No More Learning

This was also Patricius's way of looking at the matter. And so, says
Augustin, "My father gave himself no concern how I grew towards Thee, or
how chaste I was, provided only that I became a man of culture--however
destitute of Thy culture, O God. . . . My mother and he slackened the curb
without regard to due severity, and I was suffered to enjoy myself
according to my dissolute fancy. " Meanwhile, Patricius was now become
(very tardily) a catechumen. The entreaties of his wife had won him to the
Catholic faith. But his sentiments were not much more Christian--"He hardly
thought of Thee, my God," acknowledges his son, who nevertheless was
pleased at this conversion. If Patricius decided to get converted, it was
probably from political reasons. Since the death of Julian the Apostate,
paganism appeared finally conquered. The Emperor Valentinianus had just
proclaimed heavy penalties against night-sacrifices. In Africa, the
Count Romanus persecuted the Donatists. All the Christians in Thagaste
were Catholic. What was the good of keeping up a useless and dangerous
resistance? Perhaps the end of Patricius--which was near--was as edifying
as Monnica could wish. But at all events, at the present moment, he was
not the man to interfere with Augustin's pleasures: he only thought of
the eventual fortune of the young man. Alone, Monnica might have had some
influence on him, and she herself was fascinated by his future career in
the world. Perhaps, to quiet her conscience, she said to herself that this
frivolous education would be more or less of a help to her son towards
bringing him back to God, that a day would come when the famous rhetorician
would plead the cause of Christ? . . .

Scandalized though she might be at his conduct, it is however apparent that
it was about this time she began to get fonder of him, to worry over him as
her favourite child. But it was not till much later that the union between
mother and son became quite complete. Too many old customs still remained
preventing close intercourse between the men and women of a family. And it
will hardly do to picture such intimacy from the intimacy which may exist
between a mother and son of our own time. There was none of the spoiling,
or indulgence, or culpable weakness which enervates maternal tenderness and
makes it injurious to the energy of a manly character. Monnica was severe
and a little rough. If she let her feelings be seen, it was solely before
God. And yet it is most certain that in the depth of her heart she loved
Augustin, not only as a future member of Christ, but humanly, as a woman
frustrated of love in a badly assorted marriage may spend her love on her
child. The brutality of pagan ways revolted her, and she poured on this
young head all her stored-up affection. In Augustin she loved the being she
wished she could love in her husband.

A number of personal considerations were no doubt involved in the deep and
unselfish attachment she had for her son: instinctively, she looked for him
to protect her against the father's violence. She felt that he would be the
support of her old age, and also, she foresaw dimly what one day he would
be. All this aided to bring about the tie, the understanding, which grew
more and more close between Augustin and Monnica. And so from this time
they both appear to us as they were to appear to all posterity--the pattern
of the Christian Mother and Son. Thanks to them, the hard law of the
ancients has been abrogated. There shall be no more barriers between the
mother and her child. No longer shall it be vain exterior rites which draw
together the members of the same family: they shall communicate in spirit
and truth. Heart speaketh to heart. The fellowship of souls is founded,
and the ties of the domestic hearth are drawn close, as they never were in
antiquity. No more shall they work in concert only for material things;
they will join together to love--and to love each other more. The son will
belong more to his mother.

At the time we have now come to, Monnica was already undertaking the
conquest of Augustin's soul. She prayed for him fervently. The young man
cared very little: gratitude came to him only after his conversion. At this
time he was thinking of nothing but amusement. For this he even forgot his
career. But Monnica and Patricius thought of it constantly--especially
Patricius, who gave himself enormous trouble to enable this student on a
holiday to finish his studies. Eventually he got together the necessary
money, possibly borrowed enough to make up the sum from some rich landowner
who was the patron of the people of small means in Thagaste--say, that
gorgeous Romanianus, to whom Augustin, in acknowledgment, dedicated one of
his first books. The young man could now take the road for Carthage.

He left by himself, craving for knowledge and glory and pleasure, his heart
full of longing for what he knew not, and melancholy without cause. What
was going to become of him in the great, unknown city?




THE SECOND PART

THE ENCHANTMENT OF CARTHAGE


Amare et amari.
"To love and to be loved. "

_Confessions_, III, i.




