the schedule. He unrolled the book, and began it, doubtless with calm indifference. All of a sudden, a great unexpected light shone between the lines. His heart throbbed. His whole soul sprang towards these phrases, so dazzling and revealing. He awoke from his long drowsiness. Before him shone a marvellous vision…. As this dialogue is lost, we can hardly to-day account for such enthusiasm, and we hold that the Roman orator was a very middling philosopher. We know, however, through Augustin himself, that the book contained an eloquent praise of wisdom. And then, words are naught without the soul of the reader; all this, falling into Augustin’s soul, rendered a prolonged and magnificent sound. It is evident, too, that just at the moment when he unrolled the book he was in a condition to receive this uplifting summons. In such minutes, when the heart, ignorant of itself, swells like the sea before a storm, when all the inner riches of the being overflow, the slightest glimmer is enough to reveal all these imprisoned forces, and the least shock to set them free.
He has at least preserved for us, in pious and faithful gratitude, some phrases of this dialogue which moved him so deeply. Especially does he admire this passage, wherein the author, after a long discussion, ends in these terms: “If, as pretend the philosophers of old time, who are also the greatest and most illustrious, we have a soul immortal and divine, it behoves us to think, that the more it has persevered in its way, that is to say, in reason, love, and the pursuit of truth, and the less it has been intermingled and stained in human error and passion, the easier will it be for it to raise itself and soar again to the skies.”
Such phrases, read in a certain state of mind, might well overwhelm this young man, who was ere long to yearn for the cloister and was destined to be the founder of African monasticism. To give his whole life to the study of wisdom, to compel himself towards the contemplation of God, to live here below an almost divine life–this ideal, impossible to pagan wisdom, Augustin was called to realize in the name of Christ. That had dawned on him, all at once, while he was reading the _Hortensius_. And this ideal appeared to him so beautiful, so well worth the sacrifice of all he had hitherto loved, that nothing else counted for him any more. He despised rhetoric, the vain studies it compelled him to pursue, the honour and glory it promised him. What was all that to the prize of wisdom? For wisdom he felt himself ready to give up the world…. But these heroic outbursts do not, as a rule, keep up very long in natures so changeable and impressionable as Augustin’s. Yet they are not entirely thrown away. Thus, in early youth, come dim revelations of the future. There comes a presentiment of the port to which one will some day be sailing; a glimpse of the task to fulfil, the work to build up; and all this rises before the eyes in an entrancement of the whole being. Though the bright image be eclipsed, perhaps for years, the remembrance of it persists amid the worst degradations or the worst mediocrities. He who one single time has seen it pass, can never afterwards live quite like other people.
This fever calmed, Augustin set himself to reflect. The ancient philosophers promised him wisdom. But Christ also promised it! Was it not possible to reconcile them? And was not the Gospel ideal essentially more human than that of the pagan philosophers? Suppose he tried to submit to that, to bring the faith of his childhood into line with his ambitions as a young man of intellect? To be good after the manner of his mother, of his grandparents, of the good Thagaste servants, of all the humble Christian souls whose virtues he had been taught to respect, and at the same time to rival a Plato by the strength of thought–what a dream! Was it possible?… He tells us himself that the illusion was brief, and that he grew cool about the _Hortensius_ because he did not find the name of Christ in it. He deceives himself, probably. At this time he was not so Christian. He yields to the temptation of a fine phrase: when he wrote his _Confessions_ he had not yet entirely lost this habit.
But what remains true is, that feeling the inadequateness of pagan philosophy, he returned for a moment towards Christianity. The Ciceronian dialogue, by disappointing his thirst for the truth, gave him the idea of knocking at the door of the Church and trying to find out if on that side there might not be a practicable road for him. This is why the reading of _Hortensius_ is in Augustin’s eyes one of the great dates of his life. Although he fell back in his errors, he takes credit for his effort. He recognizes in it the first sign, and, as it were, a promise of his conversion. “Thenceforth, my God, began my upward way, and my return towards Thee.”
He began then to study the Holy Scriptures with a more or less serious intention to instruct himself in them. But to go to the Bible by way of Cicero was to take the worst road. Augustin got lost there. This direct popular style, which only cares about saying things, and not about how they are said, could only repel the pupil of Carthage rhetoricians, the imitator of the harmonious Ciceronian sentences. Not only had he much too spoiled a taste in literature, but there was also too much literature in this pose of a young man who starts off one fine morning to conquer wisdom. He was punished for his lack of sincerity, and especially of humility. He understood nothing of the Scripture, and “I found it,” he says, “a thing not known to the proud, nor yet laid open to children, but poor in appearance, lofty in operation, and veiled in mysteries. At that time, I was not the man to bow my head so as to pass in at its door.”…
He grew tired very quickly. He turned his back on the Bible, as he had thrown aside _Hortensius_, and he went to find pasture elsewhere. Nevertheless, his mind had been set in motion. Nevermore was he to know repose, till he had found truth. He demanded this truth from all the sects and all the churches. So it was, that in despair he flung himself into Manicheeism.
Some have professed amazement that this honest and practical mind should have stuck fast in a doctrine so tortuous, so equivocal, contaminated by fancies so grossly absurd. But perhaps it is forgotten that there was everything in Manicheeism. The leaders of the sect did not deliver the bulk of the doctrine all at once to their catechumens; the entire initiation was a matter of several degrees. Now Augustin never went higher than a simple _auditor_ in the Manichean Church. What attracted specially fine minds to the Manichees, was that they began by declaring themselves rationalists. To reconcile faith with natural science and philosophy has been the fad of heresiarchs and free-thinkers in all ages. The Manicheans bragged that they had succeeded. They went everywhere, crying out: “Truth, Truth!” That suited Augustin very well: it was just what he was looking for. He hastened to the preachings of these humbugs, impatient to receive at last this “truth,” so noisily announced. From what they said, it was contained in several large books written by their prophet under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. There was quite a library of them. By way of bamboozling the crowd, they produced some of them which looked very important, ponderous as Tables of the Law, richly bound in vellum, and embellished with striking illuminations. How was it possible to doubt that the entire revelation was contained in such beautiful books? One felt at once full of respect for a religion which was able to produce in its favour the testimony of such a mass of writings.
However, the priests did not open them. To allay the impatience of their hearers, they amused them by criticizing the books and dogmas of the Catholics. This preliminary criticism was the first lesson of their instruction. They pointed out any number of incoherences, absurdities, and interpolations in the Bible: according to them, a great part of the Scriptures had been foisted on the world by the Jews. But they triumphed especially in detecting the contradictions of the Gospel narratives. They sapped them with syllogisms. It is easy to understand that these exercises in logic should have at once attracted the youthful Augustin. With his extraordinary dialectical subtilty, he soon became very good at it himself–much better even than his masters. He made speeches in their assemblies, fenced against a text, peremptorily refuted it, and reduced his adversaries to silence. He was applauded, covered with praise. A religion which brought him such successes must be the true one.
After he became a bishop, he tried to explain to himself how it was that he fell into Manicheeism, and could find only two reasons. “The first,” he says, “was a friendship which took hold of me under I know not what appearance of kindness, and was like a cord about my neck…. The second was those unhappy victories that I almost always won in our disputes.”
But there is still another which he mentions elsewhere, and it had perhaps the most weight. This was the loose moral code which Manicheeism authorized. This doctrine taught that we are not responsible for the evil we do. Our sins and vices are the work of the evil Principle–the God of Darkness, enemy of the God of Light. Now at the moment when Augustin was received as _auditor_ by the Manichees, he had a special need of excusing his conduct by a moral system so convenient and indulgent. He had just formed his connection with her who was to become the mother of his child.
IV
THE SWEETNESS OF TEARS
Augustin was nearly twenty. He had finished his studies in rhetoric within the required time. According to the notions of that age, a young man ought to have concluded his course by his twentieth year. If not, he was considered past mending and sent back there and then to his family.
It may appear surprising that a gifted student like Augustin did not finish his rhetoric course sooner. But after his terms at Madaura, he had lost nearly a year at Thagaste. Besides, the life of Carthage had so many charms for him that doubtless he was in no hurry to leave. However that may be, the moment was now come for him to make up his mind about his career. The wishes of his parents, the advice of his masters, as well as his own ambitions and qualities, urged him, as we know, to become a barrister. But now, suddenly, all his projects for the future changed. Not only did he give up the law, but at the very moment when all appeared to smile on him, at the opening of his youth, he left Carthage to go and bury himself as a teacher of grammar in the little free-town his birthplace.
As he has neglected to give any explanation of this sudden determination, we are reduced to conjectures. It is likely that his mother was bothered about household expenses and could no longer afford to keep him at Carthage. Besides, she had other children, a son and daughter, to start in life. Augustin was on the point of being, if not poor, at least very hard up. He must do something to earn his living, and as quickly as possible. In these conditions, the quickest way out of the difficulty was to sell to others what he had bought from his masters. To live, he would open a word-shop, as he calls it disdainfully. But as he had only just ceased to be a student, he could not dream of becoming a professor in a great city such as Carthage, and setting himself up in rivalry to so many celebrated masters. The best thing he could do, if he did not want to vegetate, was to fall back on some more modest post. Now his protector, Romanianus, wanted him to go to Thagaste. This rich man had a son almost grown up, whom it was necessary to put as soon as possible in the hands of a tutor. Augustin, so often helped by the father, was naturally thought of to look after the youth. Furthermore, Romanianus, who appreciated Augustin’s talent, must have been anxious to attract him to Thagaste and keep him there. With an eye to the interests of his free-town, he desired to have such a shining light in the place. So he asked this young man, whom he patronized, to return to his native district and open a grammar school. He promised him pupils, and, above all, the support of his influence, which was considerable, Monnica, as we may conjecture, added her entreaties to those of the great head of the Thagaste municipality. Augustin yielded.
