No More Learning

Just like the
Carthaginian jockeys, Augustin had recourse to these hidden and fraudulent
practices, to make sure of success. On the eve of a verse competition in
the theatre, he fell in with a wizard who offered, if they could agree
about the price, to sacrifice a certain number of animals to buy the
victory. Upon this, Augustin, very much annoyed, declared that if the prize
were a crown of immortal gold, not a fly should be sacrificed to help him
win it. Really, magic was repellent to the honesty of his mind, as well
as to his nerves, by reason of the suspicious and brutal part of its
operations. As a rule, it was involved with haruspicy, and had a side of
sacred anatomy and the kitchen which revolted the sensitive--dissection
of flesh, inspection of entrails, not to mention the slaughtering and
strangling of victims. Fanatics, such as Julian, gave themselves up with
delight to these disgusting manipulations. What we know of Augustin's soul
makes it quite clear why he recoiled with horror.

Astrology, on the contrary, attracted him by its apparent science. Its
adepts called themselves "mathematicians," and thus seemed to borrow from
the exact sciences something of their solidity. Augustin often discussed
astrology with a Carthage physician, Vindicianus, a man of great sense
and wide learning, who even reached Proconsular honours. In vain did he
point out to the young rhetorician that the pretended prophecies of the
mathematicians were the effect of chance; in vain did Nebridius, less
credulous than his friend, join his arguments to those of the crafty
physician; Augustin clung obstinately to his chimera. His dialectical mind
discovered ingenious justifications for what the astrologers claimed.

Thus, dazzled by all the intellectual phantasms, he strayed from one
science to another, repeating meanwhile in his heart the motto of his
Manichean masters: "The Truth, the Truth! ". But whatever might be the
attractions of the speculative life, he had first to face the needs of
actual life. The sight of his child called him back to a sense of his
position. To get money, and for that purpose to push himself forward, put
himself in evidence, increase his reputation--Augustin worked at that as
hard as he could. It led him to enter for the prize of dramatic poetry.
He was declared the winner. His old friend, the physician Vindicianus, who
was then Proconsul, placed the crown, as he says, upon his "disordered
head. " The future Father of the Church writing for the theatre--and what a
theatre it was then! --is not the least extraordinary thing in this life so
disturbed and, at first sight, so contradictory.

It was also from literary ambition that about the same time he wrote a book
on æsthetics called _Upon the Beautiful and the Fit_, which he dedicated to
a famous colleague, the Syrian Hierius, "orator to the City of Rome," one
of the professors of the official education appointed either by the Roman
municipality or the Imperial treasury. This Levantine rhetorician had an
immense success in the capital of the Empire. His renown had got beyond
academical and fashionable circles and crossed the sea. Augustin admired
him on trust, like everybody else. It is clear that, at this time he could
not imagine a more glorious fortune for himself than to become, like
Hierius, orator to the City of Rome. Later in life, the Bishop of Hippo,
while condemning the vanity of his youthful ambitions, must have made some
extremely ironical reflections as to their modesty. How mistaken he was
about himself! An Augustin had dreamed of equalling one day this obscure
pedagogue, of whom nobody, save for him, would ever have spoken again. Men
of instinct, like Augustin, continually go wrong in this way about their
object and the means to employ. But their mistakes are only in appearance.
A will stronger than their own leads them, by mysterious ways, whither they
ought to go.

This first book of Augustin's is lost, and we are unable to say whether
there be any reason to regret it. He himself recalls it to us in a very
indifferent tone and rather vague terms. It would seem, however, that his
æsthetic had a basis of Manichean metaphysics. But what is significant for
us, in this youthful essay, is that the first time Augustin wrote as an
author it was to define and to praise Beauty. He did not yet know, at least
not directly from the text, the dialogues of Plato, and he is already
inclined to Platonism. He was this by nature. His Christianity will be a
religion all of light and beauty. For him, the supreme Beauty is identical
with the supreme Love. "Do we love anything," he used to say to his
friends, "except what is beautiful? " _Num amamus aliquid, nisi pulchrum? _
Again, at the end of his life, when he strives in _The City of God_ to
make clear for us the dogma of the resurrection of the body, he thinks our
bodies shall rise free from all earthly flaws, in all the splendour of the
perfect human type. Nothing of the body will be lost. It will keep all its
limbs and all its organs _because they are beautiful_. One recognizes in
this passage, not only the Platonist, but the traveller and art-lover, who
had gazed upon some of the finest specimens of ancient statuary.

