No More Learning

Perhaps he
regretted the marriage. What use had he for this nun alongside of him!
Both of them must have suffered the usual annoyances which always appeared
before long in unions of this kind between pagan and Christian. True, it
was no longer the time of Tertullian, the heroic century of persecutions,
when the Christian women glided into the prisons to kiss the shackles of
the martyrs. (What a revenge did woman take then for her long and enforced
confinement to the women's apartments! And how outrageous such conduct must
have seemed to a husband brought up in the Roman way! ) But the practices
of the Christian life established a kind of intermittent divorce between
husbands and wives of different religion. Monnica often went out, either
alone, or accompanied by a faithful bondwoman. She had to attend the
services of the Church, to go about the town visiting the poor and giving
alms. And there were the fast-days which occurred two or three times a
week, and especially the long fast of Lent--a grievous nuisance when the
husband wanted to give a dinner-party just on those particular days! On
the vigil of festivals, Monnica would spend a good part of the night in
the Basilica. Regularly, doubtless on Sundays, she betook herself to the
cemetery, or to some chapel raised to the memory of a martyr who was often
buried there--in fact, they called these chapels "Memorials" (_memoriæ_).

There were many of these chapels--even too many in the opinion of austere
Christians. Monnica went from one to another carrying in a large basket
made of willow branches some pieces of minced meat, bread, and wine mixed
with water. She met her friends in these places. They would sit down around
the tombs, of which some were shaped like tables, unpack the provisions,
and eat and drink piously in honour of the martyr. This was a residue
of pagan superstition among the Christians. These pious _agapæ_, or
love-feasts, often turned into disgusting orgies. When Augustin became
Bishop of Hippo he had considerable trouble to get his people out of the
habit of them. Notwithstanding his efforts, the tradition still lasts.
Every Friday the Muslem women keep up the custom of visiting the cemeteries
and the marabouts. Just as in the time of St. Monnica, they sit around the
tombs, so cool with their casing of painted tiles, in the shade of the
cypress and eucalyptus. They gobble sweetmeats, they gossip, they laugh,
they enjoy themselves--the husbands are not there.

Monnica made these visits in a really pious state of mind, and was far
from trying to find in them opportunities for lewdness or carouse. She was
content to drink a little wine very carefully--she always bore in mind her
youthful sin. Besides, this wine weakened with water that she brought from
the house, was tepid by the time she reached the cemetery; it would be a
drink of very moderate relish, little likely to stimulate the senses. She
distributed what was left of it among the needy, together with the contents
of her basket, and came back modestly to her house.

But however staid and reserved she might be, still these outings gave rise
to scandalous talk. They annoyed a suspicious husband. All the Africans are
that. Marital jealousy was not invented by Islam. Moreover, in Monnica's
time men and women took part in these funeral love-feasts and mingled
together disturbingly. Patricius got cross about it, and about a good many
other things too. His old mother chafed his suspicions by carrying to
him the ugly gossip and even the lies of the servants about his wife. By
dint of patience and mildness and attentions, Monnica ended by disarming
her mother-in-law and making it clear that her conduct was perfect. The
old woman flew into a rage with the servants who had lied to her, and
denounced them to her son. Patricius, like a good head of a household, had
them whipped to teach them not to lie any more. Thanks to this exemplary
punishment, and the good sense of the young wife, peace reigned once more
in the family.

Women, friends of Monnica, were amazed that the good understanding was
not oftener upset, at least in an open manner, between husband and wife.
Everybody in Thagaste knew the quick-tempered and violent character of
Patricius. And yet there were no signs that he beat his wife. Nor did
any one say he did. Other women who had less passionate husbands were
nevertheless beaten by them. When they came to Monnica's house they shewed
her the marks of the whacks they had got, their faces swollen from blows,
and they burst out in abuse of men, clamouring against their lechery,
which, said these matrons, was the cause of the ill-treatment they had to
endure.

"Blame your own tongue," retorted Monnica.