Did it grieve him very much to make up his mind to this exile? It must have been extremely hard for a young man of twenty to give up Carthage and its pleasures. Moreover, it is pretty nearly certain that at this time he had already started that connection which was to last so long. To leave a mistress whom he loved, and that in all the freshness of a passion just beginning–one wonders how he was able to make up his mind to it. And yet he did leave, and spent nearly a year at Thagaste.
One peculiar mark of the youth, and even of the whole life of Augustin, is the ease with which he unlearns and breaks off his habits–the sentimental as well as the intellectual. He used up a good many doctrines before resting in the Catholic truth; and even afterwards, in the course of a long life, he contradicted and corrected himself more than once in his controversies and theological writings. His _Retractations_ prove this. One might say that the accustomed weighs on him as a hindrance to his liberty; that the look of the places where he lives becomes hateful to him as a threat of servitude. He feels dimly that his true country is elsewhere, and that if he must settle anywhere it is in the house of his Heavenly Father. _Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te…._ “Restless are our hearts, O my God, until they rest in Thee.” Long before St. Francis of Assisi, he practised the mystic rule: “As a stranger and a pilgrim.” It is true that in his twentieth year he was very far from being a mystic. But he already felt that restlessness which made him cross the sea and roam Italy from Rome to Milan. He is an impulsive. He cannot resist the mirages of his heart or his imagination. He is always ready to leave. The road and its chances tempt him. He is eager for the unknown. He lets himself be carried in delight by the blowing wind. God calls him; he obeys without knowing where he goes. This unsettled young man, halting between contrary passions, who feels at home nowhere, has already the soul of an apostle.
This changeableness of mood was probably the true cause of his departure for Thagaste. But other more apparent reasons, reasons more patent to a juvenile consciousness, guided him also. No doubt he was not sorry to reappear in his little town, although he was so young, with the importance and authority of a master. His former companions were going to become his pupils. And then the Manichees had fanaticized him. Carried away by the neophyte’s bubbling zeal, elevated by his triumphs at the public meetings in Carthage, he meant to shine before his fellow-countrymen, and perhaps convert them. He departed with his mind made up to proselytize. Let us believe also, that in spite of his dissolute life, and the new passion that filled his heart, he did not come back to Thagaste without an affectionate thought at the back of his head for his mother.
The reception that Monnica had in reserve for him was going to surprise him considerably. Since her widowhood, the wife of Patricius had singularly advanced in the way of Christian perfection. The early Church not only offered widows the moral help of its sacraments and consolations, it also granted a special dignity with certain privileges to those who made a vow to refrain from sex-intercourse. They had in the basilicas, even as the consecrated virgins, a place of honour, divided from that of the other matrons by a balustrade. They wore a special dress. They were obliged to a conduct which would shew them worthy of all the outer marks of respect which surrounded them. The austerity of Monnica had increased with the zeal of her faith. She set an example to the Church people at Thagaste. Docile to the teachings of her priests, eager to serve her brethren, multiplying alms as much as she could with her straitened means, she was unfailing at the services of the Church. Twice daily, morning and evening, she might be seen, exact to the hour of prayer and sermon. She did not go there, her son assures us, to mingle in cabals and the gossip of pious females, but to hear God’s word in homily, and that God might hear her in prayer.
The widow compelled all who were about her to the same severe rule which she herself observed. In this rigid atmosphere of his home, the student from Carthage, with his free, fashionable airs, must have caused a painful astonishment. Monnica felt at once that she and her son understood each other no longer. She began by remonstrating with him. Augustin rebelled. Things got worse when, with his presumption of the young professor new-enamelled by the schools, the harsh and aggressive assurance of the heresiarch, he boasted as loud as he could of being a Manichee. Monnica, deeply wounded in her piety and motherly tenderness, ordered him to give up his errors. He refused, and only replied by sarcasms to the poor woman’s complaints. Then she must have believed that the separation was final, that Augustin had committed an irreparable crime. Being an African Christian, absolute in her faith and passionate for its defence, she regarded her son as a public danger. She was filled with horror at his treason. It is possible, too, that guided by the second-sight of her affection, she saw clearer into Augustin’s heart than he did himself. She was plunged in sorrow that he mistook himself to this extent, and refused the Grace which desired to win him to the Catholic unity. And as he was not content with losing himself, but also drew others into peril–disputing, speech-making before his friends, abusing his power of language to throw trouble into consciences–Monnica finally made up her mind. She forbade her son to eat at her table, or to sleep under her roof. She drove him from the house.
This must have been a big scandal in Thagaste. It does not appear, however, that Augustin cared much. In all the conceit of his false knowledge, he had that kind of inhumanity which drives the intellectual to make litter of the sweetest and deepest feelings as a sacrifice to his abstract idol. Not only did he not mind very much if his apostasy made his mother weep, but he did not trouble, either, to reconcile the chimeras of his brain with the living reality of his soul and the things of life. Whatever he found inconvenient, he tranquilly denied, content if he had talked well and entangled his adversary in the net of his syllogisms.
Put in interdict by Monnica, he simply went and quartered himself on Romanianus. The sumptuous hospitality he received there very soon consoled him for his exile from his home. And if his self-esteem had been affronted, the pride of living familiarly with so important a personage was, for a vain young man, a very full compensation.
In fact, this Romanianus roused the admiration of the whole country by his luxury and lavish expenditure. He was bound to ruin himself in the long run, or, at any rate, to raise up envious people bent upon his ruin. Being at the head of the Decurions, he was the protector, not only of Thagaste, but of the neighbouring towns. He was the great patron, the influential man, who had nearly the whole country for his dependents. The town council, through gratitude and flattery, had had his name engraved upon tables of brass, and had put up statues to him. It had even conferred powers on him wider than municipal powers. The truth is that Romanianus did not dole out his benefactions to his fellow-citizens. He gave them bear-fights and other spectacles till then unknown at Thagaste. He did not grudge public banquets, and every day a free meal was to be got at his house. The guests were served plentifully. After having eaten his dinner, they dipped in the purse of the host. Romanianus knew the art of doing an obliging thing discreetly, and even how to anticipate requests which might be painful. So he was proclaimed unanimously, “the most humane, the most liberal, the most polite and happiest of men.”
Generous to his dependents, he did not forget himself. He built a villa which, by the space it occupied, was a real palace, with _thermae_ walled in precious marbles. He passed his time in the baths, or gaming, or hunting–in short, he led the life of a great landed proprietor of those days.
No doubt these villas had neither the beauty nor the art-value of the great Italian villas, which were a kind of museums in a pretty, or grand, natural frame; but they did not lack charm. Some of them, like that of Romanianus, were built and decorated at lavish expense. Immensely large, they took in sometimes an entire village; and sometimes, also, the villa, properly speaking, the part of the building where the master dwelt, was fortified, closed in by walls and towers like a feudal castle. Upon the outer gates and the entrance door might be read in big letters: “The Property of So-and-so.” Often, the inscription was repeated upon the walls of an enclosure or of a farm, which really belonged to a dependent of the great man. Under the shelter of the lord’s name, these small-holders defended themselves better against fiscal tyranny, or were included in the immunities of their patrons. So was formed, under the cover of patronage, a sort of African feudalism. Augustin’s father, who owned vineyards, was certainly a vassal of Romanianus.
As the African villa was a centre of agricultural activity, it maintained on the estate a whole population of slaves, workmen, and small-holders. The chief herdsman’s house neighboured that of the forester. Through deer-parks, enclosed by latticed fences, wandered gazelles. Oil factories, vats and cellars for wine, ran on from the bath-buildings and the offices. Then there was the main building with its immense doorway, its belvedere of many stories, as in the Roman villas, its interior galleries, and wings to the right and left of the _atrium_. In front lay the terraces, the gardens with straight walks formed by closely-clipped hedges of box which led to pools and jets of water, to arbours covered with ivy, to nymph-fountains ornamented with columns and statues. In these gardens was a particular place called the “philosopher’s corner.” The mistress of the house used to go there to read or dream. Her chair, or folding-seat, was placed under the shade of a palm tree. Her “philosopher” followed her, holding her parasol and leading her little favourite dog.