This first book had hardly any success. Augustin does not even say whether
the celebrated Hierius paid him a compliment about it, and he has an air
of giving us to understand that he had no other admirer but himself. New
disappointments, more serious mortifications, changed little by little his
state of mind and his plans for the future. He was obliged to acknowledge
that after years of effort he was scarcely more advanced than at the start.
There was no chance to delude himself with vain pretences: it was quite
plain to everybody that the rhetorician Augustin was not a success. Now,
why was this? Was it that he lacked the gift of teaching? Perhaps he had
not the knack of keeping order, which is the most indispensable of all
for a schoolmaster. What suited him best no doubt was a small and select
audience which he charmed rather than ruled. Large and noisy classes he
could not manage. At Carthage, these rhetoric classes were particularly
difficult to keep in order, because the students were more rowdy than
elsewhere. At any moment "The Wreckers" might burst in and make a row.
Augustin, who had not joined in these "rags" when he was a student, saw
himself obliged to endure them as a professor. He had nothing worse to
complain of than his fellow-professors, in whose classes the same kind of
disturbance took place. That was the custom and, in a manner of speaking,
the rule in the Carthage schools. For all that, a little more authoritative
bearing would not have harmed him in the eyes of these disorderly boys. But
he had still graver defects for a professor who wants to get on: he was not
a schemer, and he could not make the most of himself.

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.

While she slept, Augustin went stealthily on board. The silence and the
tempered splendour of the night weighed him down. Sometimes the cry of the
sailors on watch took a strange note in the lustrous vaporous spaces. The
Gulf of Carthage gleamed far off under the scintillation of the stars,
under the palpitating of a milky way all white like the flowers of the
garden of Heaven. But Augustin's heart was heavy, heavier than the air
weighted by the heat and sea-damp--heavy from the lie and the cruelty he
had just committed. He saw already the awakening and sorrow of his mother.
His conscience was troubled, overcome by remorse and forebodings. . . .
Meanwhile, his friends tried to cheer him, and urged him to have courage
and hope. Marcianus, while embracing him, reminded him of the verses of
Terence:

"This day which brings to thee another life
Demands that thou another man shalt be. "

Augustin smiled sadly. At last the ship began to move. The wind had risen,
the wind of the grand voyage which was bearing him to the unknown. . . .
Suddenly, at the keen freshness of the open sea, he thrilled. His strength
and confidence rushed back. To go away!
What enchantment for all those who
cannot fasten themselves to a corner of the earth, who know by instinct
that they belong _elsewhere_, who always pass "as strangers and as
pilgrims," and who go away with relief, as if they cast a burthen behind
them. Augustin was of those people--of those who, among the fairest
attractions of the Road, never cease to think of the Return. But he knew
not where God was leading him. Marcianus was right: a new life was really
beginning for him; only it was not the life that either of them hoped for.

He who departed as a rhetorician, to sell words, was to come back as an
apostle, to conquer souls.




THE THIRD PART

THE RETURN


Et ecce ibi es in corde eorum, in corde confitentium tibi, et
projicientium se in te, et plorantium in sinu tuo, post vias suas
difficiles.

"And behold! Thou art there in their hearts, in the hearts of
that confess to Thee, and cast themselves upon Thee, and sob upon Thy
breast, after their weary ways. "

_Confessions_, V, 2.




I

THE CITY OF GOLD


Augustin fell ill just after he got to Rome. It would seem that he arrived
there towards the end of August or beginning of September, before the
students reassembled, just at the time of heat and fevers, when all Romans
who could leave the city fled to the summer resorts on the coast.