I

CARTHAGO VENERIS


"I went to Carthage, where shameful loves bubbled round me like boiling
oil. "

This cry of repentance, uttered by the converted Augustin twenty-five
years later, does not altogether stifle his words of admiration for the
old capital of his country. One can see this patriotic admiration stirring
between the lines. Carthage made a very strong impression on him. He gave
it his heart and remained faithful to the end. His enemies, the Donatists,
called him "the Carthaginian arguer. " After he became Bishop of Hippo, he
was continually going to Carthage to preach, or dispute, or consult his
colleagues, or to ask something from men in office. When he is not there,
he is ever speaking of it in his treatises and plain sermons. He takes
comparisons from it: "You who have been to Carthage--" he often says to
his listeners. For the boy from little Thagaste to go to Carthage, was
about the same as for our youths from the provinces to go to Paris. _Veni
Carthaginem_--in these simple words there is a touch of naive emphasis
which reveals the bewilderment of the Numidian student just landed in the
great city.

And, in fact, it was one of the five great capitals of the Empire: there
were Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria--Carthage. Carthage was the
sea-port capital of the whole western Mediterranean. With its large new
streets, its villas, its temples, its palaces, its docks, its variously
dressed cosmopolitan population, it astonished and delighted the schoolboy
from Madaura. Whatever local marks were left about him, or signs of the
rustic simpleton, it brushed off. At first, Augustin must have felt himself
as good as lost there.

There he was, his own master, with nobody to counsel and direct him. He
does indeed mention his fellow-countryman, that Romanianus, the patron of
his father and of other people in Thagaste, as a high and generous friend
who invited him to his house when he, a poor youth, came to finish his
studies in a strange city, and helped him, not only with his purse, but
with his friendship. Unfortunately the allusion is not very clear. Still,
it does seem to shew that Augustin, in the first days after his arrival at
Carthage, stayed with Romanianus. It is not in the least improbable that
Romanianus had a house at Carthage and spent the winter there: during the
rest of the year he would be in his country houses round about Thagaste.
This opulent benefactor might not have been satisfied with giving Augustin
a good "tip" for his journey when he was leaving his native town, but may
also have put him up in his own house at Carthage. Such was the atonement
for those enormous fortunes of antiquity: the rich had to give freely and
constantly. With the parcelling out of wealth we have become much more
egoistical.

In any case, Romanianus, taken up with his pleasures and business, could
not have been much of a guide for Monnica's son. Augustin was therefore
without control, or very nearly. No doubt he came to Carthage with a strong
desire to increase his knowledge and get renown, but still more athirst
for love and the emotions of sentiment. The love-prelude was deliriously
prolonged for him. He was at that time so overwhelmed by it, that it is the
first thing he thinks of when he relates his years at Carthage. "To love
and be loved" seems to him, as to his dear Alexandrine poets, the single
object of life. Yet he was not in love, "but he loved the idea of love. "
_Nondum amabam, et amare amabam . . . amare amans. . . . _

Truly, never a pagan poet had hitherto found such language to speak
of love. These subtle phrases are not only the work of a marvellous
word-smith: through their almost imperceptible shades of meaning may be
descried an entirely new soul, the pleasure-loving soul of the old world
awakening to spiritual life. Modern people have repeated the words more
than enough, but by translating them too literally--"I loved to love"--they
have perhaps distorted the sense. They have made Augustin a kind of
Romantic like Alfred de Musset, a dilettante in love. Augustin is not so
modern, although he often seems one of ourselves. When he wrote those words
he was a bishop and a penitent. What strikes him above all in looking back
upon his uneasy and feverish life as a youth and young man, is the great
onrush of all his being which swept him towards love. Plainly, man is made
for love, since he loves without object and without cause, since in itself
alone the idea of love is already for him a beginning of love. Only he
falls into error in giving to creatures a heart that the Creator alone can
fill and satisfy. In this love for love's sake, Augustin discerned the sign
of the predestined soul whose tenderness will find no rest but in God. That
is why he repeats this word "Love" with a kind of intoxication. He knows
that those who love like him cannot love long with a human love. Nor does
he blush to acknowledge it:--he loved--he loved with all his soul--he
loved to the point of loving the coming of love. Happy intimation for the
Christian! A heart so afire is pledged to the eternal marriage.

With this heat of passion, this lively sensibility, Augustin was a prey for
Carthage. The voluptuous city took complete hold on him by its charm and
its beauty, by all the seductions of mind and sense, by its promises of
easy enjoyment.

First of all, it softened this young provincial, used to the harder country
life of his home; it relaxed the Numidian contracted by the roughness of
his climate; it cooled his eyes burned by the sun in the full-flowing of
its waters and the suavity of its horizons. It was a city of laziness, and
above all, of pleasure, as well for those plunged in business as for the
idlers. They called it _Carthago Veneris_--Carthage of Venus. And certainly
the old Phoenician Tanit always reigned there. Since the rebuilding of her
temple by the Romans, she had transformed herself into _Virgo Coelestis_.
This Virgin of Heaven was the great Our Lady of unchastity, towards whom
still mounted the adoration of the African land four hundred years after
the birth of Christ. "Strange Virgin," Augustin was to say later, "who can
only be honoured by the loss of virginity. " Her dissolving influence seemed
to overcome the whole region. There is no more feminine country than this
Carthaginian peninsula, ravished on all sides by the caress of the waters.
Stretched out between her lakes on the edge of the sea, Carthage lounged in
the humid warmth of her mists, as if in the suffocating atmosphere of her
vapour-baths.

She stole away the energies, but she was an enchantment for the eyes.
From the top of the impressive flight of steps which led up to the temple
of Æsculapius on the summit of the Acropolis, Augustin could see at his
feet the huge, even-planned city, with its citadel walls which spread out
indefinitely, its gardens, blue waters, flaxen plains, and the mountains.
Did he pause on the steps at sunset, the two harbours, rounded cup-shape,
shone, rimmed by the quays, like lenses of ruby. To the left, the Lake of
Tunis, stirless, without a ripple, as rich in ethereal lights as a Venetian
lagoon, radiated in ever-altering sheens, delicate and splendid. In front,
across the bay, dotted with the sails of ships close-hauled to the wind,
beyond the wind-swept and shimmering intervals, the mountains of Rhodes
raised their aerial summit-lines against the sky. What an outlook on the
world for a young man dreaming of fame! And what more exhilarating spot
than this Mount Byrsa, where, in deep layers, so many heroic memories were
gathered and superimposed. The great dusty plains which bury themselves
far off in the sands of the desert, the mountains--yes, and isles and
headlands, all bowed before the Hill that Virgil sang and seemed to do
her reverence. She held in awe the innumerable tribes of the barbaric
continent; she was mistress of the sea. Rome herself, from the height of
her Palatine, surged less imperial.

More than any other of the young men seated with him on the benches of the
school of rhetoric, Augustin hearkened to the dumb appeals which came
from the ancient ruins and new palaces of Carthage. But the supple and
treacherous city knew the secret of enchaining the will. She tempted him by
the open display of her amusements. Under this sun which touches to beauty
the plaster of a hut, the grossest pleasures have an attraction which men
of the North cannot understand. The overflowing of lust surrounds you.
This prolific swarming, all these bodies, close-pressed and soft with
sweat, give forth as it were a breath of fornication which melts the will.
Augustin breathed in with delight the heavy burning air, loaded with human
odours, which filled the streets and squares of Carthage. To all the bold
soliciting, to all the hands stretched out to detain him as he walked, he
yielded.

But for a mind like his Carthage had more subtle allurements in reserve.
He was taken by her theatres, by the verses of her poets and the melodies
of her musicians. He shed tears at the plays of Menander and Terence;
he lamented upon the misfortunes of separated lovers; he shared their
quarrels, rejoiced and despaired with them. And still he awaited the
epiphany of Love--that Love which the performance of the actors shewed him
to be so touching and fine.

Such then was Augustin, given over to the irresponsibility of his eighteen
years--a heart spoiled by romantic literature, a mind impatient to try
every sort of intellectual adventure in the most corrupting and bewitching
city known to the pagan centuries, set amidst one of the most entrancing
landscapes in the world.




II

THE AFRICAN ROME


Carthage did not offer only pleasures to Augustin; it was besides an
extraordinary subject to think about for an understanding so alert and
all-embracing as his.

At Carthage he understood the Roman grandeur as he could not at Madaura
and the Numidian towns. Here, as elsewhere, the Romans made a point of
impressing the minds of conquered races by the display of their strength
and magnificence. Above all, they aimed at the immense. The towns built
by them offered the same decorative and monumental character of the
Greek cities of the Hellenistic period, which the Romans had further
exaggerated--a character not without emphasis and over-elaboration, but
which was bound to astonish, and that was the main thing in their view. In
short, their ideal was not perceptibly different from that of our modern
town councillors. To lay out streets which intersected at right angles; to
create towns cut into even blocks like chessboards; to multiply prospects
and huge architectural masses--all the Roman cities of this period revealed
such an aim, with an almost identical plan.