It is easy to realize that Augustin managed to stand his mother’s severity without overmuch distress in one of these fine country houses. To be comfortable there, he had only to follow his natural inclination, which was, he tells us, epicureanism. It is most certain that at this period the only thing he cared about and sought after was pleasure. Staying with Romanianus, he took his share in all the pleasant things of life, _suavitates illius vitae_–shared the amusements of his host, and only bothered about his pupils when he had nothing better to do. He must have been as little of a grammarian as possible–he hadn’t the time. With the tyrannical friendship of rich people, who are hard put to it to find occupation, Romanianus doubtless monopolized him from morning till night. They hunted together, or dined, or read poetry, or discussed in the evergreen alleys of the garden or “the philosopher’s corner.” And naturally, the recent convert to Manicheeism did his best to indoctrinate and convert his patron–so far at least as a careless man like Romanianus could be converted. Augustin accuses himself of having “flung” Romanianus into his own errors. Augustin probably was not so guilty. His wealthy friend does not seem to have had any very firm convictions. In all likelihood, he was a pagan, a sceptical or hesitating pagan, such as existed in numbers at that time. Led by Augustin, he drew near to Manicheeism. Then, when Augustin gave up Manicheeism for Platonic philosophy, we see Romanianus take the airs of a philosopher. Later, when Augustin came back to Catholicism, he drew Romanianus in his wake towards that religion. This man of fashion was one of those frivolous people who never go deep into things, for whom ideas are only a pastime, and who consider philosophers or men of letters as amusers. But it is certain that he liked to listen to Augustin, and let himself be influenced. If he trifled with Manicheeism, the reason was that Augustin dazzled him with his arguments and fine phrases. This orator of twenty had already extraordinary charm.
So Augustin led a delightful life with Romanianus. Everything pleased him–his talking triumphs, the admiration of his hearers, the flattery and luxury which surrounded him. Meanwhile, Monnica was plunged in grief at his conduct, and implored God to draw him from his errors. She began to be sorry that she had sent him away, and with the clear-sightedness of the Christian, she perceived that Romanianus’ house was not good for the prodigal. It would be better to have him back. Near her he would run less risk of being corrupted. Through intense praying, came to her a dream which quickened her determination. “She dreamed that she was weeping and lamenting, with her feet planted on a wooden rule, when she saw coming towards her a radiant youth who smiled upon her cheerfully. He asked the reason of her sorrow and her daily tears … and when she told him she was bewailing my perdition, he bade her be of good comfort, look and see, for where she was, there was I also. She looked, and saw me standing by her side on the same rule.”
Filled with joy by this promise from on high, Monnica asked her son to come home. He did come back, but with the quibbles of the Sophist, the rhetorician cavilled against his mother. He tried to upset her happiness. He said to her:
“Since, according to your dream, we are to be both standing on the same rule, that means that you are going to be a Manichean.”
“No,” answered Monnica. “_He_ did not say, where he is you will be, but where you are he will be.”
Augustin confesses that this strong good sense made a certain impression on him. Nevertheless he did not change. For still nine years he remained a Manichee.
As a last resource, Monnica begged a bishop she knew, a man deeply read in the Scriptures, to speak with her son and refute his errors. But so great was the reputation of Augustin as an orator and dialectician that the holy man dared not try a fall with such a vigorous jouster. He answered the mother very wisely, that a mind so subtle and acute could not long continue in such gross sophisms. And he offered his own example, for he, too, had been a Manichee. But Monnica pressed him with entreaties and tears. At last the bishop, annoyed by her persistence, but at the same time moved by her tears, answered with a roughness mingled with kindness and compassion:
“Go, go! Leave me alone. Live on as you are living. It cannot be that the son of such tears should be lost.”
_Filius istarum lacrymarum_: the son of such tears!… Was it indeed the country bishop, or rather the rhetorician Augustin who, in a burst of gratitude, hit upon this sublime sentence? Certain it is that later on Augustin saw in his mother’s tears as it were a first baptism whence he came forth regenerate. After having borne him according to the flesh, Monnica, by her tears and moans, gave him birth into the spiritual life. Monnica wept because of Augustin. Monnica wept for Augustin. This is rather astonishing in the case of so severe a mother–this African a trifle rough. The expressions–tears and moans and weeping–occur so often in her son’s writings, that we are at first tempted to take them for pious metaphors–figures of a sacred rhetoric. We suspect that Monnica’s tears must come from the Bible, an imitation of King David’s penitential tears. But it would be quite an error to believe that. Monnica wept real tears. In her whole-hearted prayers she bedewed the pavement of the basilica; she moistened the balustrade against which she leant her forehead. This austere woman, this widow whose face nobody saw any more, whose body was shapeless by reason of the mass of stuffs, grey and black, which wrapped her from head to foot–this rigid Christian concealed a heart full of love. Love such as this was then a perfectly new thing.
That an African woman should carry her piety to the point of fanaticism; that she should work to conquer her son to her faith; that, if he strayed from it, she should hate him and drive him out with curses–this has been seen in Africa at all times. But that a mother should mourn at the thought that her child is lost for another life; that she grows terror-stricken and despairing when she thinks that she may possess a happiness in which he will have no part, and walk in the gardens of Heaven while her child will not be there–no, this had never been seen before. “Where I am you will be,” near me, against my heart, our two hearts meeting in the one same love–in this union of souls, continued beyond the grave, lies all the Christian sweetness and hope.
Augustin was no longer, or not yet, a Christian. But in his tears he is the true son of his mother. This gift of tears that Saint Lewis of France begged God with so much earnestness and contrition to grant him, Monnica’s son had to the full. “For him to weep was a pleasure.” [1] He inebriated himself with his tears. Now, just while he was at Thagaste, he lost a friend whom he loved intensely. This death set free the fountain of tears. They are not yet the holy tears which he will shed later before God, but only poor human tears, more pathetic perhaps to our own weakness.
[Footnote 1: Sainte-Beuve.]
Who was this friend? He tells us in very vague terms. We only know that they had grown up as boys together and had gone to the same schools; that they had just passed a year together, probably at Carthage; that this young man, persuaded by him, was become a Manichee; and that, in a word, they loved passionately. Augustin, while speaking of him, recalls in a deeper sense what Horace said of his friend Virgil: _dimidium animae_–“O thou half of my soul!”
Well, this young man fell gravely sick of a fever. As all hope was at an end, they baptized him, according to the custom. He grew better, was almost cured, “As soon as I was able to talk to him,” says Augustin–“and that was as soon as he could bear it, for I never left his side, and we were bound up in one another–I ventured a jest, thinking that he would jest too, about the baptism which he had received, when he could neither think nor feel. But by this time he had been told of his baptism. He shrank from me as from an enemy, and with a wonderful new-found courage, warned me never to speak so to him again, if I wished to remain his friend. I was so astounded and confused that I said no more, resolving to wait till he should regain his strength, _when I would tell him frankly what I thought_.”
So, at this serious moment, he whom they called “the Carthaginian disputer” was sorry not to be able to measure himself in a bout of dialectics with his half-dead friend. The intellectual poison had so perverted his mind, that it almost destroyed in him the feelings of common decency. But if his head, as he acknowledges, was very much spoiled, his heart remained intact. His friend died a few days after, and Augustin was not there. He was stunned by it.
His grief wrought itself up to wildness and despair. “This sorrow fell like darkness on my heart, and wherever I looked I saw nothing but death. My country became a torture, my father’s house a misery. All the pleasures that I had shared with him, turned into hideous anguish now that he was gone. My eyes sought for him everywhere, and found him not. I hated the familiar scenes because he was not there, and they could no more cry to me, ‘Lo! he will come.’ as they used when he was absent but alive….” Then Augustin began to weep louder, he prolonged his weeping, finding consolation only in tears. Monnica’s tenderness was restrained; in him it was given full vent and exaggerated. At that time, the Christian moderation was unknown to him, as well as the measure which the good taste of the ancients prompted. He has often been compared to the most touching geniuses, to Virgil, to Racine, who had also the gift of tears. But Augustin’s tenderness is more abandoned, and, so to speak, more romantic. It even works up, sometimes, into an unhealthy excitement.
To be full of feeling, as Augustin was then, is not only to feel with excessive sensitiveness the least wounds, the slightest touches of love or hate, nor is it only to give oneself with transport; but it is especially to take delight in the gift of oneself, to feel at the moment of full abandonment that one is communicating with something infinitely sweet, which already has ceased to be the creature loved. It is love for love, it is to weep for the pleasure of tears, it is to mix with tenderness a kind of egoism avid of experiences. Having lost his friend, Augustin loathes all the world. He repeats: “Tears were my only comfort. I was wretched, and my wretchedness was dear to me.” And accordingly, he did not want to be consoled. But as, little by little, the terrors of that parting subsided, he perceived himself that he played with grief and made a joy of his tears. “My tears,” he says, “were dearer to me than my friend had been.” By degrees the friend is almost forgotten. Though Augustin may hate life because his friend has gone, he confesses naively that he would not have sacrificed his existence for the sake of the dead. He surmises that what is told of Orestes and Pylades contending to die for each other is but a fable. Ultimately, he comes to write: “Perhaps I feared to die, _lest the other half of him whom I had loved so dearly, should perish_.” He himself, in his _Retractations_, condemns this phrase as pure rhetoric. It remains true that what was perhaps the deepest sorrow of his life–this sorrow so sincere and painful which had “rent and bloodied his soul”–ended with a striking phrase.
It should be added, that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing him to return. Perhaps she told him that she was about to become a mother. Always ready to go away, Augustin scarcely hesitated. It is more than likely that he did not consult Monnica. He only told Romanianus, who, as he had all kinds of reasons for wanting to keep Augustin at Thagaste, at first strongly objected. But the young man pointed to his future, his ambition to win fame. Was he going to bury all that in a little town?