Like all the great cosmopolitan centres at that time, Rome was unhealthy.
The diseases of the whole earth, brought by the continual inflow of
foreigners, flourished there. Accordingly, the inhabitants had a panic fear
of infection, like our own contemporaries. People withdrew prudently from
those suffering from infectious disorders, who were left to their unhappy
fate. If, from a sense of shame, they sent a slave to the patient's
bedside, he was ordered to the sweating-rooms, and there disinfected from
head to foot, before he could enter the house again.

Augustin must have had at least the good luck to be well looked after,
since he recovered. He had gone to the dwelling of one of his Manichee
brethren, an _auditor_ like himself, and an excellent kind of man, whom he
stayed with all the time he was in Rome. Still, he had such a bad attack of
fever that he very nearly died. "I was perishing," he says; "and I was all
but lost. " He is frightened at the idea of having seen death so near, at a
moment when he was so far from God--so far, in fact, that it never occurred
to him to ask for baptism, as he had done, in like case, when he was
little. What a desperate blow would that have been for Monnica! He still
shudders when he recalls the danger: "Had my mother's heart been smitten
with that wound, it never could have been healed. _For I cannot express
her tender love towards me_, or with how far greater anguish she travailed
of me now in the spirit, than when she bore me in the flesh. " But Monnica
prayed. Augustin was saved. He ascribes his recovery to the fervent prayers
of his mother, who, in begging of God the welfare of his soul, obtained,
without knowing it, the welfare of his body.

As soon as he was convalescent, he had to set to work to get pupils. He was
obliged to ask the favours of many an important personage, to knock at many
an inhospitable door. This unfortunate beginning, the almost mortal illness
which he was only just recovering from, this forced drudgery--all that did
not make him very fond of Rome. It seems quite plain that he never liked
it, and till the end of his life he kept a grudge against it for the sorry
reception it gave him. In the whole body of his writings it is impossible
to find a word of praise for the beauty of the Eternal City, while, on
the contrary, one can make out through his invectives against the vices
of Carthage, his secret partiality for the African Rome. The old rivalry
between the two cities was not yet dead after so many centuries. In
his heart, Augustin, like a good Carthaginian--and because he was a
Carthaginian--did not like Rome.

The most annoying things joined together as if on purpose to disgust him
with it. The bad season of the year was nigh when he began to reside there.
Autumn rains had started, and the mornings and evenings were cold. What
with his delicate chest, and his African constitution sensitive to cold,
he must have suffered from this damp cold climate. Rome seemed to him a
northern city. With his eyes still full of the warm light of his country,
and the joyous whiteness of the Carthage streets, he wandered as one exiled
between the gloomy Roman palaces, saddened by the grey walls and muddy
pavements. Comparisons, involuntary and continual, between Carthage and
Rome, made him unjust to Rome. In his eyes it had a hard, self-conscious,
declamatory look, and gazing at the barren Roman _campagna_, he remembered
the laughing Carthage suburbs, with gardens, villas, vineyards, olivets,
circled everywhere by the brilliance of the sea and the lagoons.

And then, besides, Rome could not be a very delightful place to live in for
a poor rhetoric master come there to better his fortune. Other strangers
before him had complained of it. Always to be going up and down the flights
of steps and the ascents, often very steep, of the city of the Seven Hills;
to be rushing between the Aventine and Sallust's garden, and thence to
the Esquiline and Janiculum! To bruise the feet on the pointed cobbles of
sloping alley-ways! These walks were exhausting, and there seemed to be no
end to this city. Carthage was also large--as large almost as Rome. But
there Augustin was not seeking employment. When he went for a walk there,
he strolled. Here, the bustle of the crowds, and the number of equipages,
disturbed and exasperated the southerner with his lounging habits. Any
moment there was a risk of being run over by cars tearing at full gallop
through the narrow streets: men of fashion just then had a craze for
driving fast. Or again, the passenger was obliged to step aside so
that some lady might go by in her litter, escorted by her household,
from the handicraft slaves and the kitchen staff, to the eunuchs and
house-servants--all this army manoeuvring under the orders of a leader who
held a rod in his hand, the sign of his office. When the street became
clear once more, and at last the palace of the influential personage
to whom a visit had to be paid was reached, there was no admittance
without greasing the knocker. In order to be presented to the master,
it was necessary to buy the good graces of the slave who took the name
(_nomenclator_), and who not only introduced the suppliant, but might, with
a word, recommend or injure. Even after all these precautions, one was not
yet sure of the goodwill of the patron. Some of these great lords, who were
not always themselves sprung from old Roman families, prided themselves
upon their uncompromising nationalism, and made a point of treating
foreigners with considerable haughtiness. The Africans were regarded
unfavourably in Rome, especially in Catholic circles. Augustin must have
had an unpleasant experience of this.