According to her, women should close their eyes to the infidelities of
their husbands and avoid arguing with them when they were angry. Silence,
submissiveness, were the all-powerful arms. And since, as a young woman,
she had a certain natural merriment, she added, laughing:

"Remember what was read to you on your wedding-day. You were told that you
are the handmaids of your husbands. Don't rebel against your masters! . . . "

Possibly this was a keen criticism of the pagan code, so hard in its rules.
Still, in this matter, the Roman law was in agreement with the Gospel.
Sincere Christian as she was, the wife of Patricius never had any quarrel
with him on account of his infidelities. So much kindness and resignation
touched the dissolute and brutal husband, who besides was an excellent
man and warm-hearted. The modesty of his wife, after a while, made her
attractive in his eyes. He loved her, so to speak, on the strength of
his respect and admiration for her. He would indeed have been a churl to
find fault with a wife who interfered with him so little and who was a
perfect housekeeper, as we shall see later on when we come to her life at
Cassicium. In one point, where even she did not intend it, she forwarded
the interests of her husband by gaining him the good-will of the Christians
in Thagaste; while he, on his side, could say to the pagans who looked
askance at his marriage: "Am I not one of yourselves? "

In spite of all the differences between him and Monnica, Patricius was a
contented husband.




III

THE COMFORT OF THE MILK


Augustin came into this world the thirteenth of November of the year of
Christ 354.

It was just one little child more in this sensual and pleasure-loving
Africa, land of sin and of carnal productiveness, where children are
born and die like the leaves. But the son of Monnica and Patricius was
predestined: he was not to die in the cradle like so many other tiny
Africans.

Even if he had not been intended for great things, if he had been only a
head in the crowd, the arrival of this baby ought, all the same, to affect
us, for to the Christian, the destiny of the obscurest and humblest of
souls is a matter of importance. Forty years afterwards, Augustin, in his
_Confessions_, pondered this slight ordinary fact of his birth, which
happened almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Thagaste, and in truth it
seems to him a great event, not because it concerns himself, bishop and
Father of the Church, but because it is a soul which at this imperceptible
point of time comes into the world.

Let us clearly understand Augustin's thought. Souls have been ransomed by a
Victim of infinite value. They have themselves an infinite value. Nothing
which goes on in them can be ignored. Their most trifling sins, their
feeblest stirrings towards virtue, are vital for the eternity of their lot.
All shall be attributed to them by the just Judge. The theft of an apple
will weigh perhaps as heavily in the scales as the seizure of a province
or a kingdom. The evil of sin is in the evil intention. Now the fate
of a soul, created by God, on Him depends. Hence everything in a human
life assumes an extreme seriousness and importance. In the history of a
creature, all is worthy of being examined, weighed, studied, and perhaps
also, for the edification of others, told.

Here is an altogether new way of regarding life, and, proceeding from that,
of understanding art. Even as the slaves, thanks to Christianity, came into
the spiritual city, so the most minute realities by this outlook are to be
included in literature. The _Confessions_ will be the first model of the
art of the new era. A deep and magnificent realism, because it goes even
to the very depths of the divine--utterly distinct, at any rate, from
our surface realism of mere amusement--is about to arise from this new
conception. Without doubt, in Augustin's eyes, beauty dwells in all things,
in so far forth as beauty is a reflection of the order and the thought
of the Word. But it has also a more essential character--it has a moral
signification and value. Everything, in a word, can be the instrument of
the loss or the redemption of a soul. The most insignificant of our actions
reverberates to infinitude on our fate. Regarded from this point, both
things and beings commence to live a life more closely leagued together and
at the same time more private; more individual and more general. All is in
the lump, and nevertheless all is separate. Our salvation concerns only
ourselves, and yet through charity it becomes involved with the salvation
of our fellows.

In this spirit let us look at the cradle of Augustin. Let us look at it
with the eyes of Augustin himself, and also, perchance, of Monnica. Bending
over the frail body of the little child he once was, he puts to himself
all the great desperate questions which have shaken humanity for thousands
of years. The mystery of life and death rises before him, formidable. It
tortures him to the point of anguish, of confusion: "Yet suffer me to speak
before Thy mercy, me who am but dust and ashes. Yea, suffer me to speak,
for, behold, I speak not to man who scorns me, but to Thy mercy. Even Thou
perhaps dost scorn me, but Thou wilt turn and have pity. For what is it
that I would say, O Lord my God, save that I know not whence I came hither
into this dying life, shall I call it, or living death? . . . And, lo, my
infancy has long been dead, and I live. But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest
and in whom nothing ever dies--tell me, I beseech Thee, O God, and have
mercy on my misery, tell me whether another life of mine died before my
infancy began. "

One is reminded here of Pascal's famous prosopopoeia: "I know not who
has put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor myself. I am in a
terrible ignorance about everything. . . . All I know is that I must soon die,
but what I know least of all is this very death which I cannot escape. "