Romanianus yielded, and with a generosity that is no longer seen, he paid the expenses this time too.
V
THE SILENCE OF GOD
Augustin was going to live nine years at Carthage–nine years that he squandered in obscure tasks, in disputes sterile or unfortunate for himself and others–briefly, in an utter forgetfulness of his true vocation. “And during this time Thou wert silent, O my God!” he cries, in recalling only the faults of his early youth. Now, the silence of God lay heavy. And yet even in those years his tormented soul had not ceased to appeal. “Where wert Thou then, O my God, while I looked for Thee? Thou wert before me. But I had drawn away from myself and I could not find myself. How much less, then, could I find Thee.”
This was certainly the most uneasy, and, at moments, the most painful time of his life. Hardly was he got back to Carthage than he had to struggle against ever-increasing money difficulties. Not only had he to get his own living, but the living of others–possibly his mother’s and that of his brother and sister–at all events, he had to support his mistress and the child. It is possible that the infant was born before its father left Thagaste; if not, the birth must have occurred shortly after.
The child was called Adeodatus. There is a kind of irony in this name, which was then usual, of Adeodatus–“Gift of God.” This son of his sin, as Augustin calls him, this son whom he did not want, and the news of whose birth must have been a painful shock–this poor child was a gift of Heaven which the father could have well done without. And then, when he saw him, he was filled with joy, and he cherished him as a real gift from God.
He accepted his fatherhood courageously, and, as it happens in such cases, he was drawn closer to his mistress, their association taking on something of conjugal dignity. Did the mother of Adeodatus justify such attachment–an attachment which was to last more than ten years? The mystery in which Augustin intended that the woman he had loved the most should remain enveloped for all time, is nearly impenetrable to us. No doubt she was of a very humble, not to say low class, since Monnica judged it impossible to bring about a marriage between the ill-assorted pair. There must have been an extreme inequality between the birth and education of the lovers. This did not prevent Augustin from loving his mistress passionately, for her beauty perhaps, or perhaps for her goodness of heart, or both. Nevertheless, it is surprising, that in view of his changing humour, and his prompt and impressionable soul, he remained faithful to her so long. What was to prevent his taking his son and going off? Ancient custom authorized such an act. But Augustin was tender-hearted. He was afraid to cause pain; he dreaded for others the wounds that caused him so much suffering himself. So he stayed on from kindness, from pity, habit too, and also because, in spite of everything, he loved the mother of his child. Up to the time of his conversion, they lived like husband and wife.
So now, to keep his family, he really turns “a dealer in words.” In spite of his youth (he was barely twenty) the terms he had kept at Thagaste as a teacher of grammar allowed him to take his place among the rhetoricians at Carthage. Thanks to Romanianus, he got pupils at once. His protector at Thagaste sent his son, that young Licentius whose education Augustin had already begun, with one of his brothers, doubtless younger. It seems likely that the two youths lived in Augustin’s house. A small fact which their master has preserved, looks like a proof of this. A spoon having been lost in the house, Augustin, to find out where it was, told Licentius to go and consult a wizard, one Albicerius, who had, just then, a great name in Carthage. This message is scarcely to be explained unless we suppose the lad was lodging in his professor’s house. Another of the pupils is known to us. This is Eulogius, who was later on a rhetorician at Carthage, and of whom Augustin relates an extraordinary dream. Finally, there was Alypius, a little younger than himself, his friend–“the brother of his heart,” as he calls him. Alypius had been attending his lessons at Thagaste. When the schoolmaster abruptly threw up his employment, the father of the pupil was angry, and in sending his son to Carthage, he forbade him to go near Augustin’s class. But it was difficult to keep such eager friends apart. Little by little, Alypius overcame his father’s objections, and became a pupil of his friend.
Augustin’s knowledge, when he began to lecture, could not have been very deep, for he had only lately quitted the student’s bench himself. His duties forced him to learn what he did not know. In teaching he taught himself. It was at this time that he did most of the reading which afterwards added substance to his polemics and treatises. He tells us himself that he read in those days all that he could lay hands on. He is very proud of having read by himself and understood without any assistance from a master, the _Ten Categories_ of Aristotle, which was considered one of the most abstruse works of the Stagirite. In an age when instruction was principally by word of mouth, and books comparatively rare, it is obvious that Augustin was not what we call an “all-devouring reader.” We do not know if Carthage had many libraries, or what the libraries were worth. It is no less true that the author of _The City of God_ is the last of the Latin writers who had a really all-round knowledge. It is he who is the link between modern times and pagan antiquity. The Middle Age hardly knew classical literature, save by the allusions and quotations of Augustin.
So in spite of family and professional cares, he did not lose his intellectual proclivities. The conquest of truth remained always his great ambition. He still hoped to find it in Manicheeism, but he began to think that it was a long time coming. The leaders of the sect could not have trusted him thoroughly. They feared his acute and subtle mind, so quick to detect the flaw in a thesis or argument. That is why they postponed his initiation into their secret doctrines. Augustin remained a simple _auditor_ in their Church. By way of appeasing the enormous activity of his intelligence, they turned him on to controversy, and the critical discussion of the Scriptures. Giving themselves out for Christians, they adopted a part of them, and flung aside as interpolated or forged all that was not in tune with their theology. Augustin, as we know, triumphed in disputes of this kind, and was vain because he excelled in them.
And when he grew tired of this negative criticism and asked his evangelists to give him more substantial food, they put him on some exoteric doctrine calculated to appeal to a young imagination by its poetic or philosophical colouring. The catechumen was not satisfied, but he put up with it for lack of anything better. Very prettily he compares these enemies of the Scriptures to the snarers of birds, who defile or fill with earth all the water-places where the birds use to drink, save one mere; and about this they set their snares. The birds all fly there, not because the water is better, but because there is no other water, and they know not where else to go and drink. So Augustin, not knowing where to quench his thirst for truth, was fain to make the best of the confused pantheism of the Manichees.
What remains noteworthy is, that however unstable his own convictions were, he yet converted everybody about him. It was through him that his friends became Manichees: Alypius one of the first; then Nebridius, the son of a great landowner near Carthage; Honoratius, Marcianus; perhaps, too, the youngest of his pupils, Licentius and his brother–all victims of his persuasive tongue, which he exerted later on to draw them back from their errors. So great was his charm–so deep, especially, was public credulity!
This fourth century was no longer a century of strong Christian faith. On the other hand, the last agony of paganism was marked by a new attack of the lowest credulity and superstition. As the Church energetically combated both one and the other, it is not surprising that it was chiefly the pagans who were contaminated. The old religion was to end by foundering in magic. The greatest minds of the period, the neo-Platonists, the Emperor Julian himself, were miracle-workers, or at any rate, adepts in the occult sciences. Augustin, who was then separated from Christianity, followed the general impulse, together with the young men he knew. Just now we saw him sending to consult the soothsayer, Albicerius, about the loss of a spoon. And this man of intellect believed also in astrologers and nigromancers.
Strips of lead have been found at Carthage upon which are written magic spells against horses entered for races in the circus. Just like the Carthaginian jockeys, Augustin had recourse to these hidden and fraudulent practices, to make sure of success. On the eve of a verse competition in the theatre, he fell in with a wizard who offered, if they could agree about the price, to sacrifice a certain number of animals to buy the victory. Upon this, Augustin, very much annoyed, declared that if the prize were a crown of immortal gold, not a fly should be sacrificed to help him win it. Really, magic was repellent to the honesty of his mind, as well as to his nerves, by reason of the suspicious and brutal part of its operations. As a rule, it was involved with haruspicy, and had a side of sacred anatomy and the kitchen which revolted the sensitive–dissection of flesh, inspection of entrails, not to mention the slaughtering and strangling of victims. Fanatics, such as Julian, gave themselves up with delight to these disgusting manipulations. What we know of Augustin’s soul makes it quite clear why he recoiled with horror.
Astrology, on the contrary, attracted him by its apparent science. Its adepts called themselves “mathematicians,” and thus seemed to borrow from the exact sciences something of their solidity. Augustin often discussed astrology with a Carthage physician, Vindicianus, a man of great sense and wide learning, who even reached Proconsular honours. In vain did he point out to the young rhetorician that the pretended prophecies of the mathematicians were the effect of chance; in vain did Nebridius, less credulous than his friend, join his arguments to those of the crafty physician; Augustin clung obstinately to his chimera. His dialectical mind discovered ingenious justifications for what the astrologers claimed.
Thus, dazzled by all the intellectual phantasms, he strayed from one science to another, repeating meanwhile in his heart the motto of his Manichean masters: “The Truth, the Truth!”. But whatever might be the attractions of the speculative life, he had first to face the needs of actual life. The sight of his child called him back to a sense of his position. To get money, and for that purpose to push himself forward, put himself in evidence, increase his reputation–Augustin worked at that as hard as he could. It led him to enter for the prize of dramatic poetry. He was declared the winner. His old friend, the physician Vindicianus, who was then Proconsul, placed the crown, as he says, upon his “disordered head.” The future Father of the Church writing for the theatre–and what a theatre it was then!–is not the least extraordinary thing in this life so disturbed and, at first sight, so contradictory.
