What use had he for this nun
alongside
of him!
Bertrand - Saint Augustin
The words of Augustin's prayers are
still upon the lips of the devout.
This universal genius, who during forty years was the speaking-trumpet of
Christendom, was also the man of one special century and country. Augustin
of Thagaste is the great African.
Well may we be proud of him and adopt him as one of our glories--we who
have kept up, for now almost a century, a struggle like to that which
he maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who consider Africa
as an extension of France. More than any other writer, he has expressed
the temperament and the genius of his country. This motley Africa, with
its eternal mixture of races at odds with one another, its jealous
sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violence
of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and its
quick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous, its
materialism and its mysticism, its austerity and its luxury, its
resignation to servitude and its instincts of independence, its hunger
to rule--all that comes out with singularly vivid touches in the work of
Augustin. Not only was he his country's voice, but, as far as he could, he
realized its old dream of dominion. The supremacy in spiritual matters that
Carthage disputed so long and bitterly with Rome, it ended by obtaining,
thanks to Augustin. As long as he lived, the African Church was the
mistress of the Churches of the West.
As for me--if I may venture to refer to myself in such a matter--I have had
the joy to recognize in him, besides the Saint and Teacher whom I revere,
the ideal type of the Latin of Africa. The image of which I descried the
outline long ago through the mirages of the South in following the waggons
of my rugged heroes, I have seen at last become definite, grow clear, wax
noble and increase to the very heaven, in following the traces of Augustin.
And even supposing that the life of this child of Thagaste, the son of
Monnica, were not intermingled so deeply with ours, though he were for us
only a foreigner born in a far-off land, nevertheless he would still remain
one of the most fascinating and luminous souls who have shone amid our
darkness and warmed our sadness--one of the most human and most divine
creatures who have trod our highways.
THE FIRST PART
DAYS OF CHILDHOOD
Sed delectabat ludere.
"Only, I liked to play. "
_Confessions_, I, 9.
I
AN AFRICAN FREE-TOWN SUBJECT TO ROME
Little streets, quite white, which climb up to clay-formed hills deeply
furrowed by the heavy winter rains; between the double row of houses,
brilliant in the morning sun, glimpses of sky of a very tender blue; here
and there, in the strip of deep shade which lies along the thresholds,
white figures crouched upon rush-mats--indolent outlines, draped with
bright colours, or muffled in rough and sombre wool-stuffs; a horseman who
passes, bent almost in two in his saddle, the big hat of the South flung
back over his shoulders, and encouraging with his heel the graceful trot of
his horse--such is Thagaste as we see it to-day, and such undoubtedly it
appeared to the traveller in the days of Augustin.
Like the French town built upon its ruins, the African free-city lay in a
sort of plain taken between three round hills. One of them, the highest
one, which is now protected by a _bordj_, must have been defended in old
days by a _castellum_. Full-flowing waters moisten the land. To those
coming from the stony regions about Constantine and Setif, or the vast bare
plain of the Medjerda, Thagaste gives an impression of freshness and cool.
It is a laughing place, full of greenery and running water. To the Africans
it offers a picture of those northern countries which they have never seen,
with its wooded mountains covered by pines and cork trees and ilex. It
presents itself as a land of mountain and forest--especially forest. It is
a hunter's country. Game is plentiful there--boar, hare, redwing, quail,
partridge. In Augustin's time, wild beasts were apparently more numerous in
the district than they are to-day. When he compares his adversaries, the
Donatists, to roaring lions, he speaks like a man who knows what a lion is.
To the east and west, wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits,
streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens--there
you have Thagaste and the country round about--the world, in fact, as
it revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. But towards the
south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down
as blunted cones, or jutted in slim Tables of the Law; the sterility
of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This
full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light,
however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs into
waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight for
the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a land
of the sun.
To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which affords
the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This wooded Numidia,
with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle graze, differs in the
highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif--a wide, desolate plain,
where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy _steppes_, roll away in
monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of Mount Atlas which closes
the horizon. And this rough and melancholy plain in its turn offers a
striking contrast with the coast region of Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not
unlike the Italian Campania in its mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut
differences between the various parts of the same province doubtless
explain the essential peculiarities of the Numidian character. The bishop
Augustin, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this
country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it
the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature.