The phrases of the _Pensées_ are only the echo of the phrases of the
_Confessions_. But how different is the tone! Pascal's charge against human
ignorance is merciless. The God of Port-Royal has the hard and motionless
face of the ancient Destiny: He withdraws into the clouds, and only shews
Himself at the end to raise up His poor creature. In Augustin the accent
is tender, trusting, really like a son, and though he be harassed, one can
discern the thrill of an unconquerable hope. Instead of crushing man under
the iron hand of the Justice-dealer, he makes him feel the kindness of the
Father who has got all ready, long before its birth, for the feeble little
child: "The comforts of Thy pity received me, as I have heard from the
father and mother of my flesh. . . . And so the comfort of woman's milk was
ready for me. For my mother and my nurses did not fill their own bosoms,
but Thou, O Lord, by their means gavest me the food of infancy, according
to Thy ordinance. . . . "

And see! his heart overflows at this remembrance of his mother's milk. The
great doctor humbles his style, makes it simple and familiar, to tell us of
his first mewlings, and of his baby angers and joys. He too was a father;
he knew what is a new-born child, and a young mother who gives it suck,
because he had seen that with his own eyes close beside him. All the small
bothers which mingle with the pleasures of fatherhood he had experienced
himself. In his own son he studied himself.

* * * * *

This child, born of a Christian mother, and who was to become the great
defender of the faith, was not christened at his birth. In the early
Church, and especially in the African Church, it was not usual to do so.
The baptismal day was put as far off as possible, from the conviction that
the sins committed after the sacrament were much more serious than those
which went before. The Africans, very practical folk, clearly foresaw that
they would sin again even after baptism, but they wanted to sin at a better
rate, and lessen the inflictions of penance. This penance in Augustin's
time was far from being as hard as in the century before. Nevertheless, the
remembrance of the old severity always remained, and the habit was taken to
put off baptism so as not to discourage sinners overmuch.

Monnica, always sedulous to conform with the customs of her country and
the traditions of her Church, fell in with this practice. Perhaps she may
have had also the opposition of her husband to face, for he being a pagan
would not have cared to give too many pledges to the Christians, nor to
compromise himself in the eyes of his fellow-pagans by shewing that he
was so far under the control of Christian zealots as to have his child
baptized out of the ordinary way. There was a middle course, and this was
to inscribe the child among the catechumens. According to the rite of the
first admission to the lowest order of catechumens, the sign of the cross
was made on Augustin's forehead, and the symbolic salt placed between his
lips. And so they did not baptize him. Possibly this affected his whole
life. He lacked the baptismal modesty. Even when he was become a bishop, he
never quite cast off the old man that had splashed through all the pagan
uncleannesses. Some of his words are painfully broad for chaste ears. The
influence of African conditions does not altogether account for this. It is
only too plain that the son of Patricius had never known entire virginity
of soul.

They named him Aurelius Augustinus. Was Aurelius his family name? We cannot
tell. The Africans always applied very fantastically the rules of Roman
nomenclature. Anyhow, this name was common enough in Africa. The Bishop of
Carthage, primate of the province and a friend of Augustin, was also called
Aurelius. Pious commentators have sought to find in this name an omen of
Augustin's future renown as an orator. They have remarked that the word
_aurum_, gold, is contained in Aurelius--a prophetic indication of the
golden mouth of the great preacher of Hippo.

Meanwhile, he was a baby like any other baby, who only knew, as he tells
us, how to take his mother's breast. However, he speaks of nurses who
suckled him; no doubt these were servants or slaves of the household.
They gave him their milk, like those Algerian women who, to-day, if their
neighbour is called away, take her child and feed it. Besides, with them
children are weaned much later than with us. You can see mothers sitting at
their doors put down their work and call to a child of two or three playing
in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember
these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they
made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer.
The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the
servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the
populace and small trader class. He learned Punic without thinking about
it, in playing with other children of Thagaste, just as the sons of our
colonists learn Arab in playing with little boys who wear chechias on their
heads.

He is a Christian, a bishop, already a venerated Father, consulted by the
whole Catholic world, and he tells us all that. He tells it in a serious
and contrite way, with a manifest anxiety to attribute to God, as the sole
cause, all the benefits which embellished his childhood, as well as to
deplore his faults and wretchedness, fatal consequence of the original
Fall. And still, we can make out clearly that these suave and far-off
memories have a charm for him which he cannot quite guard himself against.
The attitude of the author of the _Confessions_ is ambiguous and a little
constrained. The father who has loved his child, who has joined in his
games, struggles in him against the theologian who later on was to uphold
the doctrine of Grace against the heretics. He feels that he must shew, not
only that Grace is necessary for salvation and that little children ought
to be baptized, but that they are capable of sinning. Yes, the children sin
even at nurse. And Augustin relates this story of a baby that he had seen:
"I know, because I have seen, jealousy in a babe. It could not speak, yet
it eyed its foster-brother _with pale cheeks and looks of hate_. " Children
are already men. The egoism and greediness of the grown man may be already
descried in the newly born.