Erected after this type, the new Carthage caused the old to be forgotten.
Everybody agreed that it was second only to Rome. The African writers
squandered the most hyperbolical praises upon it. For them it is "The
splendid, the august, the sublime Carthage. " Although there may well be a
certain amount of triviality or of patriotic exaggeration in these praises,
it is certain that the Roman capital of the Province of Africa was no less
considerable than the old metropolis of the Hanno and Barcine factions.
With a population almost as large as that of Rome, it had almost as great
a circumference. It must further be recalled that as it had no ramparts
till the Vandal invasion, the city overflowed into the country. With its
gardens, villas, and burial-places of the dead, it covered nearly the
entire peninsula, to-day depopulated.

Carthage, as well as Rome, had her Capitol and Palatine upon Mount Byrsa,
where rose no doubt a temple consecrated to the Capitolean triune deities,
Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, not far from the great temple of Æsculapius, a
modern transformation of the old Punic Eschmoum. Hard by these sanctuaries,
the Proconsul's palace dominated Carthage from the height of the acclivity
of the Acropolis. The Forum was at the foot of the hill, probably in the
neighbourhood of the ports--a Forum built and arranged in the Roman way,
with its shops of bankers and money-changers placed under the circular
galleries, with the traditional image of Marsyas, and a number of statues
of local celebrities. Apuleius no doubt had his there. Further off was the
Harbour Square, where gathered foreigners recently landed and the idlers of
the city in search of news, and where the booksellers offered the new books
and pamphlets. There was to be seen one of the curiosities of Carthage--a
mosaic representing fabulous monsters, men without heads, and men with only
one leg and one foot--a huge foot under which, lying upon their backs, they
sheltered from the sun, as under a parasol. On account of this feature they
were called the _sciapodes_. Augustin, who like everybody else had paused
before these grotesque figures, recalls them somewhere to his readers. . . .
Beside the sea, in the lower town and upon the two near hills of the
Acropolis, were a number of detached buildings that the old authors have
preserved the names of and briefly described. Thanks to the zeal of
archæologists, it is now become impossible to tell where they stood.

The pagan sanctuaries were numerous. That of the goddess Coelestis, the
great patroness of Carthage, occupied a space of five thousand feet. It
comprised, besides the actual [Greek: hieron], where stood the image of the
goddess, gardens, sacred groves, and courts surrounded with columns. The
ancient Phoenician Moloch had also his temple under the name of Saturn.
They called him _The Old One_, so Augustin tells us, and his worshippers
were falling away. On the other hand, Carthage had another sanctuary which
was very fashionable, a _Serapeum_ as at Alexandria, where were manifested
the pomps of the Egyptian ritual, celebrated by Apuleius. Neighbouring
the holy places, came the places of amusement: the theatre, the Odeum,
circus, stadium, and amphitheatre--this last, of equal dimensions with
the Colosseum at Rome, its gallery rising upon gallery, and its realistic
sculptures of animals and artisans. Then there were the buildings for the
public service: the immense cisterns of the East and the Malga, the great
aqueduct, which, after being carried along a distance of fifty-five miles,
emptied the water of the Zaghouan into the reservoirs at Carthage. Finally,
there were the Baths, some of which we know--those of Antoninus and of
Maximianus, and those of Gargilius, where one of the most important
Councils known to the history of the African Church assembled. There were
likewise many Christian basilicas at the time of Augustin. The authors
mention seventeen: it is likely there were more. That of Damous-el-Karita,
the only one of which considerable traces have been found, was vast and
richly decorated, and was perhaps the cathedral of Carthage.

What other buildings there were are utterly lost to history. It
may be conjectured, however, that Carthage, as well as Rome, had a
_septizonium_--a decorative building with peristyles one above the other
which surrounded a reservoir. In fact, it is claimed that the one at
Rome was copied from Carthage. Straight streets paved with large flags
intersected around these buildings, forming a network of long avenues, very
bright and ventilated. Some of them were celebrated in the ancient world
either for their beauty or the animation of their trade: the street of the
Jewellers, the street of Health, of Saturn, of Coelestis, too, or of Juno.
The fig and vegetable markets and the public granaries were also some of
the main centres of Carthaginian life.

It is unquestionable that Carthage, with its buildings and statues, its
squares, avenues and public gardens, looked like a large capital, and was
a perfect example of that ideal of rather brutal magnificence and strength
which the Romans obtruded everywhere.

And even while it dazzled the young provincial from Thagaste, the African
Rome shewed him the virtue of order--social and political order. Carthage,
the metropolis of Western Africa, maintained an army of officials who
handled the government in its smallest details. First of all, there
were the representatives of the central power, the imperial rulers--the
Proconsul, a sort of vice-emperor, who was surrounded by a full court, a
civil and military staff, a privy council, an _officium_ which included a
crowd of dignitaries and subaltern clerks. Then there was the Proprætor
of Africa who, being in control of the government of the whole African
province, had an _officium_ still larger perhaps than the Proconsul's.
After them came the city magistrates, who were aided in their functions by
the Council of the Decurions--the Senate of Carthage. These Carthaginian
senators cut a considerable figure: for them their colleagues at Rome
were full of airs and graces, and the Emperors endeavoured to keep them
in a good-humour. All the details of city government came under their
supervision: the slaughter-houses, buildings, the gathering of municipal
taxes, and the police, which comprised even the guardians of the Forum.
Then there were the army and navy. The home port of a grain-carrying fleet
which conveyed the African cereals to Ostia, Carthage could starve Rome
if she liked.
The grain and oil of all countries lay in her docks--the
storehouses of the state provisions, which were in charge of a special
prefect who had under his orders a whole corporation of overseers and
clerks.

Augustin must have heard a good deal of grumbling at Carthage against this
excess of officialism. But, all the same, so well-governed a city was a
very good school for a young man who was to combine later the duties of
bishop, judge, and governor. The blessings of order, of what was called
"the Roman peace" no doubt impressed him the more, as he himself came from
a turbulent district often turned upside down by the quarrels of religious
sects and by the depredations of the nomads--a boundary-land of the Sahara
regions where it was much harder to bring the central government into
play than in Carthage and the coast-towns. To appreciate the beauty of
government, there is nothing like living in a country where all is at the
mercy of force or the first-comer's will. Such of the Barbarians who came
in contact with Roman civilization were overcome with admiration for the
good order that it established. But what astonished them more than anything
else was that the Empire was everywhere.

No man, whatever his race or country, could help feeling proud to belong to
the Roman city. He was at home in all the countries in the world subject
to Rome. Our Europe, split into nationalities, can hardly understand now
this feeling of pride, so different from our narrow patriotisms. The way to
feel something of it is to go to the colonies: out there the least of us
may believe himself a sovereign, simply from the fact that he is a subject
of the governing country. This feeling was very strong in the old world.
Carthage, where the striking effect of the Empire appeared in all its
brilliancy, would increase it in Augustin. He had only to look around him
to value the extent of the privilege conferred by Rome on her citizens. Men
coming from all countries, without exception of race, were, so to speak,
made partners of the Empire and collaborated in the grandeur of the Roman
scheme. If the Proconsul who then occupied the Byrsa palace, the celebrated
Symmachus, belonged to an old Italian family, he whom he represented,
the Emperor Valentinian, was the son of a Pannonian soldier. The Count
Theodosius, the general who suppressed the insurrection of Firmus in
Mauretania, was a Spaniard, and the army he led into Africa was made up,
for the most part, of Gauls. Later on, under Arcadius, another Gaul,
Rufinus, shall be master of the whole of the East.

An active mind like Augustin's could not remain indifferent before this
spectacle of the world thrown open by Rome to all men of talent. He had the
soul of a poet, quick to enthusiasm; the sight of the Eagles planted on
the Acropolis at Carthage moved him in a way he never forgot. He acquired
the habit of seeing big, and began to cast off race prejudices and all the
petty narrowness of a local spirit. When he became a Christian he did not
close himself up, like the Donatists, within the African Church. His dream
was that Christ's Empire upon earth should equal the Empire of the Cæsars.

Still, it is desirable not to fall into error upon this Roman unity.
Behind the imposing front it shewed from one end to the other of the
Mediterranean, the variety of peoples, with their manners, traditions,
special religions, was always there, and in Africa more than elsewhere.
The population of Carthage was astonishingly mixed. The hybrid character
of this country without unity was illustrated by the streaks found in the
Carthaginian crowds. All the specimens of African races elbowed one another
in the streets, from the nigger, brought from his native Soudan by the
slave-merchant, to the Romanized Numidian. The inflow, continually renewed,
of traffickers and cosmopolitan adventurers increased this confusion.
And so Carthage was a Babel of races, of costumes, of beliefs and ideas.
Augustin, who was at heart a mystic, but also a dialectician extremely fond
of showy discussions, found in Carthage a lively summary of the religions
and philosophies of his day. During these years of study and reflection he
captured booty of knowledge and observation which he would know how to make
use of in the future.

In the Carthage sanctuaries and schools, in the squares and the streets,
he could see pass the disciples of all the systems, the props of all the
superstitions, the devotees of all the religions. He heard the shrill
clamour of disputes, the tumult of fights and riots. When a man was at the
end of his arguments, he knocked down his opponent. The authorities had a
good deal of trouble to keep order. Augustin, who was an intrepid logician,
must have longed to take his share in these rows. But one cannot exactly
improvise a faith between to-day and to-morrow. While he awaited the
enlightenment of the truth, he studied the Carthaginian Babel.

First of all, there was the official religion, the most obvious and perhaps
the most brilliant, that of the Divinity of the Emperors, which was still
kept up even under the Christian Cæsars. Each year, at the end of October,
the elected delegates of the entire province, having at their head the
_Sacerdos province_, the provincial priest, arrived at Carthage. Their
leader, clad in a robe broidered with palms, gold crown on head, made his
solemn entry into the city. It was a perfect invasion, each member dragging
in his wake a mob of clients and servants. The Africans, with their
taste for pomp and colour, seized the chance to give themselves over to a
display of ruinous sumptuosities: rich dresses, expensive horses splendidly
caparisoned, processions, sacrifices, public banquets, games at the circus
and amphitheatre. These strangers so overcrowded the city that the imperial
Government had to forbid them, under severe penalties, to stay longer
than five days. A very prudent measure! At these times, collisions were
inevitable between pagans and Christians. It was desirable to scatter such
crowds as soon as possible, for riots were always smouldering in their
midst.

No less thronged were the festivals of the Virgin of Heaven. A survival
of the national religion, these feasts were dear to the hearts of the
Carthaginians. Augustin went to them with his fellow-students. "We trooped
there from every quarter," he says. There was a great gathering of people
in the interior court which led up to the temple. The statue, taken from
its sanctuary, was placed before the peristyle upon a kind of repository.
Wantons, arrayed with barbarous lavishness, danced around the holy
image; actors performed and sang hymns. "Our eager eyes," Augustin adds
maliciously, "rested in turn on the goddess, and on the girls, her
adorers. " The Great Mother of the Gods, the Goddess of Mount Berecyntus,
was worshipped with similar license. Every year the people of Carthage went
to wash her solemnly in the sea. Her statue, carried in a splendid litter,
robed with precious stuffs, curled and farded, passed through the streets
of the city, with its guard of mummers and Corybants. These last, "with
hair greasy from pomade, pale faces, and a loose and effeminate walk, held
out bowls for alms to the onlookers. "

The devotion to Isis was yet another excuse for processions: the _Serapeum_
was a rival attraction to the temple of the Heavenly Maiden. If we may
trust Tertullian, the Africans swore only by Serapis. Possibly Mithras
had also worshippers in Carthage. Anyhow, the occult religions were fully
represented there. Miracle-working was becoming more and more the basis
even of paganism. Never had the soothsayers been more flourishing.
Everybody, in secret, pried into the entrails of the sacrificial victims,
or used magic spells. As to the wizards and astrologists, they did business
openly. Augustin himself consulted them, like all the Carthaginians. The
public credulity had no limits.

On the opposite side from the pagan worship, the sects which had sprung
from Christianity sprouted. True, Africa has given birth to but a small
number of heresies: the Africans had not the subtle mind of the Orientals
and they were not given to theorizing. But a good many of the Eastern
heresies had got into Carthage. Augustin must have still met Arians there,
although at this period Arianism was dying out in Africa. What is certain
is that orthodox Catholicism was in a very critical state. The Donatists
captured its congregations and churches; they were unquestionably in the
majority. They raised altar against altar. If Genethlius was the Catholic
bishop, the Donatist bishop was Parmenianus. And they claimed to be more
Catholic than their opponents. They boasted that they were the Church, the
single, the unique Church, the Church of Christ. But these schismatics
themselves were already splitting up into many sects. At the time Augustin
was studying at Carthage, Rogatus, Bishop of Tenes, had just broken
publicly with Parmenian's party. Another Donatist, Tyconius, published
books wherein he traversed many principles dear to his fellow-religionists.
Doubt darkened consciences. Amid these controversies, where was the truth?
Among whom did the Apostolic tradition dwell?

To put the finishing touch on this anarchy, a sect which likewise derived
from Christianity--Manicheeism--began to have numerous adepts in Africa.
Watched with suspicion by the Government, it concealed part of its
doctrine, the most scandalous and subversive. But the very mystery which
enveloped it, helped it to get adherents.

Among all these apostles preaching their gospel, these devotees beating
the drum before their god, these theologians reciprocally insulting and
excommunicating one another, Augustin brought the superficial scepticism of
his eighteenth year. He wanted no more of the religion in which his mother
had brought him up. He was a good talker, a clever dialectician; he was in
a hurry to emancipate himself, to win freedom for his way of thinking as
for his way of life; and he meant to enjoy his youth. With such gifts, and
with such dispositions, he could only choose among all these doctrines that
which would help most the qualities of his mind, at once flattering his
intellectual pretensions, and leaving his pleasure-loving instincts a loose
rein.




III

THE CARTHAGE STUDENT


However strong were the attractions of the great city, Augustin well knew
that he had not been sent there to amuse himself, or to trifle as an
amateur with philosophy. He was poor, and he had to secure his future--make
his fortune. His family counted on him. Neither was he ignorant of the
difficult position of his parents and by what sacrifices they had supplied
him with the means to finish his studies. Necessarily he was obliged to be
a student who worked.

With his extraordinary facility, he stood out at once among his
fellow-students. In the rhetoric school, where he attended lectures,
he was, he tells us, not only at the top, but he was the leader of his
companions. He led in everything. At that time, rhetoric was extremely
far-reaching: it had come to take in all the divisions of education,
including science and philosophy. Augustin claims to have learned all that
the masters of his time had to teach: rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, music,
mathematics. Having gone through the whole scholastic system, he thought of
studying law, and aided by his gift of words, to become a barrister. For a
gifted young man it was the shortest and surest road to money and honours.

Unhappily for him, hardly was he settled down at Carthage than his father
died. This made his future again problematical. How was he to keep up his
studies without the sums coming from his father? The affairs of Patricius
must have been left in the most parlous condition. But Monnica, clinging to
her ambitious plans for her son, knew how to triumph over all difficulties,
and she continued to send Augustin money. Romanianus, the Mæcenas of
Thagaste, who was doubtless applied to by her, came once more to the rescue
of the hard-up student. The young man, set at ease about his expenses,
resumed light-heartedly his studious and dissipated life.

As a matter of fact, this family bereavement does not seem to have caused
him much grief. In the _Confessions_ he mentions the death of his father in
a few words, and, so to speak, in parenthesis, as an event long foreseen
without much importance. And yet he owed him a great deal. Patricius was
hard pressed, and he took immense trouble to provide the means for his
son's education. But with the fine egotism of youth, Augustin perhaps
thought it enough to have profited by his father's sacrifices, and
dispensed himself from gratitude. In any case, his affection for his father
must have been rather lukewarm; the natural differences between them ran
too deep. In these years, Monnica filled all the heart of Augustin.

But the influence of Monnica herself was very slight upon this grown-up
youth, eighteen years old. He had forgotten her lessons, and it did not
trouble him much if his conduct added to the worries of the widow, who was
now struggling with her husband's creditors. At heart he was a good son and
he deeply loved his mother, but inevitably the pressure of the life around
him swept him along.

He has pictured his companions for us, after his conversion, as terrible
blackguards. No doubt he is too severe. Those young men were neither better
nor worse than elsewhere. They were rowdy, as they were in the other cities
of the Empire, and as one always is at that age. Imperial regulations
enjoined the police to have an eye on the students, to note their conduct
and what company they kept. They were not to become members of prohibited
societies, not to go too often to the theatre, nor to waste their time in
raking and feastings. If their conduct became too outrageous, they were to
be beaten with rods and sent back to their parents. At Carthage there was
a hard-living set of men who called themselves "The Wreckers. " Their great
pleasure was to go and make a row at a professor's lecture; they would
burst noisily into the classroom and smash up anything they could lay hold
of. They amused themselves also by "ragging" the freshmen, jeering at their
simplicity, and playing them a thousand tricks. Things haven't much changed
since then. The fellow-students of Augustin were so like students of
to-day that the most modern terms suggest themselves to describe their
performances.

Augustin, who was on the whole well conducted, and, as behoved a future
professor, had a respect for discipline, disapproved of "The Wreckers" and
their violence. This did not prevent him from enjoying himself in their
society. He was overcome with shame because he could not keep pace with
them--we must believe it at least, since he tells us so himself. With a
certain lack of assurance, blended however with much juvenile vanity, he
joined the band. He listened to that counsel of vulgar wisdom which is
disastrous to souls like his: "Do as others do. " He accordingly did do
as the others; he knew all their debauchery, or he imagined he did, for
however low he went, he was never able to do anything mean. He was then so
far from the faith that he arranged love-trysts in the churches. "I was not
afraid to think of my lust, and plan a scheme for securing the deadly fruit
of sin, even within the walls of Thy church during the celebration of Thy
mysteries. " We might be reading the confession of a sensualist of to-day.
One grows astonished at these morals, at once so old and so modern. What,
already! These young Christian basilicas, but newly sprung out of the
earth, where the men were strictly separated from the women--were they
already become places of assignation, where love-letters were slipped into
hands, and procuresses sold their furtive services! . . .