Of course, Thagaste did not pretend to be a capital. It was a free-town of
the second or third order; but its distance from the great centres gave it
a certain importance. The neighbouring free-towns, Thubursicum, Thagura,
were small. Madaura and Theveste, rather larger, had not perhaps the same
commercial importance. Thagaste was placed at the junction of many Roman
roads. There the little Augustin, with other children of his age, would
have a chance to admire the out-riders and equipages of the Imperial
Mail, halted before the inns of the town. What we can be sure of is that
Thagaste, then as now, was a town of passage and of traffic, a half-way
stopping-place for the southern and coast towns, as well as for those of
the Proconsulate and Numidia. And like the present Souk-Ahras, Thagaste
must have been above all a market. Bread-stuffs and Numidian wines were
bartered for the flocks of the Aures, leather, dates, and the esparto
basket-work of the regions of Sahara. The marbles of Simitthu, the
citron-wood of which they made precious tables, were doubtless handled
there. The neighbouring forests could furnish building materials to the
whole country. Thagaste was the great mart of woodland Numidia, the
warehouse and the bazaar, where to this day the nomad comes to lay in a
stock of provisions, and stares with childish delight at the fine things
produced by the inventive talent of the workers who live in towns.
Thus images of plenty and joy surrounded the cradle of Augustin. The smile
of Latin beauty welcomed him also from his earliest steps. It is true that
Thagaste was not what is called a fine city. The fragments of antiquity
which have been unearthed there are of rather inferior workmanship. But how
little is needed to give wings to the imagination of an intelligent child!
At all events, Thagaste had a bathing-hall paved with mosaics and perhaps
ornamented with statues; Augustin used to bathe there with his father.
And again, it is probable that, like the neighbouring Thubursicum and
other free-cities of the same level, it had its theatre, its forum, its
nymph-fountains, perhaps even its amphitheatre. Of all that nothing
has been found. Certain inscribed stone tablets, capitals and shafts
of columns, a stone with an inscription which belonged to a Catholic
church--that is all which has been discovered up to this present time.
Let us not ask for the impossible. Thagaste had columns--nay, perhaps a
whole street between a double range of columns, as at Thimgad. That would
be quite enough to delight the eyes of a little wondering boy. A column,
even injured, or scarcely cleansed from wrack and rubbish, has about it
something impressive. It is like a free melody singing among the heavy
masses of the building. To this hour, in our Algerian villages, the mere
sight of a broken column entrances and cheers us--a white ghost of beauty
streaming up from the ruins among the modern hovels.
There were columns at Thagaste.
II
THE FAMILY OF A SAINT
It was in this pleasant little town, shaded and beautified for many years
now by the arts of Rome, that the parents of Augustin lived.
His father, Patricius, affords us a good enough type of the Romanized
African. He belonged to the order of _Decuriones_, to the "very brilliant
urban council of Thagaste" (_splendidissimus ordo Thagastensis_), as an
inscription at Souk-Ahras puts it. Although these strong epithets may be
said to be part of the ordinary official phraseology, they indicate, just
the same, the importance which went with such a position. In his township,
Patricius was a kind of personage. His son assures us that he was poor, but
we may suspect the holy bishop of exaggerating through Christian humility.
Patricius must certainly have owned more than twenty-five acres of land,
for this was made a condition of being elected to the _curia_. He had
vineyards and orchards, of which Augustin later on recalled the plentiful
and sweet-tasting fruits. In short, he lived in considerable style. It
is true that in Africa household expenses have never at any time been a
great extravagance. Still, the sons of Patricius had a pedagogue, a slave
specially engaged to keep them under his eye, like all the children of
families comfortably off.
It has been said that as Augustin's father was a member of the _curia_,
he must have been a ruined man. The Decurions, who levied taxes and made
themselves responsible for their collection, were obliged to supply any
deficiency in the revenue out of their own money. Patricius, it is thought,
must have been one of the numerous victims of this disastrous system. But
no doubt there were a good many exceptions. Besides, there is nothing in
Augustin's reminiscences which authorizes us to believe that his father
ever knew embarrassment, to say nothing of actual poverty. What seems by
far the most probable is that he lived as well as he could upon the income
of his estate as a small country landowner. In Africa people are satisfied
with very little. Save for an unusually bad year following a time of long
drought, or a descent of locusts, the land always gives forth enough to
feed its master.