It was also from literary ambition that about the same time he wrote a book on aesthetics called _Upon the Beautiful and the Fit_, which he dedicated to a famous colleague, the Syrian Hierius, “orator to the City of Rome,” one of the professors of the official education appointed either by the Roman municipality or the Imperial treasury. This Levantine rhetorician had an immense success in the capital of the Empire. His renown had got beyond academical and fashionable circles and crossed the sea. Augustin admired him on trust, like everybody else. It is clear that, at this time he could not imagine a more glorious fortune for himself than to become, like Hierius, orator to the City of Rome. Later in life, the Bishop of Hippo, while condemning the vanity of his youthful ambitions, must have made some extremely ironical reflections as to their modesty. How mistaken he was about himself! An Augustin had dreamed of equalling one day this obscure pedagogue, of whom nobody, save for him, would ever have spoken again. Men of instinct, like Augustin, continually go wrong in this way about their object and the means to employ. But their mistakes are only in appearance. A will stronger than their own leads them, by mysterious ways, whither they ought to go.
This first book of Augustin’s is lost, and we are unable to say whether there be any reason to regret it. He himself recalls it to us in a very indifferent tone and rather vague terms. It would seem, however, that his aesthetic had a basis of Manichean metaphysics. But what is significant for us, in this youthful essay, is that the first time Augustin wrote as an author it was to define and to praise Beauty. He did not yet know, at least not directly from the text, the dialogues of Plato, and he is already inclined to Platonism. He was this by nature. His Christianity will be a religion all of light and beauty. For him, the supreme Beauty is identical with the supreme Love. “Do we love anything,” he used to say to his friends, “except what is beautiful?” _Num amamus aliquid, nisi pulchrum?_ Again, at the end of his life, when he strives in _The City of God_ to make clear for us the dogma of the resurrection of the body, he thinks our bodies shall rise free from all earthly flaws, in all the splendour of the perfect human type. Nothing of the body will be lost. It will keep all its limbs and all its organs _because they are beautiful_. One recognizes in this passage, not only the Platonist, but the traveller and art-lover, who had gazed upon some of the finest specimens of ancient statuary.
This first book had hardly any success. Augustin does not even say whether the celebrated Hierius paid him a compliment about it, and he has an air of giving us to understand that he had no other admirer but himself. New disappointments, more serious mortifications, changed little by little his state of mind and his plans for the future. He was obliged to acknowledge that after years of effort he was scarcely more advanced than at the start. There was no chance to delude himself with vain pretences: it was quite plain to everybody that the rhetorician Augustin was not a success. Now, why was this? Was it that he lacked the gift of teaching? Perhaps he had not the knack of keeping order, which is the most indispensable of all for a schoolmaster. What suited him best no doubt was a small and select audience which he charmed rather than ruled. Large and noisy classes he could not manage. At Carthage, these rhetoric classes were particularly difficult to keep in order, because the students were more rowdy than elsewhere. At any moment “The Wreckers” might burst in and make a row. Augustin, who had not joined in these “rags” when he was a student, saw himself obliged to endure them as a professor. He had nothing worse to complain of than his fellow-professors, in whose classes the same kind of disturbance took place. That was the custom and, in a manner of speaking, the rule in the Carthage schools. For all that, a little more authoritative bearing would not have harmed him in the eyes of these disorderly boys. But he had still graver defects for a professor who wants to get on: he was not a schemer, and he could not make the most of himself.
It is quite possible that he did not possess the qualities which just then pleased the pagan public in a rhetorician. The importance that the ancients attached to physical advantages in an orator is well known. Now, according to an old tradition, Augustin was a little man and not strong: till the end of his life he complained of his health. He had a weak voice, a delicate chest, and was often hoarse. Surely this injured him before audiences used to all the outward emphasis and all the studied graces of Roman eloquence. Finally, his written and spoken language had none of those brilliant and ingenious curiosities of phrase which pleased in literary and fashionable circles. This inexhaustibly prolific writer is not in the least a stylist. In this respect he is inferior to Apuleius, or Tertullian, though he leaves them far behind in the qualities of sincere and deep sentiment, poetic flow, colour, the vividness of metaphor, and, besides, the emotion, the suavity of the tone. With all that, no matter how hard he tried, he could never grasp what the rhetoricians of his time understood by style. This is why his writings, as well as his addresses, were not very much liked.
Nevertheless, good judges recognized his value, and guessed the powers, lying still unformed within him, which he was misusing ere they were mature. He was received at the house of the Proconsul Vindicianus, who liked to talk with him, and treated him with quite fatherly kindness. Augustin knew people in the best society. He did all his life. His charm and captivating manners made him welcome in the most exclusive circles. But just because he was valued by fashionable society, it came home to him more painfully that he had not the position he deserved with the public at large. Little by little his humour grew bitter. In this angry state of mind he was no longer able to consider things with the same confidence and serenity. His mental disquietudes took hold of him again.
His ideas were affected, first of all. He began to have doubts, more and more definite, about Manicheeism. He began by suspecting the rather theatrical austerity which the initiated of the sect made such a great parade of. Among other turpitudes, he saw one day in one of the busiest parts of Carthage “three of the Elect whinny after some women or other who were passing, and begin making such obscene signs that they surpassed the coarsest people for impudence and shamelessness.” He was scandalized at that; but, after all, it was a small thing. He himself was not so very virtuous then. Generally your intellectual worries very little about squaring his conduct with his principles, and does not bother about the practical part. No; what was much worse in his eyes is that the Manichean physical science, a congeries of fables more or less symbolical, suddenly struck him as ruinous. He had just been studying astronomy, and he found that the cosmology of the Manichees–of these men who called themselves materialists–did not agree with scientific facts. Therefore Manicheeism must be wrong universally, since it ran counter to reason confirmed by experience.
Augustin spoke about his doubts, not only to his friends, but to the priests of his sect. These got out of the difficulty by evasions and the most dazzling promises. A Manichee bishop, a certain Faustus, was coming to Carthage. He was a man of immense learning. Most certainly he would refute every objection without the least trouble. He would confirm the young _auditors_ in their faith…. So Augustin and his friends waited for Faustus as for a Messiah. Their disappointment was immense. The supposed doctor turned out to be an ignorant man, who possessed no tincture of science or philosophy, and whose intellectual baggage consisted of nothing but a little grammar. A delightful talker and a wit, the most he could do was to discourse pleasantly on literature.
This disappointment, joined to the set-backs in his profession, brought about a crisis of soul and conscience in Augustin. So this Truth which he had sighed after so long, which had been so much promised to him, was only a decoy! One must be content not to know!… Then what was left to do since truth was unapproachable? Possibly fortune and honours would console him for it. But he was far enough from them too. He felt that he was on the wrong road, that he was getting into a rut at Carthage, as he had got into a rut at Thagaste. He must succeed, whatever the cost!… And then he gave way to one of those moments of weariness, when a man has no further hope of saving himself save by some desperate step. He was sick of where he was and of those about him. His friends, whom he knew too well, had nothing more to teach him, and could not help him in the only search which passionately interested him. And his entanglement became irksome. Here was nine years that this sharing of bed and board had lasted. His son was at that unattractive age which rather bores a young father than it revives an affection already old. No doubt he did not want to abandon him. He did not intend to break altogether with his mistress. But he felt the need of a change of air, to take himself off somewhere else, where he could breathe more freely and get fresh courage for his task.
Then it dawned on him to try his fortune at Rome. It was there that literary reputations were made. He would find there, no doubt, better judges than at Carthage. He would very likely end by getting a post in the public instruction, with a steady salary–this would relieve him of present worries, at all events. Probably he had already this plan in his head when he sent his treatise _On the Beautiful_ to Hierius, orator to the City of Rome; he thought that by this politeness he might depend, later, on the backing of the well-known rhetorician. Lastly, his friends, Honoratius, Marcianus, and the others, earnestly persuaded him to go and find a stage worthy of him at Rome. Alypius, who was at this time finishing his law studies there, and must have felt their separation, pressed him to come to Rome and promised him success.
Once more, Augustin was ready to go away. He was not long in making up his mind. He was going to leave all belonging to him, his mistress, his child, till the time when his new position would enable him to send for them. He himself tells us that the chief motive which led him to decide on this journey was that the Roman students were said to be better disciplined and less noisy than the students at Carthage. Evidently, that is a reason which would weigh with a professor who objected to act the policeman in his class. But besides the reasons we have given, there were others which must have influenced his decision. Theodosius had lately ordered very heavy penalties against the Manichees. Not only did he condemn them to death, but he had instituted a perfect Inquisition, with the special duty of spying upon and prosecuting these heretics. Did it occur to Augustin that he might hide better in Rome, where he was unknown, than in a city where he was a marked man on account of his proselytizing zeal? In any case, his departure gave rise to calumnies which his adversaries, the Donatists, did not fail many years later to bring up again and make worse. They accused him of having run away from prosecution; he fled the country, so they said, on account of a judgment which was out against him, pronounced by the Proconsul Messianus. Augustin had no trouble in refuting these false insinuations. But all these facts seem to prove that the most ordinary prudence warned him to cross the sea as soon as possible.
