Saint Augustin

by Louis Bertrand

For the moment, the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world, where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated his precocious instinct for Beauty.

More than Thagaste, no doubt, Madaura bore the marks of the building genius of the Romans. Even to-day their descendants, the Italians, are the masons of the world, after having been the architects. The Romans were the building nation above all others. They it was who raised and established towns upon the same model and according to the same ideal as an oration or a poem. They really invented the house, mansio, not only the shelter where one lives, but the building which itself lives, which triumphs over years and centuries, a huge construction ornamental and sightly, existing as much—and perhaps more—for the delight of the eyes as for usefulness. The house, the Town-with-deep-streets, perfectly ordered, were a great matter of amazement for the African nomad—he who passes and never settles down anywhere. He hated them, doubtless, as the haunts of the soldier and the publican, his oppressors, but he also regarded them with admiration mixed with jealousy as the true expression of a race which, when it entered a country, planted itself for eternity, and claimed to join magnificence and beauty to the manifestation of its strength. The Roman ruins which are scattered over modern Algeria humiliate ourselves by their pomp—us who flatter ourselves that we are resuming the work of the Empire and continuing its tradition. They are a permanent reproach to our mediocrity, a continual incitement to grandeur and beauty. Of course, the Roman architecture could not have had on Augustin, this still unformed young African, the same effect as it has to-day on a Frenchman or a man from Northern Europe. But it is certain that it formed, without his knowledge, his thought and his power of sensation, and extended for him the lessons of the Latin rhetoricians and grammarians.

All that was not exactly very Christian. But from these early school years Augustin got further and further away from Christianity, and the examples he had under his eyes, at Madaura were hardly likely to strengthen him in his faith. It was hardly an edifying atmosphere there for a Catholic youth who had a lively imagination, a pleasure-loving temperament, and who liked pagan literature. The greatest part of the population were pagans, especially among the aristocrats. The Decurions continued to preside at festivals in honour of the old idols.

These festivals were frequent. The least excuse was taken to engarland piously the doors of houses with branches, to bleed the sacrificial pig, or slaughter the lamb. In the evening, squares and street corners were illuminated. Little candles burned on all the thresholds. During the mysteries of Bacchus, the town councillors themselves headed the popular rejoicings. It was an African carnival, brutal and full of colour. People got tipsy, pretended they were mad. For the sport of the thing, they assaulted the passers and robbed them. The dull blows on tambourines, the hysterical and nasal preludes of the flutes, excited an immense elation, at once sensual and mystic. And all quieted down among the cups and leather flagons of wine, the grease and meats of banquets in the open air. Even in a country as sober as Africa, the pagan feasts were never much else than excuses for gorging and orgies. Augustin, who after his conversion had only sarcasms for the carnival of Madaura, doubtless went with the crowd, like many other Christians. Rich and influential people gave the example. There was danger of annoying them by making a group apart. And then, there was no resisting the agreeableness of such festivals.

Perhaps he was even brought to these love-feasts by those in whose charge he was. For, in fact, to whom had he been entrusted? Doubtless to some host of Patricius, a pagan like himself. Or did he lodge with his master, a grammarian, who kept a boarding-house for the boys? Almost all these schoolmasters were pagan too. Is it wonderful that the Christian lessons of Monnica and the nurses at Thagaste became more and more blurred in Augustin's mind? Many years after, an old Madaura grammarian, called Maximus, wrote to him in a tone of loving reproach: "Thou hast drawn away from us"—a secta nostra deviasti. Did he wish to hint that at this time Augustin had glided into paganism? Nothing is more unlikely. He himself assures us that the name of Christ remained always "graven on his heart." But while he was at Madaura he lived indifferently with pagans and Christians.

Besides that, the teaching he got was altogether pagan in tone. No doubt he picked out, as he always did, the subjects which suited him. Minds such as his fling themselves upon that which is likely to nourish them: they throw aside all the rest, or suffer it very unwillingly. Thus Augustin never wavered in his dislike for Greek: he was a poor Greek scholar. He detested the Greeks by instinct. According to Western prejudice, these men of the East were all rascals or amusers. Augustin, as a practical African, always regarded the Greeks as vain, discoursing wits. In a word, they were not sincere people whom it would be safe to trust. The entirely local patriotism of the classical Greek authors further annoyed this Roman citizen who was used to regard the world as his country: he thought them very narrow-minded to take so much interest in the history of some little town. As for him, he looked higher and farther. It must be remembered that in the second half of the fourth century the Greek attitude, broadened and fully conscious of itself, set itself more and more against Latinism, above all, politically. There it lay, a hostile and impenetrable block before the Western peoples. And here was a stronger reason for a Romanized African to dislike the Greeks.

So he painfully construed the Iliad and Odyssey, very cross at the difficulties of a foreign language which prevented him from grasping the plots of the fine, fabulous narratives. There were, however, abridgments used in the schools, a kind of summaries of the Trojan War, written by Latin grammarians under the odd pseudonyms of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete. But these abridgments were very dry for an imagination like Augustin's. He much preferred the Æneid, the poem admired above all by the Africans, on account of the episode devoted to the foundation of Carthage. Virgil was his passion. He read and re-read him continually; he knew him by heart. To the end of his life, in his severest writings, he quoted verses or whole passages out of his much-loved poet. Dido's adventure moved him to tears. They had to pluck the book out of his hands.

Now the reason is that there was a secret harmony between Virgil's soul and the soul of Augustin. Both were gracious and serious. One, the great poet, and one, the humble schoolboy, they both had pity on the Queen of Carthage, they would have liked to save her, or at any rate to mitigate her sadness, to alter a little the callousness of Æneas and the harshness of the Fates. But think of it! Love is a divine sickness, a chastisement sent by the gods. It is just, when all's said, that the guilty one should endure her agony to the very end. And then, such very great things are going to arise out of this poor love! Upon it depends the lot of two Empires. What counts a woman before Rome and Carthage? Besides, she was bound to perish: the gods had decreed it…. There was in all that a concentrated emotion, a depth of sentiment, a religious appeal which stirred Augustin's heart, still unaware of itself. This obedience of the Virgilian hero to the heavenly will, was already an adumbration of the humility of the future Christian.

Certainly, Augustin did not perceive very plainly in these turbid years of his youth the full religious significance of Virgil's poem. Carried away by his headstrong nature, he yielded to the heart-rending charm of the romantic story: he lived it, literally, with the heroine. When his schoolmasters desired him to elaborate the lament of the dying Queen Dido in Latin prose, what he wrote had a veritable quiver of anguish. Without the least defence against lust and the delusions of the heart, he spent intellectually and in a single outburst all the strength of passion.

He absorbed every love-poem with the eagerness of a participating soul. If he took pleasure in the licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love. For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for itself, to love for the sake of loving—there is the constant subject of these sensualists, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. After the story of Dido, the youthful reader was ravished by the story of Ariadne, even more disturbing, because no remorse modifies the frenzy of it. He read: