No More Learning

Even now in the towns our police are obliged
to take measures against these ferocious children. In Augustin's time,
at Cherchell, which is the ancient _Cæsarea Mauretaniæ_, the childish
population was split into two hostile camps which stoned each other. On
certain holidays the fathers and big brothers joined the children; blood
flowed, and there were deaths.

The bishop Augustin recalls with severity the "superb victories" he won in
jousts of this kind. But I find it hard to believe that such a delicate
child (he was sickly almost all his life) could have got much pleasure out
of these brutal sports. If he was drawn into them by the example of others,
it must have been through the imagination they appealed to him. In these
battles, wherein sides took the field as Romans against Carthaginians,
Greeks against Trojans, he believed himself Scipio or Hannibal, Achilles
or Hector. He experienced beforehand, as a rhetorician, the intoxication
of a triumph which playfellows who were stronger and better provided with
muscles gave him a hard fight for. He did not always get the upper hand,
except perhaps when he bribed the enemy. But an eager young soul, such
as he was, can hardly be content with half-victories; he wants to excel.
Accordingly, he sought his revenge in those games wherein the mind has the
chief part. He listened to stories with delight, and in his turn repeated
them to his little friends, thus trying upon an audience of boys that charm
of speech by which later he was to subdue crowds. They also played at
acting, at gladiators, at drivers and horses. Some of Augustin's companions
were sons of wealthy citizens who gave splendid entertainments to their
fellow-countrymen. As these dramatic representations, or games of the
arena or circus, drew near, the little child-world was overcome by a
fever of imitation. All the children of Thagaste imitated the actors, the
_mirmillones_, or the horsemen in the amphitheatre, just as the young
Spaniards of to-day imitate the _toreros_.

In the midst of these amusements Augustin fell ill; he had fever and
violent pains in the stomach. They thought he was going to die. It appears
that it was himself who in this extreme situation asked for baptism.
Monnica was making all haste to have the sacrament administered, when
suddenly, against all expectation, the child recovered. Again was baptism
postponed, and from the same reason: to lessen the gravity of the sins
which young Augustin was bound to commit. His mother, who no doubt foresaw
some of them, again fell in with the custom.

It is possible that Patricius interfered this time in a more decided way.
Just at this period Catholicism was in an unfavourable situation. The
short reign of Julian had started a violent pagan reaction. Everywhere
the temples were reopening, the sacrifices beginning again. Moreover,
the Donatists secretly aided the pagans. Their _Seids_, more or less
acknowledged, the Circoncelliones, bands of fanatical peasants, scoured
through the Numidian country, attacking the Catholics, ravaging and
pillaging, and burning their farms and villas. Was this a good time to
make a noisy profession of faith, to be enrolled among the ranks of the
conquered party?

Little Augustin knew nothing of all these calculations of motherly prudence
and fatherly diplomacy: he begged for baptism, so he tells us. This seems
very remarkable in so young a child. But he lived in a house where all the
service was done by Christians. He heard the talk of Monnica's friends;
perhaps, too, of his grandparents, who were Catholics faithful and austere.
And then, his soul was naturally religious. That explains everything:
he asked for baptism to be like grown-up people, and because he was
predestined. Among children, the chosen have these sudden flashes of light.
At certain moments they feel what one day they shall be. Anyhow, Monnica
must have seen this sign with joy.

He got well, and took up again his little boy's life, divided between play,
and dawdling, and school.

School! painful memory for Augustin! They sent him to the _primus
magister_, the elementary teacher, a real terror, armed with a long switch
which came down without pity on idle boys. Seated on benches around him, or
crouched on mats, the boys sang out all together: "One and one are two, two
and two are four"--horrible refrain which deafened the whole neighbourhood.
The school was often a mere shed, or a _pergola_ in the fields which was
protected fairly well from sun and rain by cloths stretched overhead--a hut
rented for a trifle, wide open to the winds, with a mosquito-net stretched
out before the entrance. All who were there must have frozen in winter
and broiled in summer. Augustin remembered it as a slaves' chain-prison
(_ergastulum_) of boyhood.

He hated school and what they taught there--the alphabet, counting, and
the rudiments of Latin and Greek grammar. He had a perfect horror of
lessons--of Greek above all. This schoolboy, who became, when his turn
came, a master, objected to the methods of school. His mind, which grasped
things instinctively at a single bound, could not stand the gradual
procedure of the teaching faculty. He either mastered difficulties at
once, or gave them up. Augustin was one of the numerous victims of the
everlasting mistake of schoolmasters, who do not know how to arrange
their lessons to accord with various kinds of mind. Like most of those
who eventually become great men, he was no good as a pupil. He was often
punished, thrashed--and cruelly thrashed. The master's scourge filled
him with an unspeakable terror. When he was smarting all over from cuts
and came to complain to his parents, they laughed at him or made fun of
him--yes, even the pious Monnica. Then the poor lad, not knowing whom to
turn to, remembered hearing his mother and the servants talk of a Being,
very powerful and very good, who defends the orphan and the oppressed. And
he said from the depths of his heart:

"O my God, please grant that I am not whipped at school. "

But God did not hear his prayer because he was not a good boy. Augustin was
in despair.

It is evident that these punishments were cruel, because forty years
afterwards he denounces them with horror. In his mind, they are tortures
comparable to the wooden horse or the iron pincers. Nothing is small
for children, especially for a sensitive child like Augustin. Their
sensitiveness and their imagination exaggerate all things out of due
measure. In this matter, also, schoolmasters often go wrong. They do not
know how to handle delicate organizations. They strike fiercely, when a
few words said at the right moment would have much more effect on the
culprit. . . . Monnica's son suffered as much from the rod as he took pride
in his successes at games. If, as Scipio, he was filled with a sensation
of glory in his battles against other boys, no doubt he pictured himself
a martyr, a St. Laurence or St. Sebastian, when he was swished. He never
pardoned--save as a Christian--his schoolmasters for having brutalized him.

Nevertheless, despite his hatred for ill-ordered lessons, his precocious
intelligence was remarked by everybody. It was clear that such lucky gifts
should not be neglected. Monnica, no doubt, was the first to get this into
her head, and she advised Patricius to make Augustin read for a learned
profession.

The business of the _curia_ was not exactly brilliant, and so he may have
perceived that his son might raise their fortunes if he had definite
employment. Augustin, a professor of eloquence or a celebrated pleader,
might be the saviour and the benefactor of his family. The town councils,
and even the Imperial treasury, paid large salaries to rhetoricians. In
those days, rhetoric led to everything. Some of the professors who went
from town to town giving lectures made considerable fortunes. At Thagaste
they pointed with admiration to the example of the rhetorician Victorinus,
an African, a fellow-countryman, who had made a big reputation over-seas,
and had his statue in the Roman Forum. And many years before, had not M.
Cornelius Fronto, of Cirta, another African, become the tutor of Marcus
Aurelius, who covered him with honours and wealth and finally raised him to
the Consulship? Pertinax himself, did he not begin as a simple teacher of
grammar, and become Proconsul of Africa and then Emperor of Rome? How many
stimulants for provincial ambition! . . .

Augustin's parents reasoned as the middle-class parents of to-day. They
discounted the future, and however hard up they were, they resolved to
make sacrifices for his education. And as the schools of Thagaste were
inadequate, it was decided to send this very promising boy to Madaura.




V

THE SCHOOLBOY OF MADAURA


A new world opened before Augustin. It was perhaps the first time he had
ever gone away from Thagaste.

Of course, Madaura is not very far off; there are about thirty miles at
most between the two towns. But there are no short journeys for children.
This one lay along the military road which ran from Hippo to Theveste--a
great Roman causeway paved with large flags on the outskirts of towns, and
carefully pebbled over all the rest of the distance. Erect upon the high
saddle of his horse, Augustin, who was to become a tireless traveller
and move about ceaselessly over African roads during all his episcopal
life--Augustin got his first glimpse of the poetry of the open road, a
poetry which we have lost for ever.

How amusing they were, the African roads of those days, how full of sights!
Pauses were made at inns with walls thick as the ramparts of citadels,
their interiors bordered by stables built in arcades, heaped up with
travellers' packs and harness. In the centre were the trough and cistern;
and to the little rooms opening in a circle on to the balcony, drifted up
a smell of oil and fodder, and the noise of men and of beasts of burthen,
and of the camels as they entered majestically, curving their long necks
under the lintel of the door. Then there was talk with the merchants, just
arrived from the south, who brought news of the nomad countries, and had
stories to tell. And then, without hurrying, a start was made again for the
next stage. Long files of chariots were encountered carrying provisions to
soldiers garrisoned on the frontier, or the State-distributed corn of the
Roman people to the sea-ports; or again, from time to time, the _lectica_,
brought along by slaves or mules, of a bishop on a visitation; and then the
litter, with close-drawn curtains, of a matron or some great personage. Of
a sudden all pulled sharp to one side; the vehicles lined up on the edge of
the road; and there passed at full speed, in a cloud of dust, a messenger
of the Imperial Post. . . .

Certainly this road from Hippo to Theveste was one of the busiest and most
picturesque in the province: it was one of its main arteries.

At first the look of the country is rather like the neighbourhood of
Thagaste. The wooded and mountainous landscape still spreads out its
little breast-shaped hills and its sheets of verdure. Here and there the
road skirts the deeply-ravined valley of the Medjerda. At the foot of the
precipitous slopes, the river can be heard brawling in a torrent over its
stony bed, and there are sharp descents among thickets of juniper and the
fringed roots of the dwarf-pines. Then, as the descent continues, the land
becomes thinner and spaces bare of vegetation appear oftener. At last, upon
a piece of tableland, Madaura comes into view, all white in the midst of
the vast tawny plain, where to-day nothing is to be seen but a mausoleum
in ruins, the remains of a Byzantine fortress, and vague traces vanishing
away.

This is the first rise of the great plain which declines towards Theveste
and the group of the Aures Mountains. Coming from the woodland country of
Thagaste, the nakedness of it is startling. Here and there, thin cows crop
starveling shrubs which have grown on the bank of some _oued_ run dry.
Little asses, turned loose, save themselves at a gallop towards the tents
of the nomads, spread out, black and hairy, like immense bats on the
whiteness of the land. Nearer, a woman's red _haick_ interposes, the single
stain of bright colour breaking the indefinite brown and grey of the plain.
Here is felt the harshness of Numidia; it is almost the stark spaces of
the desert world. But on the side towards the east, the architecture of
mountains, wildly sculptured, stands against the level reaches of the
horizon. Upon the clear background of the sky, shew, distinctly, lateral
spurs and a cone like to the mystic representation of Tanit. Towards the
south, crumbling isolated crags appear, scattered about like gigantic
pedestals uncrowned of their statues, or like the pipes of an organ raised
there to capture and attune the cry of the great winds of the _steppe_.

This country is characterized by a different kind of energy from Thagaste.
There is more air and light and space. If the plantation is sparse, the
beautiful shape of the land may be observed all the better. Nothing breaks
or lessens the grand effects of the light. . . . And let no one say that
Augustin's eyes cared not for all that, he who wrote after his conversion,
and in all the austerity of his repentance: "If sentient things had not a
soul, we should not love them so much. "

It is here, between Madaura and Thagaste, during the eager years of youth,
that he gathered together the seeds of sensations and images which,
later on, were to burst forth into fiery and boiling metaphors in the
_Confessions_, and in his homilies and paraphrases of Holy Scripture. Later
on, he will not have the time to observe, or he will have lost the power.
Rhetoric will stretch its commonplace veil between him and the unceasing
springtide of the earth. Ambition will turn him away from those sights
which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then,
later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He
will no longer perceive the creation save at odd moments in a kind of
metaphysical dream, and, so to speak, across the glory of the Creator.
But in these youthful years all things burst upon him with extraordinary
violence and ecstasy. His undulled senses swallowed greedily the whole
banquet offered by this wide world to his hunger for pleasure. The fugitive
beauty of things and beings, with all their charms, revealed itself to
him in its newness: _novissimarum rerum fugaces pulchritudines, earumque
suavitates_. This craving for sensation will still exist in the great
Christian teacher, and betray itself in the warm and coloured figures
of his style. Of course, he was not as a worldly describer, who studies
to produce phrases which present an image, or arranges glittering
pictures--all such endeavours he knew nothing about. But by instinct, and
thanks to his warm African temperament, he was a kind of impressionist and
metaphysical poet.

If the rural landscape of Thagaste is reflected in certain passages--the
pleasantest and most well known--of the _Confessions_, all the intellectual
part of Augustin's work finds its symbolical commentary here in this arid
and light-splashed plain of Madaura. Like it, the thought of Augustin has
no shadows. Like it too, it is lightened by strange and splendid tints
which seem to come from far off, from a focal fire invisible to human eyes.
No modern writer has better praised the light--not only the immortal light
of the blessed, but that light which rests on the African fields, and
is on land and sea; and nobody has spoken of it with more amplitude and
wonder. The truth is, that in no country in the world, not even in Egypt,
in the rose-coloured lands of Karnak and Luxor, is the light more pure and
admirable than in these great bare plains of Numidia and the region of the
Sahara. Is there not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this
play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as
the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing--of
lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of
fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders
into darkness, even as ideas in the obscure depths of the intelligence
which reposes. . . .

Not less than this land, stern even to sadness, but hot and sumptuous, the
town of Madaura must have impressed Augustin.

It was an old Numidian city, proud of its antiquity. Long before the Roman
conquest, it had been a fortress of King Syphax. Afterwards, the conquerors
settled there, and in the second century of our era, Apuleius, the most
famous of its children, could state before a proconsul, not without pride,
that Madaura was a very prosperous colony. It is probable that this old
town was not so much Romanized as its neighbours, Thimgad and Lambesa,
which were of recent foundation and had been built all at once by decree of
the Government. But it may well have been as Roman as Theveste, a no less
ancient city, where the population was probably just as mixed. Madaura,
like Theveste, had its temples with pillars and Corinthian porticoes, its
triumphal arches (these were run up everywhere), its forum surrounded by a
covered gallery and peopled with statues. Statues also were very liberally
distributed in those days. We know of at least three at Madaura which
Augustin mentions in one of his letters: A god Mars in his heroic
nakedness, and another Mars armed from head to foot; opposite, the statue
of a man, in realistic style, stretching out three fingers to neutralize
the evil eye. These familiar figures remained very clear in the
recollection of Augustin. In the evening, or at the hour of the siesta, he
had stretched himself under their pedestals and played at dice or bones in
the cool shade of the god Mars, or of the Man with outstretched fingers.
The slabs of marble of the portico made a good place to play or sleep.

Among these statues, there was one perhaps which interested the lad and
stimulated all his early ambitions--that of Apuleius, the great man of
Madaura, the orator, philosopher, sorcerer, who was spoken of from one end
to the other of Africa. By dint of gazing at this, and listening to the
praises of the great local author, did the young scholar become aware of
his vocation? Did he have from this time a confused sort of wish to become
one day another Apuleius, a Christian Apuleius--to surpass the reputation
of this celebrated pagan? These impressions and admirations of youth have
always a more or less direct influence upon what use a boy makes of his
talents.

Be that as it will, Augustin could not take a step in Madaura without
running against the legend of Apuleius, who was become almost a divinity
for his fellow-countrymen. He was looked upon not only as a sage, but as
a most wily nigromancer. The pagans compared him to Christ--nay, put him
higher than Christ. In their view he had worked much more astonishing
miracles than those of Jesus or of Apollonius of Tyana. And people told the
extravagant stories out of his _Metamorphoses_ as real, as having actually
happened. Nothing was seen on all sides but wizards, men changed into
animals, animals, or men and women, under some spell. In the inns, a man
watched with a suspicious look the ways of the maidservant who poured out
his drink or handed him a dish. Perhaps some magic potion was mingled with
the cheese or bread that she was laying on the table. It was an atmosphere
of feverish and delirious credulity. The pagan madness got the better of
the Christians themselves. Augustin, who had lived in this atmosphere, will
later find considerable trouble in maintaining his strong common sense amid
such an overflow of marvels.

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:

_Now while the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his
and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,--there,
standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows
him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a
Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats
upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her
fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her bosom,
and the smooth cincture which supports her quivering breasts. All that
slips from her body into the salt foam which ripples round her feet.
But little she cares for her coif or for her apparel carried away by
the tide! Lost, bewildered, with all her heart and all her soul, she is
clinging to thee, O Theseus. _

And if Augustin, when he had read these burning verses of Catullus, looked
through the Anthologies which were popular in the African schools, he
would come upon "The Vigil of Venus," that eclogue which ends with such a
passionate cry:

_O my springtime, when wilt thou come? When shall I be as the swallow?
When shall I cease to be silent? . . . May he love to-morrow, he
has not loved yet. And he who has already loved, may he love again
to-morrow. _

Imagine the effect of such exhortations on a youth of fifteen! Truly, this
springtide of love, which the poet cries for in his distress, the son
of Monnica knew well was come for him. How he must have listened to the
musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the
book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And
what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic
and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phædra, formed and re-formed continually
in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's
age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines
are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from us into
outlying lands, to a vanished world which will never come again. But for
Augustin, this was the world he was born into--it was his pagan Africa
where pleasure was the whole of life, and one lived only for the lusts of
the flesh. And the race of fabulous princesses--they were not dead, those
ladies: they were ever waiting for the well-beloved in the palaces at
Carthage. Yes, the scholar of Madaura lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus
of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love
comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly
discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The
unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper and
the heart more strong. . . .

A long time afterwards, when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to
us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from
having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will
say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human
heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom--yea, the pleasure
of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is
holy, stands alone. You will find nothing in any voluptuousness fit to be
compared to it. I say not that this other pleasure is less, for that which
is called less hath only to increase to become equal. No, I shall not say
that all other pleasure is less. No comparison can be made. It is another
kind, it is another reality. "




VI

THE HOLIDAYS AT THAGASTE


In the city of Apuleius, the Christian Monnica's son became simply a pagan.
He was near his sixteenth year: the awkward time of early virility was
beginning for him. Prepared at Madaura, it suddenly burst out at Thagaste.

Augustin came back to his parents, no doubt during the vacation. But
this vacation lasted perhaps a whole year. He had come to the end of his
juvenile studies. The grammarians at Madaura could teach him nothing more.
To round off his acquirements, it would be necessary to attend the lectures
of some well-known rhetorician. Now there were very good rhetoricians only
at Carthage. Besides, it was a fashion, and point of honour, for Numidian
families to send their sons to finish their education in the provincial
capital. Patricius was most eager to do this for his son, who at Madaura
had shewn himself a very brilliant pupil and ought not therefore to be
pulled up half-way down the course. But the life of a student cost a good
deal, and Patricius had no money. His affairs were always muddled. He was
obliged to wait for the rents from his farms, to grind down his tenants,
and, ultimately, despairing of any other way out of it, to ask for an
advance of money from a rich patron. That needed time and diplomacy.

Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with
easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of
life, like all the young townsmen of Thagaste--pleasures rather rough and
little various, such as were to be got in a little free-town of those days,
and as they have remained for the natives of to-day, whether they live
a town or country life. To hunt, to ride horseback, to play at games of
chance, to drink, eat, and make love--they wanted nothing beyond that. When
Augustin in his _Confessions_ accuses himself of his youthful escapades he
uses the most scathing language. He speaks of them with horror and disgust.
Once more we are tempted to believe that he exaggerates through an excess
of Christian remorse. There are even some who, put on their guard by this
vehement tone, have questioned the historical value of the _Confessions_.
They argue that when the Bishop of Hippo wrote these things his views and
feelings had altered. He could no longer judge with the same eye and in
the same spirit the happenings of his youth. All this is only too certain:
when he wrote, it was as a Christian he judged himself, and not as a cold
historian who refuses to go beyond the brutal fact. He tried to unravel
the origin and to trace the consequences of the humblest of his actions,
because this is of the highest importance for salvation. But however severe
his judgment may be, it does not impair the reality of the fact itself.
Moreover, in natures like his, acts which others would hardly think of
have a vibration out of all proportion with the act itself. The evil of sin
depends upon the consciousness of the sin and the pleasure taken in it.
Augustin was very intelligent and very sensual.

In any case, young Africans develop early, and the lechery of the race
is proverbial. It must have been a good deal stronger at a time when
Christianity still had to fight against pagan slackness in these matters,
ere Islam had imposed its hypocritical austerity upon the general conduct.
There is even room for wonder that in Augustin's case this crisis of
development did not happen earlier than his sixteenth year. It seems that
it was only more violent. In what language he describes it! "I dared to
roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade. " But he
was not yet in love--this he points out himself. In his case then it was
simple lust. "From the quagmire of concupiscence, from the well of puberty,
exhaled a mist which clouded and befogged my heart, so that I could not
distinguish between the clear shining of affection and the darkness of
lust. . . . I could not keep within the kingdom of light, where friendship
binds soul to soul. . . . And so I polluted the brook of friendship with the
sewage of lust. " Let us not try to make it clearer than he has left it
himself. When one thinks of all the African vices, one dare not dwell upon
such avowals. "Lord," he says, "I was loathsome in Thy sight. " And with
pitiless justice he analyses the effect of the evil: "It stormed confusedly
within me, whirling my thoughtless youth over the precipices of desire. And
I wandered still further from Thee, and Thou didst leave me to myself; the
torrent of my fornications tossed and swelled and boiled and ran over. " And
during this time: "Thou saidst nothing, O my God! " This silence of God is
the terrible sign of hardened sin, of hopeless damnation. It meant utter
depravity of the will; he did not even feel remorse any more.

Here he is, then, as if unfastened from his child's soul--separated from
himself. The object of his youthful faith has no more meaning for him. He
understands no longer, and it is all one to him that he does not. Thus,
told by himself, does this first crisis of Augustin's life emerge from the
autobiography; and it takes on a general significance. Once for all, under
a definite form, and to a certain degree classic, he has diagnosed with
his subtle experience of doctor of souls the pubescent crisis in all young
men of his age, in all the young Christians who are to come after him. For
the story of Augustin is the story of each of us. The loss of faith always
occurs when the senses first awaken. At this critical moment, when nature
claims us for her service, the consciousness of spiritual things is, in
most cases, either eclipsed or totally destroyed. The gradual usage to the
brutalities of the instinct ends by killing the sensitiveness of the inward
feelings. It is not reason which turns the young man from God; it is the
flesh. Scepticism but provides him with excuses for the new life he is
leading.

Thus started, Augustin was not able to pull up half-way on the road of
pleasure; he never did anything by halves. In these vulgar revels of the
ordinary wild youth, he wanted again to be best, he wanted to be first as
he was at school. He stirred up his companions and drew them after him.
They in their turn drew him. Among them was found that Alypius, who was the
friend of all his life, who shared his faults and mistakes, who followed
him even in his conversion, and became Bishop of Thagaste. These two future
shepherds of Christ roamed the streets with the lost sheep. They spent
the nights in the open spaces of the town, playing, or wantonly dreaming
before cups of cool drinks. They lounged there, stretched out on mats, with
a crown of leaves on the head, a jasmine garland round the neck, a rose
or marigold thrust above the ear. They never knew what to do next to kill
time. So one fine evening the reckless crew took it into their heads to
rifle a pear tree of one of Patricius's neighbours. This pear tree was just
beyond the vineyard belonging to Augustin's father. The rascals shook down
the pears. They took a few bites to find out the taste, and having decided
this to be rather disappointing, they chucked all the rest to the hogs.

In this theft, done merely for the pleasure of the thing, Augustin sees
an evidence of diabolical mischief. Doubtless he committed many another
misdeed where, like this, the whole attraction lay in the Satanic joy
of breaking the law. His fury for dissolute courses knew no rest. Did
Monnica observe anything of this change in Augustin? The boy, grown big,
had escaped from the supervision of the women's apartments. If the mother
guessed anything, she did not guess all. It fell to her husband to open her
eyes. With the freedom of manners among the ancients, Augustin relates the
fact quite plainly. . . .