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| St. Augustine of Hippo |
From
his birth to his conversion (354-386)
Augustine was born at Tagaste on 13
November, 354. Tagaste, now Souk-Ahras, about 60 miles from Bona (ancient
Hippo-Regius), was at that time a small free city of proconsular Numidia which
had recently been converted from Donatism. Although eminently respectable, his
family was not rich, and his father, Patricius, one of the curiales of the
city, was still a pagan. However, the admirable virtues that made Monica the
ideal of Christian mothers at length brought her husband the grace of baptism
and of a holy death, about the year 371.
Augustine received a Christian education. His
mother had him signed with the cross and enrolled among the catechumens. Once,
when very ill, he asked for baptism, but, all danger being soon passed, he
deferred receiving the sacrament, thus yielding to a deplorable custom of the
times. His association with "men of prayer" left three great ideas
deeply engraven upon his soul: a Divine Providence, the future life with
terrible sanctions, and, above all, Christ the Saviour. "From my tenderest
infancy, I had in a manner sucked with my mother's milk that name of my
Saviour, Thy Son; I kept it in the recesses of my heart; and all that presented
itself to me without that Divine Name, though it might be elegant, well
written, and even replete with truth, did not altogether carry me away"
(Confessions I.4).
But
a great intellectual and moral crisis stifled for a time all these Christian
sentiments. The heart was the first point of attack. Patricius, proud of his
son's success in the schools of Tagaste and Madaura determined to send him to
Carthage to prepare for a forensic career. But, unfortunately, it required
several months to collect the necessary means, and Augustine had to spend his
sixteenth year at Tagaste in an idleness which was fatal to his virtue; he gave
himself up to pleasure with all the vehemence of an ardent nature. At first he
prayed, but without the sincere desire of being heard, and when he reached
Carthage, towards the end of the year 370, every circumstance tended to draw
him from his true course: the many seductions of the great city that was still
half pagan, the licentiousness of other students, the theatres, the
intoxication of his literary success, and a proud desire always to be first,
even in evil. Before long he was obliged to confess to Monica that he had
formed a sinful liaison with the person who bore him a son (372), "the son
of his sin" — an entanglement from which he only delivered himself at
Milan after fifteen years of its thralldom.
Two
extremes are to be avoided in the appreciation of this crisis. Some, like
Mommsen, misled perhaps by the tone of grief in the "Confessions",
have exaggerated it: in the "Realencyklopädie" (3d ed., II, 268)
Loofs reproves Mommsen on this score, and yet he himself is too lenient towards
Augustine, when he claims that in those days, the Church permitted concubinage.
The "Confessions" alone prove that Loofs did not understand the 17th
canon of Toledo. However, it may be said that, even in his fall, Augustine
maintained a certain dignity and felt a compunction which does him honour, and
that, from the age of nineteen, he had a genuine desire to break the chain. In
fact, in 373, an entirely new inclination manifested itself in his life,
brought about by the reading Cicero's "Hortensius" whence he imbibed
a love of the wisdom which Cicero so eloquently praises. Thenceforward
Augustine looked upon rhetoric merely as a profession; his heart was in
philosophy.
Unfortunately, his faith, as well as his
morals, was to pass though a terrible crisis. In this same year, 373, Augustine
and his friend Honoratus fell into the snares of the Manichæans. It seems
strange that so great a mind should have been victimized by Oriental
vapourings, synthesized by the Persian Mani (215-276) into coarse, material
dualism, and introduced into Africa scarcely fifty years previously. Augustine
himself tells us that he was enticed by the promises of a free philosophy
unbridled by faith; by the boasts of the Manichæans, who claimed to have
discovered contradictions in Holy Writ; and, above all, by the hope of finding
in their doctrine a scientific explanation of nature and its most mysterious
phenomena. Augustine's inquiring mind was enthusiastic for the natural
sciences, and the Manichæans declared that nature withheld no secrets from
Faustus, their doctor. Moreover, being tortured by the problem of the origin of
evil, Augustine, in default of solving it, acknowledged a conflict of two
principles. And then, again, there was a very powerful charm in the moral
irresponsibility resulting from a doctrine which denied liberty and attributed
the commission of crime to a foreign principle.
Once
won over to this sect, Augustine devoted himself to it with all the ardour of
his character; he read all its books, adopted and defended all its opinions.
His furious proselytism drew into error his friend Alypius and Romanianus, his
Mæcenas of Tagaste, the friend of his father who was defraying the expenses of
Augustine's studies. It was during this Manichæan period that Augustine's
literary faculties reached their full development, and he was still a student
at Carthage when he embraced error.
