No More Learning

"

_Filius istarum lacrymarum_: the son of such tears! . . . Was it indeed the
country bishop, or rather the rhetorician Augustin who, in a burst of
gratitude, hit upon this sublime sentence? Certain it is that later on
Augustin saw in his mother's tears as it were a first baptism whence he
came forth regenerate. After having borne him according to the flesh,
Monnica, by her tears and moans, gave him birth into the spiritual life.
Monnica wept because of Augustin. Monnica wept for Augustin. This is rather
astonishing in the case of so severe a mother--this African a trifle
rough. The expressions--tears and moans and weeping--occur so often in
her son's writings, that we are at first tempted to take them for pious
metaphors--figures of a sacred rhetoric. We suspect that Monnica's tears
must come from the Bible, an imitation of King David's penitential tears.
But it would be quite an error to believe that. Monnica wept real tears.
In her whole-hearted prayers she bedewed the pavement of the basilica; she
moistened the balustrade against which she leant her forehead. This austere
woman, this widow whose face nobody saw any more, whose body was shapeless
by reason of the mass of stuffs, grey and black, which wrapped her from
head to foot--this rigid Christian concealed a heart full of love. Love
such as this was then a perfectly new thing.

That an African woman should carry her piety to the point of fanaticism;
that she should work to conquer her son to her faith; that, if he strayed
from it, she should hate him and drive him out with curses--this has been
seen in Africa at all times. But that a mother should mourn at the thought
that her child is lost for another life; that she grows terror-stricken and
despairing when she thinks that she may possess a happiness in which he
will have no part, and walk in the gardens of Heaven while her child will
not be there--no, this had never been seen before. "Where I am you will
be," near me, against my heart, our two hearts meeting in the one same
love--in this union of souls, continued beyond the grave, lies all the
Christian sweetness and hope.

Augustin was no longer, or not yet, a Christian. But in his tears he is
the true son of his mother. This gift of tears that Saint Lewis of France
begged God with so much earnestness and contrition to grant him, Monnica's
son had to the full. "For him to weep was a pleasure. " [1] He inebriated
himself with his tears. Now, just while he was at Thagaste, he lost a
friend whom he loved intensely. This death set free the fountain of tears.
They are not yet the holy tears which he will shed later before God, but
only poor human tears, more pathetic perhaps to our own weakness.

[Footnote 1: Sainte-Beuve. ]

Who was this friend? He tells us in very vague terms. We only know that
they had grown up as boys together and had gone to the same schools; that
they had just passed a year together, probably at Carthage; that this young
man, persuaded by him, was become a Manichee; and that, in a word, they
loved passionately. Augustin, while speaking of him, recalls in a deeper
sense what Horace said of his friend Virgil: _dimidium animæ_--"O thou half
of my soul! "

Well, this young man fell gravely sick of a fever. As all hope was at an
end, they baptized him, according to the custom. He grew better, was almost
cured, "As soon as I was able to talk to him," says Augustin--"and that was
as soon as he could bear it, for I never left his side, and we were bound
up in one another--I ventured a jest, thinking that he would jest too,
about the baptism which he had received, when he could neither think nor
feel. But by this time he had been told of his baptism. He shrank from
me as from an enemy, and with a wonderful new-found courage, warned me
never to speak so to him again, if I wished to remain his friend. I was
so astounded and confused that I said no more, resolving to wait till
he should regain his strength, _when I would tell him frankly what I
thought_. "

So, at this serious moment, he whom they called "the Carthaginian disputer"
was sorry not to be able to measure himself in a bout of dialectics with
his half-dead friend. The intellectual poison had so perverted his mind,
that it almost destroyed in him the feelings of common decency. But if his
head, as he acknowledges, was very much spoiled, his heart remained intact.
His friend died a few days after, and Augustin was not there. He was
stunned by it.

His grief wrought itself up to wildness and despair. "This sorrow fell like
darkness on my heart, and wherever I looked I saw nothing but death. My
country became a torture, my father's house a misery. All the pleasures
that I had shared with him, turned into hideous anguish now that he was
gone. My eyes sought for him everywhere, and found him not. I hated the
familiar scenes because he was not there, and they could no more cry to
me, 'Lo! he will come. ' as they used when he was absent but alive. . . . "
Then Augustin began to weep louder, he prolonged his weeping, finding
consolation only in tears. Monnica's tenderness was restrained; in him it
was given full vent and exaggerated. At that time, the Christian moderation
was unknown to him, as well as the measure which the good taste of the
ancients prompted. He has often been compared to the most touching
geniuses, to Virgil, to Racine, who had also the gift of tears. But
Augustin's tenderness is more abandoned, and, so to speak, more romantic.
It even works up, sometimes, into an unhealthy excitement.