At length the great happiness for which Augustin had so long been sighing
was granted him: he loved and he was loved.

He loved as he indeed was able to love, with all the impetuosity of his
nature and all the fire of his temperament, with all his heart and all his
senses. "I plunged headlong into love, whose fetters I longed to wear. " But
as he went at once to extremes, as he meant to give himself altogether,
and expected all in return, he grew irritated at not receiving this same
kind of love. It was never enough love for him. Yet he was loved, and the
very certainty of this love, always too poor to his mind, exasperated the
violence and pertinacity of his desire. "Because I was loved, I proudly
riveted round myself the chain of woe, to be soon scourged with the red-hot
iron rods of jealousy, torn by suspicions, fears, anger, and quarrels. "
This was passion with chorus and orchestra, a little theatrical, with its
violences, its alternations between fury and ecstasy, such as an African,
steeped in romantic literature, would conceive it. Deceived, he flung
himself in desperate pursuit of the ever-flitting love. He had certainly
more than one passion. Each one left him more hungry than the last.

He was sensual, and he felt each time how brief is pleasure, in what a
limited circle all enjoyment turns. He was tender, eager to give himself;
and he saw plainly that one never gives oneself quite altogether, that even
in the maddest hours of surrender one always reserves oneself in secret,
keeping for oneself something of oneself; and he felt that most of the time
his tenderness got no answer. When the joyous heart brings the offering of
its love, the heart of her he loves is absent. And when it is there, on the
edge of the lips, decked and smiling to meet the loved one, it is the other
who is absent. Almost never do they join together, and they never join
together altogether. And so this Love, which claims to be constant and even
eternal, ought to be, if it would prolong itself, a continual act of faith,
and hope, and charity. To believe in it in spite of its darkening and
falling away; to hope its return, often against all evidence; to pardon its
injustices and sometimes its foul actions--how many are capable of such
abnegation? Augustin went through all that. He was in despair about it.
And then, the nostalgia of predestined souls took hold of him. He had an
indistinct feeling that these human loves were unworthy of him, and that
if he must have a master, he was born to serve another Master. He had a
desire to shake off the platitude of here below, the melancholy fen where
stagnated what he calls "the marsh of the flesh"; to escape, in a word,
from the wretched huts wherein for a little he had sheltered his heart; to
burn all behind him, and so prevent the weakness of a return; and to go and
pitch his tent further, higher, he knew not where--upon some unapproachable
mountain where the air is icy, but before the eyes, the vasty stretches of
light and space. . . .

These first loves of Augustin were really too fierce to last. They
burned up themselves. Augustin did not keep them up long. There was in
him, besides, an instinct which counteracted his exuberant, amorous
sentimentality--the sense of beauty. That in itself was enough to make him
pause on the downhill of riot. The anarchy and commotion of passion was
repellent to a mind devoted to clearness and order. But there was still
another thing--the son of the Thagaste freeholder had any amount of common
sense. That at least was left to him of the paternal heritage. A youth of
what we call the lower middle class, strictly brought up in the hard and
frugal discipline of the provinces, he felt the effects of his training.
The bohemianism in which his friends revelled could not hold him
indefinitely. Besides this, the career he desired, that of a barrister
or professor, had a preliminary obligation to maintain a certain outward
decorum. He himself tells us so; in the midst of his most disreputable
performances he aspired to be known for his fashion and wit--_elegans atque
urbanus_. Politeness of speech and manners, the courteous mutual deference
of the best society--such, was the ideal of this budding professor of
rhetoric.

Anxiety about his future, joined to his rapid disenchantments, ere long
sobered the student: he just took his fling and then settled down. Love
turned for him into sensual habit. His head became clear for study and
meditation. The apprentice to rhetoric liked his business. Up to his
last breath, despite his efforts to change, he continued, like all his
contemporaries, to love rhetoric. He handled words like a worker in verbals
who is aware of their price and knows all their resources. Even after his
conversion, if he condemns profane literature as a poisoner of souls, he
absolves the beauty of language. "I accuse not words," he says. "Words
are choice and precious vessels. I accuse the wine of error that drunken
doctors pour out for us into these fair goblets. " At the Rhetoric School he
took extreme pleasure in declaiming. He was applauded; the professor gave
him as an example to the others. These scholastic triumphs foretold others
more celebrated and reverberating.