To hunt, to ride horseback, now and then to go on parade, to look after
his small-holders and agricultural slaves, to drive one of those bargains
in which African cunning triumphs--such were the employments of Patricius.
In short, he drifted through life on his little demesne. Sometimes this
indolent man was overcome by a sudden passion for work; or again he was
seized by furious rages. He was violent and brutal. At such moments he
struck out right and left. He would even have hit his wife or flogged the
skin off her back if the quietude of this woman, her dignity and Christian
mildness, had not overawed him. Let us not judge this kind of conduct by
our own; we shall never understand it. The ancient customs, especially the
African customs, were a disconcerting mixture of intense refinement and
heedless brutality.
That is why it will not do to exaggerate the outbursts of Patricius, which
his son mentions discreetly. Although he may not have been very faithful to
his wife, that was in those days, more than in ours, a venial sin in the
eyes of the world. At heart the African has always longed for a harem in
his house; he inclines naturally to the polygamy of Muslemism. In Carthage,
and elsewhere, public opinion was full of indulgence for the husband who
allowed himself liberties with the serving-women. People laughed at it, and
excused the man. It is true they were rather harder on the matron who took
the same kind of liberty with her men-slaves. However, that went on too.
The Bishop of Hippo, in his sermons, strongly rebuked the Christian married
couples for these frequent adulteries which were scarcely regarded as
errors.
Patricius was a pagan, and this partly explains his laxity. It would
doubtless be going too far to say that he remained faithful to paganism
all his life. It is not likely that this urban councillor of Thagaste was
a particularly assured pagan. Speculative and intellectual considerations
made a very moderate appeal to him. He was not an arguer like his son. He
was pagan from habit, from that instinctive conservatism of the citizen
and landowner who sticks obstinately to his class and family traditions.
Prudence and diplomacy had also something to do with it. Many great
landlords continued to defend and practise paganism, probably from motives
similar to those of Patricius himself. As for him, he had no desire to get
wrong with the important and influential people of the country; he might
have need of their protection to save his small property from the ravenous
public treasury. Moreover, the best-paid posts were still controlled by the
pagan priesthood. And so Augustin's father thought himself very wise in
dealing cautiously with a religion which was always so powerful, and
rewarded its adherents so well.
But for all that, it is undeniable that paganism about this time was in an
awkward position from a political point of view. The Government eyed it
with disapproval. Since the death of Constantine, the "accursed emperors"
had waged against it a furious war. In 353, just before the birth of
Augustin, Constantius promulgated an edict renewing the order for the
closing of the temples and the abolition of sacrifices--and that too under
pain of death and confiscation. But in distant provinces, such as Numidia,
the action of the central power was slow and irregular. It was often
represented by officials who were hostile or indifferent to Christianity.
The local aristocracy and their following scoffed at it more or less
openly. In their immense villas, behind the walls of their parks, the rich
landowners offered sacrifices and organized processions and feasts as
if there were no law at all. Patricius knew all that. And, on the other
side, he could take note of the encroachments of the new religion. During
the first half of the fourth century Thagaste had been conquered by the
Donatists. Since the edict of Constans against these schismatics, the
inhabitants of the little city had come back to Catholicism out of fear of
the severity of the imperial government. But the settlement was far from
being complete and final. As a consequence of the edict, the whole region
of the Aures had been in revolution. The Bishop of Bagai, fortified in
his episcopal city and basilica, had stood an actual siege from the Roman
troops. Almost everywhere the struggle between Donatists and Catholics
still went on below the surface. There cannot be the least doubt that
Thagaste took its share in these quarrels. To those who urged him to be
baptized, the father of Augustin might well answer with ironic politeness:
"I am only waiting till you agree among yourselves, to see where the truth
lies. " In his heart this rather lukewarm pagan had no inveterate dislike to
Christianity.
What proves it at once is that he married a Christian.
How did Monnica become the wife of Patricius? How did these two beings, so
little alike, between whom there was such a great difference of age, not to
mention all the rest, come to join their fate? Those are questions which
it would never have occurred to the people of Thagaste to ask. Patricius
married to be like everybody else--and also because he was well over forty,
and his mother an old woman who would soon be no longer able to run his
house.
Monnica also had her mother. The two old women had a meeting, with many
politenesses and ceremonious bowings, and because the thing appeared to
them reasonable and most suitable, they settled the marriage. Had Patricius
ever seen the girl that he was going to take, according to custom, so as to
have a child-bearer and housewife? It is quite likely he had not. Was she
pretty, rich, or poor? He considered such matters as secondary, since the
marriage was not a love-match but a traditional duty to fulfil. If the
union was respectable, that was quite enough. But however the matter fell
out, what is certain is that Monnica was very young. She was twenty-two
when Augustin was born, and he was probably not her first child. We know
that she was hardly marriageable when she was handed over, as Arab parents
do to-day with their adolescent or little girls, to the man who was going
to marry her. Now in Africa girls become marriageable at a very early age.
They are married at fourteen, sometimes even at twelve. Perhaps she was
seventeen or eighteen at most when she married Patricius. She must have had
first a son, Navigius, whom we shall meet later on at Milan, and also a
daughter, of whom we do not even know the name, but who became a nun, and
superior of a convent in the diocese of Hippo. For us the features of these
two other children of Monnica and Patricius are obliterated. They are
concealed by the radiance of their illustrious great brother.
Monnica was fond of telling stories of her girlhood to her son. He has
handed down some of them to us.
She was brought up strictly, according to the system of that time. Both her
parents came of families which had been Christian, and Catholic-Christian,
for many generations. They had never been carried away by the Donatist
schism; they were people very obstinate in their convictions--a character
quite as frequent in Africa as its opposite, the kind of Numidian or Moor,
who is versatile and flighty. It is not unimportant that Augustin came from
this hard-headed race, for this it was, with the aid of God's grace, that
saved him--the energetic temper of his will.
Still, if the faith of the young Monnica was confirmed from her earliest
years, it is not so much to the lessons of her mother that she owed it,
as to the training of an old woman-servant of whom she always spoke with
gratitude. In the family of her master, this old woman had a place like the
one which to-day in a Turkish family is held by the nurse, the _dada_, who
is respected by all the harem and all the household. Doubtless she herself
was born in the house and had seen all the children born. She had carried
Monnica's father on her back when he was little, just as the Kabylian
women or the Bedouin nomads carry their babies still. She was a devoted
slave, just a bit unreasonable--a veritable housedog who in the zeal of
guardianship barks more than is necessary at the stranger who passes. She
was like the negress in the Arab houses to-day, who is often a better
Muslem, more hostile to the Christian, than her employers. The old woman
in Monnica's family had witnessed the last persecutions; she had perhaps
visited the confessors in prison; perhaps she had seen flow the blood of
the martyrs. These exciting and terrible scenes would have been graven on
her memory. What inflamed stories the old servant must have told her young
mistresses, what vital lessons of constancy and heroism! Monnica listened
to them eagerly.
Because of her great faith, this simple slave was revered as a saint by
her owners, who entrusted her with the supervision of their daughters. She
proved a stern governess, who would stand no trifling with her rules. She
prevented these girls from drinking even water except at meals. Cruel
suffering for little Africans! Thagaste is not far from the country of
thirst. But the old woman said to them:
"You drink water now because you can't get at the wine. In time to come,
when you are married and have bins and cellars of your own, you'll turn up
your nose at water, and your habit of drinking will be too much for you. "
Monnica came near fulfilling the prophecy of the honest woman. It was
before she was married. As she was very well-behaved and very temperate,
she used to be sent to the cellar to draw the wine from the cask. Before
pouring it into the flagon she would sip just a little. Being unaccustomed
to wine, she was not able to drink more; it was too strong for her gullet.
She did this, not because she liked the wine, but from naughtiness, to play
a trick on her parents who trusted her, and also, of course, because it was
prohibited. Each time she swallowed a little more, and so it went on till
she ended by finding it rather nice, and came to drinking greedily one
cup after another. One day a slave-girl, who went with her to the cellar,
began to grumble. Monnica gave her a sharp answer. Upon this the girl
called Monnica a drunkard. . . . Drunkard! This bitter taunt so humiliated the
self-respect of the future saint, that she got the better of her taste for
drink. Augustin does not say it was through piety she did this, but because
she felt the ugliness of such a vice.
There is a certain roughness in this story of childhood, the roughness of
ancient customs, with which is always mingled some decency or dignity.
Christianity did the work of polishing the soul of Monnica. At the time we
are dealing with, if she was already a very devout young girl, she was far
as yet from being the grand Christian that she became afterwards.
When she married Patricius she was a girl very reserved and cold to all
appearances (in reality, she was very passionate), precise in attending to
her religious duties, even a little strict, with her exaggeration of the
Christian austerity in her hate of all the brutalities and all the careless
morals that paganism condoned. Nevertheless, this rigid soul knew how to
bend when it was necessary. Monnica had tact, suppleness, and, when it
was needed, a very acute and very reasonable practical sense of which she
gave many a proof in the bringing up and management of her son Augustin.
This soul, hard for herself, veiled her uncompromising religion under an
unchangeable sweetness which was in her rather the work of grace than a
natural gift.
There can be little doubt that her behaviour and character greatly
disturbed Patricius at the beginning of their married life. Perhaps he
regretted the marriage.
What use had he for this nun alongside of him!
Both of them must have suffered the usual annoyances which always appeared
before long in unions of this kind between pagan and Christian. True, it
was no longer the time of Tertullian, the heroic century of persecutions,
when the Christian women glided into the prisons to kiss the shackles of
the martyrs. (What a revenge did woman take then for her long and enforced
confinement to the women's apartments! And how outrageous such conduct must
have seemed to a husband brought up in the Roman way! ) But the practices
of the Christian life established a kind of intermittent divorce between
husbands and wives of different religion. Monnica often went out, either
alone, or accompanied by a faithful bondwoman. She had to attend the
services of the Church, to go about the town visiting the poor and giving
alms. And there were the fast-days which occurred two or three times a
week, and especially the long fast of Lent--a grievous nuisance when the
husband wanted to give a dinner-party just on those particular days! On
the vigil of festivals, Monnica would spend a good part of the night in
the Basilica. Regularly, doubtless on Sundays, she betook herself to the
cemetery, or to some chapel raised to the memory of a martyr who was often
buried there--in fact, they called these chapels "Memorials" (_memoriæ_).
There were many of these chapels--even too many in the opinion of austere
Christians. Monnica went from one to another carrying in a large basket
made of willow branches some pieces of minced meat, bread, and wine mixed
with water. She met her friends in these places. They would sit down around
the tombs, of which some were shaped like tables, unpack the provisions,
and eat and drink piously in honour of the martyr. This was a residue
of pagan superstition among the Christians. These pious _agapæ_, or
love-feasts, often turned into disgusting orgies. When Augustin became
Bishop of Hippo he had considerable trouble to get his people out of the
habit of them. Notwithstanding his efforts, the tradition still lasts.
Every Friday the Muslem women keep up the custom of visiting the cemeteries
and the marabouts. Just as in the time of St. Monnica, they sit around the
tombs, so cool with their casing of painted tiles, in the shade of the
cypress and eucalyptus. They gobble sweetmeats, they gossip, they laugh,
they enjoy themselves--the husbands are not there.
Monnica made these visits in a really pious state of mind, and was far
from trying to find in them opportunities for lewdness or carouse. She was
content to drink a little wine very carefully--she always bore in mind her
youthful sin. Besides, this wine weakened with water that she brought from
the house, was tepid by the time she reached the cemetery; it would be a
drink of very moderate relish, little likely to stimulate the senses. She
distributed what was left of it among the needy, together with the contents
of her basket, and came back modestly to her house.
But however staid and reserved she might be, still these outings gave rise
to scandalous talk. They annoyed a suspicious husband. All the Africans are
that. Marital jealousy was not invented by Islam. Moreover, in Monnica's
time men and women took part in these funeral love-feasts and mingled
together disturbingly. Patricius got cross about it, and about a good many
other things too. His old mother chafed his suspicions by carrying to
him the ugly gossip and even the lies of the servants about his wife. By
dint of patience and mildness and attentions, Monnica ended by disarming
her mother-in-law and making it clear that her conduct was perfect. The
old woman flew into a rage with the servants who had lied to her, and
denounced them to her son. Patricius, like a good head of a household, had
them whipped to teach them not to lie any more. Thanks to this exemplary
punishment, and the good sense of the young wife, peace reigned once more
in the family.