To be full of feeling, as Augustin was then, is not only to feel with
excessive sensitiveness the least wounds, the slightest touches of love or
hate, nor is it only to give oneself with transport; but it is especially
to take delight in the gift of oneself, to feel at the moment of full
abandonment that one is communicating with something infinitely sweet,
which already has ceased to be the creature loved. It is love for love, it
is to weep for the pleasure of tears, it is to mix with tenderness a kind
of egoism avid of experiences. Having lost his friend, Augustin loathes all
the world. He repeats: "Tears were my only comfort. I was wretched, and
my wretchedness was dear to me. " And accordingly, he did not want to be
consoled. But as, little by little, the terrors of that parting subsided,
he perceived himself that he played with grief and made a joy of his
tears. "My tears," he says, "were dearer to me than my friend had been. "
By degrees the friend is almost forgotten. Though Augustin may hate life
because his friend has gone, he confesses naively that he would not have
sacrificed his existence for the sake of the dead. He surmises that what
is told of Orestes and Pylades contending to die for each other is but a
fable. Ultimately, he comes to write: "Perhaps I feared to die, _lest the
other half of him whom I had loved so dearly, should perish_. " He himself,
in his _Retractations_, condemns this phrase as pure rhetoric. It remains
true that what was perhaps the deepest sorrow of his life--this sorrow so
sincere and painful which had "rent and bloodied his soul"--ended with a
striking phrase.

It should be added, that in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love,
wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does
ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab.
Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable
humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a
rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there
was pressing him to return. Perhaps she told him that she was about to
become a mother. Always ready to go away, Augustin scarcely hesitated.
It is more than likely that he did not consult Monnica. He only told
Romanianus, who, as he had all kinds of reasons for wanting to keep
Augustin at Thagaste, at first strongly objected. But the young man pointed
to his future, his ambition to win fame. Was he going to bury all that in a
little town?

Romanianus yielded, and with a generosity that is no longer seen, he paid
the expenses this time too.




V

THE SILENCE OF GOD


Augustin was going to live nine years at Carthage--nine years that he
squandered in obscure tasks, in disputes sterile or unfortunate for himself
and others--briefly, in an utter forgetfulness of his true vocation. "And
during this time Thou wert silent, O my God! " he cries, in recalling only
the faults of his early youth. Now, the silence of God lay heavy. And yet
even in those years his tormented soul had not ceased to appeal. "Where
wert Thou then, O my God, while I looked for Thee? Thou wert before me. But
I had drawn away from myself and I could not find myself. How much less,
then, could I find Thee. "

This was certainly the most uneasy, and, at moments, the most painful time
of his life. Hardly was he got back to Carthage than he had to struggle
against ever-increasing money difficulties. Not only had he to get his
own living, but the living of others--possibly his mother's and that of
his brother and sister--at all events, he had to support his mistress and
the child. It is possible that the infant was born before its father left
Thagaste; if not, the birth must have occurred shortly after.

The child was called Adeodatus. There is a kind of irony in this name,
which was then usual, of Adeodatus--"Gift of God. " This son of his sin, as
Augustin calls him, this son whom he did not want, and the news of whose
birth must have been a painful shock--this poor child was a gift of Heaven
which the father could have well done without. And then, when he saw him,
he was filled with joy, and he cherished him as a real gift from God.

He accepted his fatherhood courageously, and, as it happens in such
cases, he was drawn closer to his mistress, their association taking on
something of conjugal dignity. Did the mother of Adeodatus justify such
attachment--an attachment which was to last more than ten years? The
mystery in which Augustin intended that the woman he had loved the most
should remain enveloped for all time, is nearly impenetrable to us. No
doubt she was of a very humble, not to say low class, since Monnica judged
it impossible to bring about a marriage between the ill-assorted pair.
There must have been an extreme inequality between the birth and education
of the lovers. This did not prevent Augustin from loving his mistress
passionately, for her beauty perhaps, or perhaps for her goodness of heart,
or both. Nevertheless, it is surprising, that in view of his changing
humour, and his prompt and impressionable soul, he remained faithful to
her so long. What was to prevent his taking his son and going off? Ancient
custom authorized such an act. But Augustin was tender-hearted. He was
afraid to cause pain; he dreaded for others the wounds that caused him so
much suffering himself. So he stayed on from kindness, from pity, habit
too, and also because, in spite of everything, he loved the mother of his
child. Up to the time of his conversion, they lived like husband and wife.