Accordingly, he prepared to set sail. Let us hope that in spite of his lofty indifference to material things, he made some provision for the existence of the woman and child he left behind. As for her, she appeared to agree without over-many violent scenes to this parting, which, he said, was temporary. It was not the same with his mother. The very idea of Rome, which seemed to her another Babylon, terrified this austere African woman. What spiritual dangers lay in wait for her son there! She wanted to keep him near her, both to bring him to the faith and also to love him–this Augustin who had been her only human love. And then he was doubtless the chief support of the widow. Without him, what was going to become of her?
The fugitive was forced to put a trick on Monnica so as to carry out his plan. She would not leave him a moment, folded him in her arms, implored him with tears not to go. The night he was to sail she followed him down to the dock, although Augustin, to allay her suspicions, had told her a lie. He pretended that he was only going down to the ship with a friend to see him off. But Monnica, only half believing, followed. Night fell. Meanwhile, the ship, anchored in a little bay to the north of the city, did not move. The sailors were waiting till a wind rose to slip their moorings. The weather was moist and oppressive, as it usually is in the Mediterranean in August and September. There was not a breath of air. The hours passed on. Monnica, overcome by heat and fatigue, could hardly stand. Then Augustin cunningly persuaded her to go and pass the night in a chapel hard by, since it was plain that the ship would not weigh anchor till dawn. After many remonstrances, she at length agreed to rest in this chapel–a _memoria_ consecrated to St. Cyprian, the great martyr and patron of Carthage.
Like most of the African sanctuaries of those days, and the _marabouts_ of to-day, this one must have been either surrounded, or approached, by a court with a portico in arcades, where it was possible to sleep. Monnica sat down on the ground under her heap of veils among other poor people and travellers, who were come like her to try to find a little cool air on this stifling night near the relics of the blessed Cyprian. She prayed for her child, offering to God “the blood of her heart,” begging God not to let him go, “for she loved to keep me with her” says Augustin, “as mothers are wont, yes, far more than most mothers.” And like a true daughter of Eve, “weeping and crying, she sought again with groans the son she had brought forth with groans.” She prayed for a long time; then, worn out with sorrow, she slept. The porter of the chapel, without knowing it, watched that night not only the mother of the rhetorician Augustin, but the ancestor of an innumerable line of souls; this humble woman, who slept there on the ground, on the flags of the courtyard, carried in her heart all the yearning of all the mothers of the future.
While she slept, Augustin went stealthily on board. The silence and the tempered splendour of the night weighed him down. Sometimes the cry of the sailors on watch took a strange note in the lustrous vaporous spaces. The Gulf of Carthage gleamed far off under the scintillation of the stars, under the palpitating of a milky way all white like the flowers of the garden of Heaven. But Augustin’s heart was heavy, heavier than the air weighted by the heat and sea-damp–heavy from the lie and the cruelty he had just committed. He saw already the awakening and sorrow of his mother. His conscience was troubled, overcome by remorse and forebodings…. Meanwhile, his friends tried to cheer him, and urged him to have courage and hope. Marcianus, while embracing him, reminded him of the verses of Terence:
“This day which brings to thee another life Demands that thou another man shalt be.”
Augustin smiled sadly. At last the ship began to move. The wind had risen, the wind of the grand voyage which was bearing him to the unknown…. Suddenly, at the keen freshness of the open sea, he thrilled. His strength and confidence rushed back. To go away! What enchantment for all those who cannot fasten themselves to a corner of the earth, who know by instinct that they belong _elsewhere_, who always pass “as strangers and as pilgrims,” and who go away with relief, as if they cast a burthen behind them. Augustin was of those people–of those who, among the fairest attractions of the Road, never cease to think of the Return. But he knew not where God was leading him. Marcianus was right: a new life was really beginning for him; only it was not the life that either of them hoped for.
He who departed as a rhetorician, to sell words, was to come back as an apostle, to conquer souls.
THE THIRD PART
THE RETURN
Et ecce ibi es in corde eorum, in corde confitentium tibi, et projicientium se in te, et plorantium in sinu tuo, post vias suas difficiles.
“And behold! Thou art there in their hearts, in the hearts of that confess to Thee, and cast themselves upon Thee, and sob upon Thy breast, after their weary ways.”
_Confessions_, V, 2.
I
THE CITY OF GOLD
Augustin fell ill just after he got to Rome. It would seem that he arrived there towards the end of August or beginning of September, before the students reassembled, just at the time of heat and fevers, when all Romans who could leave the city fled to the summer resorts on the coast.
Like all the great cosmopolitan centres at that time, Rome was unhealthy. The diseases of the whole earth, brought by the continual inflow of foreigners, flourished there. Accordingly, the inhabitants had a panic fear of infection, like our own contemporaries. People withdrew prudently from those suffering from infectious disorders, who were left to their unhappy fate. If, from a sense of shame, they sent a slave to the patient’s bedside, he was ordered to the sweating-rooms, and there disinfected from head to foot, before he could enter the house again.
Augustin must have had at least the good luck to be well looked after, since he recovered. He had gone to the dwelling of one of his Manichee brethren, an _auditor_ like himself, and an excellent kind of man, whom he stayed with all the time he was in Rome. Still, he had such a bad attack of fever that he very nearly died. “I was perishing,” he says; “and I was all but lost.” He is frightened at the idea of having seen death so near, at a moment when he was so far from God–so far, in fact, that it never occurred to him to ask for baptism, as he had done, in like case, when he was little. What a desperate blow would that have been for Monnica! He still shudders when he recalls the danger: “Had my mother’s heart been smitten with that wound, it never could have been healed. _For I cannot express her tender love towards me_, or with how far greater anguish she travailed of me now in the spirit, than when she bore me in the flesh.” But Monnica prayed. Augustin was saved. He ascribes his recovery to the fervent prayers of his mother, who, in begging of God the welfare of his soul, obtained, without knowing it, the welfare of his body.
As soon as he was convalescent, he had to set to work to get pupils. He was obliged to ask the favours of many an important personage, to knock at many an inhospitable door. This unfortunate beginning, the almost mortal illness which he was only just recovering from, this forced drudgery–all that did not make him very fond of Rome. It seems quite plain that he never liked it, and till the end of his life he kept a grudge against it for the sorry reception it gave him. In the whole body of his writings it is impossible to find a word of praise for the beauty of the Eternal City, while, on the contrary, one can make out through his invectives against the vices of Carthage, his secret partiality for the African Rome. The old rivalry between the two cities was not yet dead after so many centuries. In his heart, Augustin, like a good Carthaginian–and because he was a Carthaginian–did not like Rome.
The most annoying things joined together as if on purpose to disgust him with it. The bad season of the year was nigh when he began to reside there. Autumn rains had started, and the mornings and evenings were cold. What with his delicate chest, and his African constitution sensitive to cold, he must have suffered from this damp cold climate. Rome seemed to him a northern city. With his eyes still full of the warm light of his country, and the joyous whiteness of the Carthage streets, he wandered as one exiled between the gloomy Roman palaces, saddened by the grey walls and muddy pavements. Comparisons, involuntary and continual, between Carthage and Rome, made him unjust to Rome. In his eyes it had a hard, self-conscious, declamatory look, and gazing at the barren Roman _campagna_, he remembered the laughing Carthage suburbs, with gardens, villas, vineyards, olivets, circled everywhere by the brilliance of the sea and the lagoons.
And then, besides, Rome could not be a very delightful place to live in for a poor rhetoric master come there to better his fortune. Other strangers before him had complained of it. Always to be going up and down the flights of steps and the ascents, often very steep, of the city of the Seven Hills; to be rushing between the Aventine and Sallust’s garden, and thence to the Esquiline and Janiculum! To bruise the feet on the pointed cobbles of sloping alley-ways! These walks were exhausting, and there seemed to be no end to this city. Carthage was also large–as large almost as Rome. But there Augustin was not seeking employment. When he went for a walk there, he strolled. Here, the bustle of the crowds, and the number of equipages, disturbed and exasperated the southerner with his lounging habits. Any moment there was a risk of being run over by cars tearing at full gallop through the narrow streets: men of fashion just then had a craze for driving fast. Or again, the passenger was obliged to step aside so that some lady might go by in her litter, escorted by her household, from the handicraft slaves and the kitchen staff, to the eunuchs and house-servants–all this army manoeuvring under the orders of a leader who held a rod in his hand, the sign of his office. When the street became clear once more, and at last the palace of the influential personage to whom a visit had to be paid was reached, there was no admittance without greasing the knocker. In order to be presented to the master, it was necessary to buy the good graces of the slave who took the name (_nomenclator_), and who not only introduced the suppliant, but might, with a word, recommend or injure. Even after all these precautions, one was not yet sure of the goodwill of the patron. Some of these great lords, who were not always themselves sprung from old Roman families, prided themselves upon their uncompromising nationalism, and made a point of treating foreigners with considerable haughtiness. The Africans were regarded unfavourably in Rome, especially in Catholic circles. Augustin must have had an unpleasant experience of this.