Through the long streets, brilliantly lighted at evening (it would seem
that the artificial lighting of Rome almost equalled the daylight), he
would return tired out to the dwelling of his host, the Manichee. This
dwelling, according to an old tradition, was in the Velabrum district, in
a street which is still to-day called _Via Greca_, and skirts the very old
church of Santa Maria-in-Cosmedina--a poor quarter where swarmed a filthy
mass of Orientals, and where the immigrants from the Levantine countries,
Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, lodged. The warehouses on the Tiber
were not very far off, and no doubt there were numbers of labourers,
porters, and watermen living in this neighbourhood. What a place for
him who had been at Thagaste the guest of the magnificent Romanianus,
and intimate with the Proconsul at Carthage! When he had climbed up the
six flights of stairs to his lodging, and crouched shivering over the
ill-burning movable hearth, in the parsimonious light of a small bronze or
earthenware lamp, while the raw damp sweated through the walls, he felt
more and more his poverty and loneliness. He hated Rome and the stupid
ambition which had brought him there. And yet Rome should have made a vivid
appeal to this cultured man, this æsthete so alive to beauty. Although the
transfer of the Court to Milan had drawn away some of its liveliness and
glitter, it was still all illuminated by its grand memories, and never had
it been more beautiful. It seems impossible that Augustin should not have
been struck by it, despite his African prejudices. However well built the
new Carthage might be, it could not pretend to compare with a city more
than a thousand years old, which at all periods of its history had
maintained the princely taste for building, and which a long line of
emperors had never ceased to embellish.

When Augustin landed at Ostia, he saw rise before him, closing the
perspective of the _Via Appia_, the Septizonium of Septimus Severus--an
imitation, doubtless, on a far larger scale, of the one at Carthage. This
huge construction, water-works probably of enormous size, with its ordered
columns placed line above line, was, so to speak, the portico whence opened
the most wonderful and colossal architectural mass known to the ancient
world. Modern Rome has nothing at all to shew which comes anywhere near it.
Dominating the Roman Forum, and the Fora of various Emperors--labyrinths of
temples, basilicas, porticoes, and libraries--the Capitol and the Palatine
rose up like two stone mountains, fashioned and sculptured, under the heap
of their palaces and sanctuaries. All these blocks rooted in the soil,
suspended, and towering up from the flanks of the hills, these interminable
regiments of columns and pilasters, this profusion of precious marbles,
metals, mosaics, statues, obelisks--in all that there was something
enormous, a lack of restraint which disturbed the taste and floored the
imagination. But it was, above all, the excessive use of gold and gilding
that astonished the visitor. Originally indigent, Rome became noted for
its greed of gold. When the gold of conquered nations began to come into
its hands, it spread it all over with the rather indiscreet display of
the upstart. When Nero built the Golden House he realized its dream. The
Capitol had golden doors. Statues, bronzes, the roofs of temples, were all
gilded. All this gold, spread over the brilliant surfaces and angles of
the architecture, dazzled and tired the eyes: _Acies stupet igne metalli_,
said Claudian. For the poets who have celebrated it, Rome is the city of
gold--_aurata Roma_.

A Greek, such as Lucian, had perhaps a right to be shocked by this
architectural debauch, this beauty too crushing and too rich. A Carthage
rhetorician, like Augustin, could feel at the sight of it nothing but the
same irritated admiration and secret jealousy as the Emperor Constans felt
when he visited his capital for the first time.