So now, to keep his family, he really turns "a dealer in words. " In spite
of his youth (he was barely twenty) the terms he had kept at Thagaste as
a teacher of grammar allowed him to take his place among the rhetoricians
at Carthage. Thanks to Romanianus, he got pupils at once. His protector at
Thagaste sent his son, that young Licentius whose education Augustin had
already begun, with one of his brothers, doubtless younger. It seems likely
that the two youths lived in Augustin's house. A small fact which their
master has preserved, looks like a proof of this. A spoon having been lost
in the house, Augustin, to find out where it was, told Licentius to go
and consult a wizard, one Albicerius, who had, just then, a great name in
Carthage. This message is scarcely to be explained unless we suppose the
lad was lodging in his professor's house. Another of the pupils is known to
us. This is Eulogius, who was later on a rhetorician at Carthage, and of
whom Augustin relates an extraordinary dream. Finally, there was Alypius,
a little younger than himself, his friend--"the brother of his heart," as
he calls him. Alypius had been attending his lessons at Thagaste. When the
schoolmaster abruptly threw up his employment, the father of the pupil
was angry, and in sending his son to Carthage, he forbade him to go near
Augustin's class. But it was difficult to keep such eager friends apart.
Little by little, Alypius overcame his father's objections, and became a
pupil of his friend.

Augustin's knowledge, when he began to lecture, could not have been very
deep, for he had only lately quitted the student's bench himself. His
duties forced him to learn what he did not know. In teaching he taught
himself. It was at this time that he did most of the reading which
afterwards added substance to his polemics and treatises. He tells us
himself that he read in those days all that he could lay hands on. He is
very proud of having read by himself and understood without any assistance
from a master, the _Ten Categories_ of Aristotle, which was considered one
of the most abstruse works of the Stagirite. In an age when instruction was
principally by word of mouth, and books comparatively rare, it is obvious
that Augustin was not what we call an "all-devouring reader. " We do not
know if Carthage had many libraries, or what the libraries were worth. It
is no less true that the author of _The City of God_ is the last of the
Latin writers who had a really all-round knowledge. It is he who is the
link between modern times and pagan antiquity. The Middle Age hardly knew
classical literature, save by the allusions and quotations of Augustin.

So in spite of family and professional cares, he did not lose his
intellectual proclivities. The conquest of truth remained always his great
ambition. He still hoped to find it in Manicheeism, but he began to think
that it was a long time coming. The leaders of the sect could not have
trusted him thoroughly. They feared his acute and subtle mind, so quick
to detect the flaw in a thesis or argument. That is why they postponed
his initiation into their secret doctrines. Augustin remained a simple
_auditor_ in their Church. By way of appeasing the enormous activity of
his intelligence, they turned him on to controversy, and the critical
discussion of the Scriptures. Giving themselves out for Christians, they
adopted a part of them, and flung aside as interpolated or forged all that
was not in tune with their theology. Augustin, as we know, triumphed in
disputes of this kind, and was vain because he excelled in them.

And when he grew tired of this negative criticism and asked his evangelists
to give him more substantial food, they put him on some exoteric doctrine
calculated to appeal to a young imagination by its poetic or philosophical
colouring. The catechumen was not satisfied, but he put up with it for
lack of anything better. Very prettily he compares these enemies of the
Scriptures to the snarers of birds, who defile or fill with earth all the
water-places where the birds use to drink, save one mere; and about this
they set their snares. The birds all fly there, not because the water
is better, but because there is no other water, and they know not where
else to go and drink. So Augustin, not knowing where to quench his thirst
for truth, was fain to make the best of the confused pantheism of the
Manichees.

What remains noteworthy is, that however unstable his own convictions were,
he yet converted everybody about him. It was through him that his friends
became Manichees: Alypius one of the first; then Nebridius, the son of a
great landowner near Carthage; Honoratius, Marcianus; perhaps, too, the
youngest of his pupils, Licentius and his brother--all victims of his
persuasive tongue, which he exerted later on to draw them back from their
errors. So great was his charm--so deep, especially, was public credulity!

This fourth century was no longer a century of strong Christian faith. On
the other hand, the last agony of paganism was marked by a new attack of
the lowest credulity and superstition. As the Church energetically combated
both one and the other, it is not surprising that it was chiefly the
pagans who were contaminated. The old religion was to end by foundering in
magic. The greatest minds of the period, the neo-Platonists, the Emperor
Julian himself, were miracle-workers, or at any rate, adepts in the occult
sciences. Augustin, who was then separated from Christianity, followed the
general impulse, together with the young men he knew. Just now we saw him
sending to consult the soothsayer, Albicerius, about the loss of a spoon.
And this man of intellect believed also in astrologers and nigromancers.

Strips of lead have been found at Carthage upon which are written magic
spells against horses entered for races in the circus. 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.