Through the long streets, brilliantly lighted at evening (it would seem that the artificial lighting of Rome almost equalled the daylight), he would return tired out to the dwelling of his host, the Manichee. This dwelling, according to an old tradition, was in the Velabrum district, in a street which is still to-day called _Via Greca_, and skirts the very old church of Santa Maria-in-Cosmedina–a poor quarter where swarmed a filthy mass of Orientals, and where the immigrants from the Levantine countries, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, lodged. The warehouses on the Tiber were not very far off, and no doubt there were numbers of labourers, porters, and watermen living in this neighbourhood. What a place for him who had been at Thagaste the guest of the magnificent Romanianus, and intimate with the Proconsul at Carthage! When he had climbed up the six flights of stairs to his lodging, and crouched shivering over the ill-burning movable hearth, in the parsimonious light of a small bronze or earthenware lamp, while the raw damp sweated through the walls, he felt more and more his poverty and loneliness. He hated Rome and the stupid ambition which had brought him there. And yet Rome should have made a vivid appeal to this cultured man, this aesthete so alive to beauty. Although the transfer of the Court to Milan had drawn away some of its liveliness and glitter, it was still all illuminated by its grand memories, and never had it been more beautiful. It seems impossible that Augustin should not have been struck by it, despite his African prejudices. However well built the new Carthage might be, it could not pretend to compare with a city more than a thousand years old, which at all periods of its history had maintained the princely taste for building, and which a long line of emperors had never ceased to embellish.
When Augustin landed at Ostia, he saw rise before him, closing the perspective of the _Via Appia_, the Septizonium of Septimus Severus–an imitation, doubtless, on a far larger scale, of the one at Carthage. This huge construction, water-works probably of enormous size, with its ordered columns placed line above line, was, so to speak, the portico whence opened the most wonderful and colossal architectural mass known to the ancient world. Modern Rome has nothing at all to shew which comes anywhere near it. Dominating the Roman Forum, and the Fora of various Emperors–labyrinths of temples, basilicas, porticoes, and libraries–the Capitol and the Palatine rose up like two stone mountains, fashioned and sculptured, under the heap of their palaces and sanctuaries. All these blocks rooted in the soil, suspended, and towering up from the flanks of the hills, these interminable regiments of columns and pilasters, this profusion of precious marbles, metals, mosaics, statues, obelisks–in all that there was something enormous, a lack of restraint which disturbed the taste and floored the imagination. But it was, above all, the excessive use of gold and gilding that astonished the visitor. Originally indigent, Rome became noted for its greed of gold. When the gold of conquered nations began to come into its hands, it spread it all over with the rather indiscreet display of the upstart. When Nero built the Golden House he realized its dream. The Capitol had golden doors. Statues, bronzes, the roofs of temples, were all gilded. All this gold, spread over the brilliant surfaces and angles of the architecture, dazzled and tired the eyes: _Acies stupet igne metalli_, said Claudian. For the poets who have celebrated it, Rome is the city of gold–_aurata Roma_.
A Greek, such as Lucian, had perhaps a right to be shocked by this architectural debauch, this beauty too crushing and too rich. A Carthage rhetorician, like Augustin, could feel at the sight of it nothing but the same irritated admiration and secret jealousy as the Emperor Constans felt when he visited his capital for the first time.
Even as the Byzantine Caesar, and all the provincials, Augustin, no doubt, examined the curiosities and celebrated works which were pointed out to strangers: the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian; the Pantheon; the temple of Roma and of Venus; the Place of Concord; the theatre of Pompey; the Odeum, and the Stadium. Though he might be stupefied by all this, he would remember, too, all that the Republic had taken from the provinces to construct these wonders, and would say to himself: “‘Tis we who have paid for them.” In truth, all the world had been ransacked to make Rome beautiful. For some time a muffled hostility had been brewing in provincial hearts against the tyranny of the central power, especially since it had shewn itself incapable of maintaining peace, and the Barbarians were threatening the frontiers. Worn out by so many insurrections, wars, massacres, and pillages, the provinces had come to ask if the great complicated machine of the Empire was worth all the blood and money that it cost.
For Augustin, moreover, the crisis was drawing near which was to end in his return to the Catholic faith. He had been a Christian, and as such brought up in principles of humility. With these sentiments, he would perhaps decide that the pride and vanity of the creature at Rome claimed far too much attention, and was even sacrilegious. It was not only the emperors who disputed the privileges of immortality with the gods, but anybody who took it into his head, provided that he was rich or had any kind of notoriety. Amid the harsh and blinding gilt of palaces and temples, how many statues, how many inscriptions endeavoured to keep an obscure memory green, or the features of some unknown man! Of course, at Carthage too, where they copied Rome, as in all the big cities, there were statues and inscriptions in abundance upon the Forum, the squares, and in the public baths. But what had not shocked Augustin in his native land, did shock him in a strange city. His home-sick eyes opened to faults which till then had been veiled by usage. In any case, this craze for statues and inscriptions prevailed at Rome more than anywhere else. The number of statues on the Forum became so inconvenient, that on many occasions certain ones were marked for felling, and the more insignificant shifted. The men of stone drove out the living men, and forced the gods into their temples. And the inscriptions on the walls bewildered the mind with such a noise of human praise, that ambition could dream of nothing beyond. It was all a kind of idolatry which revolted the strict Christians; and in Augustin, even at this time, it must have offended the candour of a soul which detested exaggeration and bombast.
The vices of the Roman people, with whom he was obliged to live cheek by jowl, galled him still more painfully. And to begin with, the natives hated strangers. At the theatres they used to shout: “Down with the foreign residents!” Acute attacks of xenophobia often caused riots in the city. Some years before Augustin arrived, a panic about the food supply led to the expulsion, as useless mouths, of all foreigners domiciled in Rome, even the professors. Famine was an endemic disease there. And then, these lazy people were always hungry. The gluttony and drunkenness of the Romans roused the wonder and also the disgust of the sober races of the Empire–of the Greeks as well as the Africans. They ate everywhere–in the streets, at the theatre, at the circus, around the temples. The sight was so ignoble, and the public intemperance so scandalous, that the Prefect, Ampelius, was obliged to issue an order prohibiting people who had any self-respect from eating in the street, the keepers of wine-shops from opening their places before ten o’clock in the morning, and the hawkers from selling cooked meat in the streets earlier than a certain hour of the day. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble. Religion itself encouraged this greediness. The pagan sacrifices were scarcely more than pretexts for stuffing. Under Julian, who carried the great public sacrifices of oxen to an abusive extent, the soldiers got drunk and gorged themselves with meat in the temples, and came out staggering. Then they would seize hold of any passers-by, whom they forced to carry them shoulder-high to their barracks.
All this must be kept in mind so as to understand the strictness and unyielding attitude of the Christian reaction. This Roman people, like the pagans in general, was frightfully material and sensual. The difficulty of shaking himself free from matter and the senses is going to be the great obstacle which delays Augustin’s conversion; and if it was so with him, a fastidious and intellectual man, what about the crowd? Those people thought of nothing but eating and drinking and lewdness. When they left the tavern or their squalid rooms, they had only the obscenities of mimes, or the tumbles of the drivers in the circus, or the butcheries in the amphitheatre to elevate them. They passed the night there under the awnings provided by the municipality. Their passion for horse-races and actors and actresses, curbed though it was by the Christian emperors, continued even after the sack of Rome by the Barbarians. At the time of the famine, when the strangers were expelled, they excepted from this wholesale banishment three thousand female dancers with the members of their choirs, and their leaders of orchestra.
The aristocracy did not manifest tastes much superior. Save a few cultivated minds, sincerely fond of literature, the greatest number only saw in the literary pose an easy way of being fashionable. These became infatuated about an unknown author, or an ancient author whose books were not to be had. They had these books sought for and beautifully copied. They, “who hated study like poison,” spoke only of their favourite author: the others did not exist for them. As a matter of fact, music had ousted literature: “the libraries were closed like sepulchres.” But fashionable people were interested in an hydraulic organ, and they ordered from the lute-makers “lyres the size of chariots.” Of course, this musical craze was sheer affectation. Actually, they were only interested in sports: to race, to arrange races, to breed horses, to train athletes and gladiators. As a pastime, they collected Oriental stuffs. Silk was then fashionable, and so were precious stones, enamels, heavy goldsmiths’ work. Rows of rings were worn on each finger. People took the air in silk robes, held together by brooches carved in the figures of animals, a parasol in one hand, and a fan with gold fringes in the other. The costumes and fashions of Constantinople encroached upon the old Rome and the rest of the Western world.
Immense fortunes, which had gathered in the hands of certain people, either through inheritance or swindling, enabled them to keep up a senseless expenditure. Like the American millionaires of to-day, who have their houses and properties in both hemispheres, these great Roman lords possessed them in every country in the Empire. Symmachus, who was Prefect of the City when Augustin was in Rome, had considerable estates not only in Italy and in Sicily, but even in Mauretania. And yet, in spite of all their wealth and all the privileges they enjoyed, these rich people were neither happy nor at ease. At the least suspicion of a despotic power, their lives and property were threatened. Accusations of magic, of disrespect to the Caesar, of plots against the Emperor–any pretext was good to plunder them. During the preceding reign, that of the pitiless Valentinian, the Roman nobility had been literally decimated by the executioner. A certain vice-Prefect, Maximinus, had gained a sinister reputation for cleverness in the art of manufacturing suspects. By his orders, a basket at the end of a string was hung out from one of the windows of the Praetorium, into which denunciations might be cast. The basket was in use day and night.