His
studies ended, he should in due course have entered the forum litigiosum, but
he preferred the career of letters, and Possidius tells us that he returned to
Tagaste to "teach grammar." The young professor captivated his
pupils, one of whom, Alypius, hardly younger than his master, loath to leave
him after following him into error, was afterwards baptized with him at Milan,
eventually becoming Bishop of Tagaste, his native city. But Monica deeply
deplored Augustine's heresy and would not have received him into her home or at
her table but for the advice of a saintly bishop, who declared that "the
son of so many tears could not perish." Soon afterwards Augustine went to
Carthage, where he continued to teach rhetoric. His talents shone to even
better advantage on this wider stage, and by an indefatigable pursuit of the
liberal arts his intellect attained its full maturity. Having taken part in a
poetic tournament, he carried off the prize, and the Proconsul Vindicianus
publicly conferred upon him the corona agonistica.
It was at this moment of literary intoxication,
when he had just completed his first work on æsthetics (now lost) that he began
to repudiate Manichæism. Even when Augustine was in his first fervour, the
teachings of Mani had been far from quieting his restlessness, and although he
has been accused of becoming a priest of the sect, he was never initiated or
numbered among the "elect," but remained an "auditor" the
lowest degree in the hierarchy. He himself gives the reason for his
disenchantment. First of all there was the fearful depravity of Manichæan
philosophy — "They destroy everything and build up nothing"; then,
the dreadful immorality in contrast with their affectation of virtue; the
feebleness of their arguments in controversy with the Catholics, to whose
Scriptural arguments their only reply was: "The Scriptures have been
falsified." But, worse than all, he did not find science among them —
science in the modern sense of the word — that knowledge of nature and its laws
which they had promised him. When he questioned them concerning the movements
of the stars, none of them could answer him. "Wait for Faustus," they
said, "he will explain everything to you." Faustus of Mileve, the
celebrated Manichæan bishop, at last came to Carthage; Augustine visited and
questioned him, and discovered in his responses the vulgar rhetorician, the
utter stranger to all scientific culture. The spell was broken, and, although
Augustine did not immediately abandon the sect, his mind rejected Manichæan
doctrines. The illusion had lasted nine years.
But
the religious crisis of this great soul was only to be resolved in Italy, under
the influence of Ambrose. In 383 Augustine, at the age of twenty-nine, yielded
to the irresistible attraction which Italy had for him, but his mother
suspected his departure and was so reluctant to be separated from him that he
resorted to a subterfuge and embarked under cover of the night. He had only
just arrived in Rome when he was taken seriously ill; upon recovering he opened
a school of rhetoric, but, disgusted by the tricks of his pupils, who
shamelessly defrauded him of their tuition fees, he applied for a vacant
professorship at Milan, obtained it, and was accepted by the prefect,
Symmachus. Having visited Bishop Ambrose, the fascination of that saint's
kindness induced him to become a regular attendant at his preachings.
However, before embracing the Faith,
Augustine underwent a three years' struggle during which his mind passed
through several distinct phases. At first he turned towards the philosophy of
the Academics, with its pessimistic scepticism; then neo-Platonic philosophy
inspired him with genuine enthusiasm. At Milan he had scarcely read certain
works of Plato and, more especially, of Plotinus, before the hope of finding
the truth dawned upon him. Once more he began to dream that he and his friends
might lead a life dedicated to the search for it, a life purged of all vulgar
aspirations after honours, wealth, or pleasure, and with celibacy for its rule
(Confessions VI). But it was only a dream; his passions still enslaved him.
Monica, who had joined her son at Milan,
prevailed upon him to become betrothed, but his affianced bride was too young,
and although Augustine dismissed the mother of Adeodatus, her place was soon
filled by another. Thus did he pass through one last period of struggle and
anguish. Finally, through the reading of the Holy Scripture light penetrated
his mind. Soon he possessed the certainty that Jesus Christ is the only way to
truth and salvation. After that resistance came only from the heart. An interview
with Simplicianus, the future successor of St. Ambrose, who told Augustine the
story of the conversion of the celebrated neo-Platonic rhetorician, Victorinus
(Confessions VIII.1, VIII.2), prepared the way for the grand stroke of grace
which, at the age of thirty-three, smote him to the ground in the garden at
Milan (September, 386). A few days later Augustine, being ill, took advantage
of the autumn holidays and, resigning his professorship, went with Monica,
Adeodatus, and his friends to Cassisiacum, the country estate of Verecundus,
there to devote himself to the pursuit of true philosophy which, for him, was
now inseparable from Christianity.
If you seek rest in this life, how will you,
then, come to everlasting rest? Do not
determine to have rest here, but to have patience, and seek true rest not on
earth, but in heaven; not in man or in any creature, but in God alone, where
true rest is. You ought gladly to suffer
all things for the love of God: all
labors, sorrows, temptations, vexations; all anguish, need, sickness, injuries,
evil sayings, reproaches; all oppressions, confusions, corrections, and despisings. These greatly help a man to virtue; those
prove the true knight of Christ and prepare for him a heavenly
crown. And I shall reward him with
everlasting reward for his short labor, with infinite glory for his transitory
confusion.