Even as the Byzantine Cæsar, and all the provincials, Augustin, no doubt,
examined the curiosities and celebrated works which were pointed out to
strangers: the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; the baths of Caracalla and
Diocletian; the Pantheon; the temple of Roma and of Venus; the Place of
Concord; the theatre of Pompey; the Odeum, and the Stadium. Though he might
be stupefied by all this, he would remember, too, all that the Republic
had taken from the provinces to construct these wonders, and would say to
himself: "'Tis we who have paid for them. " In truth, all the world had
been ransacked to make Rome beautiful. For some time a muffled hostility
had been brewing in provincial hearts against the tyranny of the central
power, especially since it had shewn itself incapable of maintaining peace,
and the Barbarians were threatening the frontiers. Worn out by so many
insurrections, wars, massacres, and pillages, the provinces had come to ask
if the great complicated machine of the Empire was worth all the blood and
money that it cost.

For Augustin, moreover, the crisis was drawing near which was to end in his
return to the Catholic faith. He had been a Christian, and as such brought
up in principles of humility. With these sentiments, he would perhaps
decide that the pride and vanity of the creature at Rome claimed far too
much attention, and was even sacrilegious. It was not only the emperors who
disputed the privileges of immortality with the gods, but anybody who took
it into his head, provided that he was rich or had any kind of notoriety.
Amid the harsh and blinding gilt of palaces and temples, how many statues,
how many inscriptions endeavoured to keep an obscure memory green, or the
features of some unknown man! Of course, at Carthage too, where they copied
Rome, as in all the big cities, there were statues and inscriptions in
abundance upon the Forum, the squares, and in the public baths. But what
had not shocked Augustin in his native land, did shock him in a strange
city. His home-sick eyes opened to faults which till then had been veiled
by usage. In any case, this craze for statues and inscriptions prevailed at
Rome more than anywhere else. The number of statues on the Forum became so
inconvenient, that on many occasions certain ones were marked for felling,
and the more insignificant shifted. The men of stone drove out the living
men, and forced the gods into their temples. And the inscriptions on the
walls bewildered the mind with such a noise of human praise, that ambition
could dream of nothing beyond. It was all a kind of idolatry which revolted
the strict Christians; and in Augustin, even at this time, it must have
offended the candour of a soul which detested exaggeration and bombast.

The vices of the Roman people, with whom he was obliged to live cheek by
jowl, galled him still more painfully. And to begin with, the natives hated
strangers. At the theatres they used to shout: "Down with the foreign
residents! " Acute attacks of xenophobia often caused riots in the city.
Some years before Augustin arrived, a panic about the food supply led to
the expulsion, as useless mouths, of all foreigners domiciled in Rome,
even the professors. Famine was an endemic disease there. And then, these
lazy people were always hungry. The gluttony and drunkenness of the Romans
roused the wonder and also the disgust of the sober races of the Empire--of
the Greeks as well as the Africans. They ate everywhere--in the streets, at
the theatre, at the circus, around the temples. The sight was so ignoble,
and the public intemperance so scandalous, that the Prefect, Ampelius, was
obliged to issue an order prohibiting people who had any self-respect from
eating in the street, the keepers of wine-shops from opening their places
before ten o'clock in the morning, and the hawkers from selling cooked meat
in the streets earlier than a certain hour of the day. But he might as well
have saved himself the trouble. Religion itself encouraged this greediness.
The pagan sacrifices were scarcely more than pretexts for stuffing. Under
Julian, who carried the great public sacrifices of oxen to an abusive
extent, the soldiers got drunk and gorged themselves with meat in the
temples, and came out staggering. Then they would seize hold of any
passers-by, whom they forced to carry them shoulder-high to their barracks.

All this must be kept in mind so as to understand the strictness and
unyielding attitude of the Christian reaction. This Roman people, like the
pagans in general, was frightfully material and sensual. The difficulty of
shaking himself free from matter and the senses is going to be the great
obstacle which delays Augustin's conversion; and if it was so with him, a
fastidious and intellectual man, what about the crowd? Those people thought
of nothing but eating and drinking and lewdness. When they left the tavern
or their squalid rooms, they had only the obscenities of mimes, or the
tumbles of the drivers in the circus, or the butcheries in the amphitheatre
to elevate them. They passed the night there under the awnings provided by
the municipality. Their passion for horse-races and actors and actresses,
curbed though it was by the Christian emperors, continued even after
the sack of Rome by the Barbarians. At the time of the famine, when the
strangers were expelled, they excepted from this wholesale banishment three
thousand female dancers with the members of their choirs, and their leaders
of orchestra.