It is clear that at the time that Augustin settled in Rome this abominable system was a little moderated. But accusation by detectives was always in the air. And living in this atmosphere of mistrust, hypocrisy, bribery, and cruelty–small wonder if the Carthaginian fell into bitter reflections upon Roman corruption. However impressive from the front, the Empire was not nice to look at close at hand.
But Augustin was, above all, home-sick. When he strolled tinder the shady trees of the Janiculum or Sallust’s gardens, he already said to himself what he would repeat later to his listeners at Hippo: “Take an African, put him in a place cool and green, and he won’t stay there. He will feel he must go away and come back to his blazing desert.” As for himself, he had something better to regret than a blazing desert. In front of the City of Gold, stretched out at his feet, and the horizon of the Sabine Hills, he remembered the feminine softness of the twilights upon the Lake of Tunis, the enchantment of moonlit nights upon the Gulf of Carthage, and that astonishing landscape to be discovered from the height of the terrace of Byrsa, which all the grandeur of the Roman _campagna_ could not make him forget.
II
THE FINAL DISILLUSION
‘The new professor had managed to secure a certain number of pupils whom he gathered together in his rooms. He could make enough to live at Rome by himself, if he could not support there the woman and child he had left behind at Carthage. In this matter of finding work, his host and his Manichee friends had done him some very good turns. Although forced to conceal their beliefs since the edict of Theodosius, there were a good many Manichees in the city. They formed an occult Church, strongly organized, and its adepts had relations with all classes of Roman society. Possibly Augustin presented himself as one driven out of Africa by the persecution. Some compensation would be owing to this young man who had suffered for the good cause.
It was his friend Alypius, “the brother of his heart,” who, having preceded him to Rome to study law at his parents’ wishes, now was the most useful in helping Augustin to make himself known and find pupils. Himself a Manichee, converted by Augustin, and a member of one of the leading families in Thagaste, he had not long to wait for an important appointment in the Imperial administration. He was assessor to the Treasurer-General, or “Count of the Italian Bounty Office,” and decided fiscal questions. Thanks to his influence, as well as to his acquaintances among the Manichees, he was a valuable friend for the new arrival, a friend who could aid him, not only with his purse, but with advice. Without much capacity for theorizing, this Alypius was a practical spirit, a straight and essentially honest soul, whose influence was excellent for his impetuous friend. Of very chaste habits, he urged Augustin to restraint. And even in abstract studies, the religious controversies which Augustin dragged him into, his strong good sense moderated the imaginative dashes, the overmuch subtilty which sometimes led the other beyond healthy reason.
Unhappily they were both very busy–the judge and the rhetorician–and although their friendship became still greater during this stay in Rome, they were not able to see each other as much as they desired. Their pleasures, too, were perhaps not the same. Augustin did not in the least care about being chaste, and Alypius had a passion for the amphitheatre–a passion which his friend disapproved of. Some time earlier, at Carthage, Augustin had filled him with disgust of the circus. But hardly was Alypius arrived in Rome, than he became mad about the gladiatorial shows. Some fellow-students took him to the amphitheatre, almost by force. Thereupon, he said that he would stay, since they had dragged him there; but he bet that he would keep his eyes shut all through the fight, and that nothing could make him open them. He sat down on the benches with those who had brought him, his eyelids pressed down, refusing to look. Suddenly there was a roar of shouting, the shout of the crowd hailing the fall of the first wounded. His lids parted of themselves; he saw the flow of blood. “At the sight of the blood” says Augustin, “he drank in ruthlessness; no longer did he turn away, but fixed his gaze, and he became mad–and he knew no more…. He was fascinated by the criminal atrocity of this battle, and drunk with the pleasure of blood.”
These breathless phrases of the _Confessions_ seem to throb still with the wild frenzy of the crowd. They convey to us directly the kind of Sadic excitement which people went to find about the arena. Really, a wholesome sight for future Christians, for all the souls that the brutality of pagan customs revolted! The very year that Augustin was at Rome, certain prisoners of war, Sarmatian soldiers, condemned to kill each other in the amphitheatre, chose suicide rather than this shameful death. There was in this something to make him reflect–him and his friends. The fundamental injustices whereon the ancient world rested–the crushing of the slave and the conquered, the contempt for human life–these things they touched with the finger when they looked on at the butcheries in the amphitheatre. All those whose hearts sickened with disgust and horror before these slaughter-house scenes, all those who longed for a little more mildness, a little more justice, were all recruits marked out for the peaceful army of the Christ.
For Alypius, especially, it was not a bad thing to have known this blood-drunkenness at first hand: he shall be only the more ashamed when he falls at the feet of the merciful God. Equally useful was it for him to have personal experience of the harshness of men’s justice; and in the fulfilment of his duties as a judge to observe its errors and flaws. While he was a student at Carthage he just escaped being condemned to death upon a false accusation of theft–the theft of a piece of lead! Already they were dragging him, if not to the place of capital punishment, at least to prison, when a chance meeting with a friend of his who was a senator saved him from the threatening mob. At Rome, while Assessor to the Count of the Italian Bounty Office, he had to resist an attempt to bribe him, and by doing so risked losing his appointment, and, no doubt, something worse too. Official venality and dishonesty were evils so deeply rooted, that he himself nearly succumbed. He wanted some books copied, and he had the temptation to get this done at the charge of the Treasury. This peculation had, in his eyes, a good enough excuse, and it was certain to go undetected. Nevertheless, when he thought it over he changed his mind, and virtuously refrained from giving himself a library at the expense of the State.
Augustin, who relates these anecdotes, draws the same moral from them as we do, to wit–that for a man who was going to be a bishop and, as such, administrator and judge, this time spent in the Government service was a good preparatory school. Most of the other great leaders of this generation of Christians had also been officials; before ordination, they had been mixed up in business and politics, and had lived freely the life of their century. So it was with St. Ambrose, with St. Paulinus of Nola, with Augustin himself, and Evodius and Alypius, his friends.
And yet, however absorbed in their work the two Africans might be, it is pretty near certain that intellectual questions took the lead of all others. This is manifest in Augustin’s case at least. He must have astonished the good Alypius when he got to Rome by acknowledging that he hardly believed in Manicheeism any longer. And he set forth his doubts about their masters’ cosmogony and physical science, his suspicions touching the hidden immorality of the sect. As for himself, the controversies, which were the Manichees’ strong point, did not dazzle him any longer. At Carthage, but lately, he had heard a Catholic, a certain Helpidius, oppose to them arguments from Scripture, which they were unable to refute. To make matters worse, the Manichee Bishop of Rome made a bad impression on him from the very outset. This man, he tells us, was of rough appearance, without culture or polite manners. Doubtless this unmannerly peasant, in his reception of the young professor, had not shewn himself sufficiently alive to his merits, and the professor felt aggrieved.
From then, his keen dialectic and his satirical spirit (Augustin had formidable powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness, were immersed in certain plants and liquors. Hence, the distinction they made between clean and unclean food. All those foods were pure which contained some part of the Divine Light; impure, those which did not. The purity of food became evident by certain qualities of taste, smell, and appearance. But now Augustin found a good deal of arbitrariness in these distinctions, and a good deal of simplicity in the belief that the Divine Light dwelt in a vegetable. “Are they not ashamed,” he said, “to search God with their palates or with their nose? And if His presence is revealed by a special brilliancy, by the goodness of the taste or the smell, why allow that dish and condemn this, which is of equal savour, light, and perfume?
“Yea, why do they look upon the golden melon as come out of God’s treasure-house, and yet will have none of the golden fat of the ham or the yellow of an egg? Why does the whiteness of lettuce proclaim to them the Divinity, and the whiteness of cream nothing at all? And why this horror of meat? For, look you, roast sucking-pig offers us a brilliant colour, an agreeable smell, and an appetizing taste–sure signs, according to them, of the Divine Presence.”… Once started on this topic, Augustin’s vivacity has no limits. He even drops into jokes which would offend modern shamefacedness by their Aristophanic breadth.
These arguments, to say the truth, did not shake the foundations of the doctrine, and if a doctrine must be judged according to its works, the Manichees might entrench themselves behind their rigid moral rules, and their conduct. Contrary to the more accommodating Catholicism, they paraded a puritan intolerance. But Augustin had found out at Carthage that this austerity was for the most part hypocrisy. At Rome he was thoroughly enlightened.
The Elect of the religion made a great impression by their fasts and their abstinence from meat. Now it became clear that these devout personages, under pious pretexts, literally destroyed themselves by over-eating and indigestion. They held, in fact, that the chief work of piety consisted in setting free particles of the Divine Light, imprisoned in matter by the wiles of the God of Darkness. They being the Pure, they purified matter by absorbing it into their bodies. The faithful brought them stores of fruit and vegetables, served them with real feasts, so that by eating these things they might liberate a little of the Divine Substance. Of course, they abstained from all flesh, flesh being the dwelling-place of the Dark God, and also from fermented wine, which they called “the devil’s gall.” But how they made up for it over the rest! Augustin makes great fun of these people who would think it a sin if they took as a full meal a small bit of bacon and cabbage, with two or three mouthfuls of undiluted wine,