Saint Augustin

by Louis Bertrand

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.