Women, friends of Monnica, were amazed that the good understanding was
not oftener upset, at least in an open manner, between husband and wife.
Everybody in Thagaste knew the quick-tempered and violent character of
Patricius. And yet there were no signs that he beat his wife. Nor did
any one say he did. Other women who had less passionate husbands were
nevertheless beaten by them. When they came to Monnica's house they shewed
her the marks of the whacks they had got, their faces swollen from blows,
and they burst out in abuse of men, clamouring against their lechery,
which, said these matrons, was the cause of the ill-treatment they had to
endure.
"Blame your own tongue," retorted Monnica.
According to her, women should close their eyes to the infidelities of
their husbands and avoid arguing with them when they were angry. Silence,
submissiveness, were the all-powerful arms. And since, as a young woman,
she had a certain natural merriment, she added, laughing:
"Remember what was read to you on your wedding-day. You were told that you
are the handmaids of your husbands. Don't rebel against your masters! . . . "
Possibly this was a keen criticism of the pagan code, so hard in its rules.
Still, in this matter, the Roman law was in agreement with the Gospel.
Sincere Christian as she was, the wife of Patricius never had any quarrel
with him on account of his infidelities. So much kindness and resignation
touched the dissolute and brutal husband, who besides was an excellent
man and warm-hearted. The modesty of his wife, after a while, made her
attractive in his eyes. He loved her, so to speak, on the strength of
his respect and admiration for her. He would indeed have been a churl to
find fault with a wife who interfered with him so little and who was a
perfect housekeeper, as we shall see later on when we come to her life at
Cassicium. In one point, where even she did not intend it, she forwarded
the interests of her husband by gaining him the good-will of the Christians
in Thagaste; while he, on his side, could say to the pagans who looked
askance at his marriage: "Am I not one of yourselves? "
In spite of all the differences between him and Monnica, Patricius was a
contented husband.
III
THE COMFORT OF THE MILK
Augustin came into this world the thirteenth of November of the year of
Christ 354.
It was just one little child more in this sensual and pleasure-loving
Africa, land of sin and of carnal productiveness, where children are
born and die like the leaves. But the son of Monnica and Patricius was
predestined: he was not to die in the cradle like so many other tiny
Africans.
Even if he had not been intended for great things, if he had been only a
head in the crowd, the arrival of this baby ought, all the same, to affect
us, for to the Christian, the destiny of the obscurest and humblest of
souls is a matter of importance. Forty years afterwards, Augustin, in his
_Confessions_, pondered this slight ordinary fact of his birth, which
happened almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Thagaste, and in truth it
seems to him a great event, not because it concerns himself, bishop and
Father of the Church, but because it is a soul which at this imperceptible
point of time comes into the world.
Let us clearly understand Augustin's thought. Souls have been ransomed by a
Victim of infinite value. They have themselves an infinite value. Nothing
which goes on in them can be ignored. Their most trifling sins, their
feeblest stirrings towards virtue, are vital for the eternity of their lot.
All shall be attributed to them by the just Judge. The theft of an apple
will weigh perhaps as heavily in the scales as the seizure of a province
or a kingdom. The evil of sin is in the evil intention. Now the fate
of a soul, created by God, on Him depends. Hence everything in a human
life assumes an extreme seriousness and importance. In the history of a
creature, all is worthy of being examined, weighed, studied, and perhaps
also, for the edification of others, told.
Here is an altogether new way of regarding life, and, proceeding from that,
of understanding art. Even as the slaves, thanks to Christianity, came into
the spiritual city, so the most minute realities by this outlook are to be
included in literature. The _Confessions_ will be the first model of the
art of the new era. A deep and magnificent realism, because it goes even
to the very depths of the divine--utterly distinct, at any rate, from
our surface realism of mere amusement--is about to arise from this new
conception. Without doubt, in Augustin's eyes, beauty dwells in all things,
in so far forth as beauty is a reflection of the order and the thought
of the Word. But it has also a more essential character--it has a moral
signification and value. Everything, in a word, can be the instrument of
the loss or the redemption of a soul. The most insignificant of our actions
reverberates to infinitude on our fate. Regarded from this point, both
things and beings commence to live a life more closely leagued together and
at the same time more private; more individual and more general. All is in
the lump, and nevertheless all is separate. Our salvation concerns only
ourselves, and yet through charity it becomes involved with the salvation
of our fellows.