The aristocracy did not manifest tastes much superior. Save a few
cultivated minds, sincerely fond of literature, the greatest number only
saw in the literary pose an easy way of being fashionable. These became
infatuated about an unknown author, or an ancient author whose books were
not to be had. They had these books sought for and beautifully copied.
They, "who hated study like poison," spoke only of their favourite author:
the others did not exist for them. As a matter of fact, music had ousted
literature: "the libraries were closed like sepulchres. " But fashionable
people were interested in an hydraulic organ, and they ordered from the
lute-makers "lyres the size of chariots. " Of course, this musical craze was
sheer affectation. Actually, they were only interested in sports: to race,
to arrange races, to breed horses, to train athletes and gladiators. As a
pastime, they collected Oriental stuffs. Silk was then fashionable, and so
were precious stones, enamels, heavy goldsmiths' work. Rows of rings were
worn on each finger. People took the air in silk robes, held together by
brooches carved in the figures of animals, a parasol in one hand, and a fan
with gold fringes in the other. The costumes and fashions of Constantinople
encroached upon the old Rome and the rest of the Western world.

Immense fortunes, which had gathered in the hands of certain people, either
through inheritance or swindling, enabled them to keep up a senseless
expenditure. Like the American millionaires of to-day, who have their
houses and properties in both hemispheres, these great Roman lords
possessed them in every country in the Empire. Symmachus, who was Prefect
of the City when Augustin was in Rome, had considerable estates not only in
Italy and in Sicily, but even in Mauretania. And yet, in spite of all their
wealth and all the privileges they enjoyed, these rich people were neither
happy nor at ease. At the least suspicion of a despotic power, their lives
and property were threatened. Accusations of magic, of disrespect to
the Cæsar, of plots against the Emperor--any pretext was good to plunder
them. During the preceding reign, that of the pitiless Valentinian, the
Roman nobility had been literally decimated by the executioner. A certain
vice-Prefect, Maximinus, had gained a sinister reputation for cleverness in
the art of manufacturing suspects. By his orders, a basket at the end of a
string was hung out from one of the windows of the Prætorium, into which
denunciations might be cast. The basket was in use day and night.

It is clear that at the time that Augustin settled in Rome this abominable
system was a little moderated. But accusation by detectives was always in
the air. And living in this atmosphere of mistrust, hypocrisy, bribery, and
cruelty--small wonder if the Carthaginian fell into bitter reflections upon
Roman corruption. However impressive from the front, the Empire was not
nice to look at close at hand.

But Augustin was, above all, home-sick. When he strolled tinder the shady
trees of the Janiculum or Sallust's gardens, he already said to himself
what he would repeat later to his listeners at Hippo: "Take an African, put
him in a place cool and green, and he won't stay there. He will feel he
must go away and come back to his blazing desert. " As for himself, he had
something better to regret than a blazing desert. In front of the City of
Gold, stretched out at his feet, and the horizon of the Sabine Hills, he
remembered the feminine softness of the twilights upon the Lake of Tunis,
the enchantment of moonlit nights upon the Gulf of Carthage, and that
astonishing landscape to be discovered from the height of the terrace of
Byrsa, which all the grandeur of the Roman _campagna_ could not make him
forget.




II

THE FINAL DISILLUSION


'The new professor had managed to secure a certain number of pupils whom
he gathered together in his rooms. He could make enough to live at Rome
by himself, if he could not support there the woman and child he had left
behind at Carthage. In this matter of finding work, his host and his
Manichee friends had done him some very good turns. Although forced to
conceal their beliefs since the edict of Theodosius, there were a good many
Manichees in the city. They formed an occult Church, strongly organized,
and its adepts had relations with all classes of Roman society. Possibly
Augustin presented himself as one driven out of Africa by the persecution.
Some compensation would be owing to this young man who had suffered for the
good cause.