However, the theologian of Grace was not able to drive from his mind
this verse of the Gospel: _Sinite ad me parvulos venire_--"Suffer little
children to come unto Me. " But he interprets this in a very narrow sense,
luring it into an argument which furthers his case. For him, the small
height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can
enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to
take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from
their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness for
symbols, favoured.

Well, let us dare to say it: Augustin goes wrong here. Such is the penalty
of human thought, which in its justest statements always wounds some
truth less clear or mutilates some tender sentiment. Radically, Augustin
is right. The child is wicked as man is. We know it. But against the
relentlessness of the theologian we place the divine gentleness of Christ:
"Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of
God. "




IV

THE FIRST GAMES


"I loved to play," Augustin says, in telling us of those far-off years.

Is it surprising if this quick and supple intelligence, who mastered
without effort, and as if by instinct, the encyclopædic knowledge of his
age, who found himself at his ease amidst the deepest abstractions, did, at
the beginning, take life as a game?

The amusements of the little Africans of to-day are not very many, nor very
various either. They have no inventive imagination. In this matter their
French playfellows have taught them a good deal. If they play marbles, or
hopscotch, or rounders, it is in imitation of the _Roumis_. And yet they
are great little players. Games of chance attract them above all. At these
they spend hour after hour, stretched out flat on their stomachs in some
shady corner, and they play with an astonishing intensity of passion. All
their attention is absorbed in what they are about; they employ on the game
all the cunning of their wits, precociously developed, and so soon stuck
fast in material things.

When Augustin recalls the games of his childhood, he only mentions "nuts,"
handball, and birds. To capture a bird, that winged, light, and brilliant
thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth. But in
Africa, where there are plenty of birds, big people as well as little
love them. In the Moorish cafés, in the wretchedest _gourbis_, cages made
of reeds are hung on the walls, all rustling with trills and fluttering
of wings.
Quail, thrushes, nightingales are imprisoned in them. The
nightingale, the singing-bird beyond all others, so difficult to tame, is
the honoured guest, the privileged dweller in these rustic cages. With
the rose, he is an essential part of Arab poetry. The woods round about
Thagaste were full of nightingales. Not the least doubt that the child
Augustin had felt the little musical throats of these singing-birds throb
between his hands. His sermons, his heaviest treatises, have a recollection
of them. He draws from them an evidence in favour of the creating Word who
has put beauty and harmony everywhere. In the song of the nightingale he
finds, as it were, an echo of the music of the spheres.

If he loved birds, as a poet who knows not that he is a poet, did he love
as well to play at "nuts"? "Nuts," or thimble-rigging, is only a graceful
and crafty game, too crafty for a dreaming and careless little boy. It
calls for watchfulness and presence of mind. Grown men play at it as well
as children. A step of a staircase is used as a table by the players, or
the pavement of a courtyard. Three shells are laid on the stone and a
dried pea. Then, with rapid baffling movements, hands brown and alert fly
from one shell to another, shuffle them, mix them up, juggle the dried
pea sometimes under this shell, sometimes under that,--and the point is
to guess which shell the pea has got under. By means of certain astute
methods, an artful player can make the pea stick to his fingers, or to the
inside of the shell, and the opponent loses every time. They cheat with a
calm shamelessness. Augustin cheated too--which did not prevent him from
bitterly denouncing the cheating of his fellow-players.

The truth is, that he would not have quite belonged to his country if he
had not lied and stolen now and then. He lied to his tutor and to his
schoolmasters. He stole at his parents' table, in the kitchen, and in the
cellar. But he stole like a man of quality, to make presents and to win
over his playfellows: he ruled the other boys by his presents--a noteworthy
characteristic in this future ruler of souls. Morals like these, a little
rough, shape free and bold natures. Those African children were much less
coddled, much less scolded, than to-day. Monnica had something else to do
than to look after the boys. So for them it was a continual life in the
open air, which makes the body strong and hard. Augustin and his companions
should be pictured as young wild-cats.

This roughness came out strong at games of ball, and generally at all
the games in which there are two sides, conquerors and prisoners, or
fights with sticks and stones. Stone-throwing is an incurable habit
among the little Africans. 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?