In this spirit let us look at the cradle of Augustin. Let us look at it
with the eyes of Augustin himself, and also, perchance, of Monnica. Bending
over the frail body of the little child he once was, he puts to himself
all the great desperate questions which have shaken humanity for thousands
of years. The mystery of life and death rises before him, formidable. It
tortures him to the point of anguish, of confusion: "Yet suffer me to speak
before Thy mercy, me who am but dust and ashes. Yea, suffer me to speak,
for, behold, I speak not to man who scorns me, but to Thy mercy. Even Thou
perhaps dost scorn me, but Thou wilt turn and have pity. For what is it
that I would say, O Lord my God, save that I know not whence I came hither
into this dying life, shall I call it, or living death? . . . And, lo, my
infancy has long been dead, and I live. But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest
and in whom nothing ever dies--tell me, I beseech Thee, O God, and have
mercy on my misery, tell me whether another life of mine died before my
infancy began. "
One is reminded here of Pascal's famous prosopopoeia: "I know not who
has put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor myself. I am in a
terrible ignorance about everything. . . . All I know is that I must soon die,
but what I know least of all is this very death which I cannot escape. "
The phrases of the _Pensées_ are only the echo of the phrases of the
_Confessions_. But how different is the tone! Pascal's charge against human
ignorance is merciless. The God of Port-Royal has the hard and motionless
face of the ancient Destiny: He withdraws into the clouds, and only shews
Himself at the end to raise up His poor creature. In Augustin the accent
is tender, trusting, really like a son, and though he be harassed, one can
discern the thrill of an unconquerable hope. Instead of crushing man under
the iron hand of the Justice-dealer, he makes him feel the kindness of the
Father who has got all ready, long before its birth, for the feeble little
child: "The comforts of Thy pity received me, as I have heard from the
father and mother of my flesh. . . . And so the comfort of woman's milk was
ready for me. For my mother and my nurses did not fill their own bosoms,
but Thou, O Lord, by their means gavest me the food of infancy, according
to Thy ordinance. . . . "
And see! his heart overflows at this remembrance of his mother's milk. The
great doctor humbles his style, makes it simple and familiar, to tell us of
his first mewlings, and of his baby angers and joys. He too was a father;
he knew what is a new-born child, and a young mother who gives it suck,
because he had seen that with his own eyes close beside him. All the small
bothers which mingle with the pleasures of fatherhood he had experienced
himself. In his own son he studied himself.
* * * * *
This child, born of a Christian mother, and who was to become the great
defender of the faith, was not christened at his birth. In the early
Church, and especially in the African Church, it was not usual to do so.
The baptismal day was put as far off as possible, from the conviction that
the sins committed after the sacrament were much more serious than those
which went before. The Africans, very practical folk, clearly foresaw that
they would sin again even after baptism, but they wanted to sin at a better
rate, and lessen the inflictions of penance. This penance in Augustin's
time was far from being as hard as in the century before. Nevertheless, the
remembrance of the old severity always remained, and the habit was taken to
put off baptism so as not to discourage sinners overmuch.
Monnica, always sedulous to conform with the customs of her country and
the traditions of her Church, fell in with this practice. Perhaps she may
have had also the opposition of her husband to face, for he being a pagan
would not have cared to give too many pledges to the Christians, nor to
compromise himself in the eyes of his fellow-pagans by shewing that he
was so far under the control of Christian zealots as to have his child
baptized out of the ordinary way. There was a middle course, and this was
to inscribe the child among the catechumens. According to the rite of the
first admission to the lowest order of catechumens, the sign of the cross
was made on Augustin's forehead, and the symbolic salt placed between his
lips. And so they did not baptize him. Possibly this affected his whole
life. He lacked the baptismal modesty. Even when he was become a bishop, he
never quite cast off the old man that had splashed through all the pagan
uncleannesses. Some of his words are painfully broad for chaste ears. The
influence of African conditions does not altogether account for this. It is
only too plain that the son of Patricius had never known entire virginity
of soul.