It was his friend Alypius, "the brother of his heart," who, having preceded
him to Rome to study law at his parents' wishes, now was the most useful in
helping Augustin to make himself known and find pupils. Himself a Manichee,
converted by Augustin, and a member of one of the leading families in
Thagaste, he had not long to wait for an important appointment in the
Imperial administration. He was assessor to the Treasurer-General, or
"Count of the Italian Bounty Office," and decided fiscal questions. Thanks
to his influence, as well as to his acquaintances among the Manichees, he
was a valuable friend for the new arrival, a friend who could aid him, not
only with his purse, but with advice. Without much capacity for theorizing,
this Alypius was a practical spirit, a straight and essentially honest
soul, whose influence was excellent for his impetuous friend. Of very
chaste habits, he urged Augustin to restraint. And even in abstract
studies, the religious controversies which Augustin dragged him into, his
strong good sense moderated the imaginative dashes, the overmuch subtilty
which sometimes led the other beyond healthy reason.

Unhappily they were both very busy--the judge and the rhetorician--and
although their friendship became still greater during this stay in Rome,
they were not able to see each other as much as they desired. Their
pleasures, too, were perhaps not the same. Augustin did not in the least
care about being chaste, and Alypius had a passion for the amphitheatre--a
passion which his friend disapproved of. Some time earlier, at Carthage,
Augustin had filled him with disgust of the circus. But hardly was Alypius
arrived in Rome, than he became mad about the gladiatorial shows. Some
fellow-students took him to the amphitheatre, almost by force. Thereupon,
he said that he would stay, since they had dragged him there; but he bet
that he would keep his eyes shut all through the fight, and that nothing
could make him open them. He sat down on the benches with those who had
brought him, his eyelids pressed down, refusing to look. Suddenly there was
a roar of shouting, the shout of the crowd hailing the fall of the first
wounded. His lids parted of themselves; he saw the flow of blood. "At the
sight of the blood" says Augustin, "he drank in ruthlessness; no longer
did he turn away, but fixed his gaze, and he became mad--and he knew no
more. . . . He was fascinated by the criminal atrocity of this battle, and
drunk with the pleasure of blood. "

These breathless phrases of the _Confessions_ seem to throb still with the
wild frenzy of the crowd. They convey to us directly the kind of Sadic
excitement which people went to find about the arena. Really, a wholesome
sight for future Christians, for all the souls that the brutality of
pagan customs revolted! The very year that Augustin was at Rome, certain
prisoners of war, Sarmatian soldiers, condemned to kill each other in the
amphitheatre, chose suicide rather than this shameful death. There was in
this something to make him reflect--him and his friends. The fundamental
injustices whereon the ancient world rested--the crushing of the slave
and the conquered, the contempt for human life--these things they touched
with the finger when they looked on at the butcheries in the amphitheatre.
All those whose hearts sickened with disgust and horror before these
slaughter-house scenes, all those who longed for a little more mildness, a
little more justice, were all recruits marked out for the peaceful army of
the Christ.

For Alypius, especially, it was not a bad thing to have known this
blood-drunkenness at first hand: he shall be only the more ashamed when
he falls at the feet of the merciful God. Equally useful was it for him
to have personal experience of the harshness of men's justice; and in the
fulfilment of his duties as a judge to observe its errors and flaws. While
he was a student at Carthage he just escaped being condemned to death upon
a false accusation of theft--the theft of a piece of lead! Already they
were dragging him, if not to the place of capital punishment, at least to
prison, when a chance meeting with a friend of his who was a senator saved
him from the threatening mob. At Rome, while Assessor to the Count of the
Italian Bounty Office, he had to resist an attempt to bribe him, and by
doing so risked losing his appointment, and, no doubt, something worse
too. Official venality and dishonesty were evils so deeply rooted, that
he himself nearly succumbed. He wanted some books copied, and he had the
temptation to get this done at the charge of the Treasury.