They named him Aurelius Augustinus. Was Aurelius his family name? We cannot
tell. The Africans always applied very fantastically the rules of Roman
nomenclature. Anyhow, this name was common enough in Africa. The Bishop of
Carthage, primate of the province and a friend of Augustin, was also called
Aurelius. Pious commentators have sought to find in this name an omen of
Augustin's future renown as an orator. They have remarked that the word
_aurum_, gold, is contained in Aurelius--a prophetic indication of the
golden mouth of the great preacher of Hippo.
Meanwhile, he was a baby like any other baby, who only knew, as he tells
us, how to take his mother's breast. However, he speaks of nurses who
suckled him; no doubt these were servants or slaves of the household.
They gave him their milk, like those Algerian women who, to-day, if their
neighbour is called away, take her child and feed it. Besides, with them
children are weaned much later than with us. You can see mothers sitting at
their doors put down their work and call to a child of two or three playing
in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember
these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they
made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer.
The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the
servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the
populace and small trader class. He learned Punic without thinking about
it, in playing with other children of Thagaste, just as the sons of our
colonists learn Arab in playing with little boys who wear chechias on their
heads.
He is a Christian, a bishop, already a venerated Father, consulted by the
whole Catholic world, and he tells us all that. He tells it in a serious
and contrite way, with a manifest anxiety to attribute to God, as the sole
cause, all the benefits which embellished his childhood, as well as to
deplore his faults and wretchedness, fatal consequence of the original
Fall. And still, we can make out clearly that these suave and far-off
memories have a charm for him which he cannot quite guard himself against.
The attitude of the author of the _Confessions_ is ambiguous and a little
constrained. The father who has loved his child, who has joined in his
games, struggles in him against the theologian who later on was to uphold
the doctrine of Grace against the heretics. He feels that he must shew, not
only that Grace is necessary for salvation and that little children ought
to be baptized, but that they are capable of sinning. Yes, the children sin
even at nurse. And Augustin relates this story of a baby that he had seen:
"I know, because I have seen, jealousy in a babe. It could not speak, yet
it eyed its foster-brother _with pale cheeks and looks of hate_. " Children
are already men. The egoism and greediness of the grown man may be already
descried in the newly born.
However, the theologian of Grace was not able to drive from his mind
this verse of the Gospel: _Sinite ad me parvulos venire_--"Suffer little
children to come unto Me. " But he interprets this in a very narrow sense,
luring it into an argument which furthers his case. For him, the small
height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can
enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to
take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from
their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness for
symbols, favoured.
Well, let us dare to say it: Augustin goes wrong here. Such is the penalty
of human thought, which in its justest statements always wounds some
truth less clear or mutilates some tender sentiment. Radically, Augustin
is right. The child is wicked as man is. We know it. But against the
relentlessness of the theologian we place the divine gentleness of Christ:
"Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of
God. "
IV
THE FIRST GAMES
"I loved to play," Augustin says, in telling us of those far-off years.
Is it surprising if this quick and supple intelligence, who mastered
without effort, and as if by instinct, the encyclopædic knowledge of his
age, who found himself at his ease amidst the deepest abstractions, did, at
the beginning, take life as a game?
The amusements of the little Africans of to-day are not very many, nor very
various either. They have no inventive imagination. In this matter their
French playfellows have taught them a good deal. If they play marbles, or
hopscotch, or rounders, it is in imitation of the _Roumis_. And yet they
are great little players. Games of chance attract them above all. At these
they spend hour after hour, stretched out flat on their stomachs in some
shady corner, and they play with an astonishing intensity of passion. All
their attention is absorbed in what they are about; they employ on the game
all the cunning of their wits, precociously developed, and so soon stuck
fast in material things.
When Augustin recalls the games of his childhood, he only mentions "nuts,"
handball, and birds. To capture a bird, that winged, light, and brilliant
thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth. But in
Africa, where there are plenty of birds, big people as well as little
love them. In the Moorish cafés, in the wretchedest _gourbis_, cages made
of reeds are hung on the walls, all rustling with trills and fluttering
of wings. Quail, thrushes, nightingales are imprisoned in them. The
nightingale, the singing-bird beyond all others, so difficult to tame, is
the honoured guest, the privileged dweller in these rustic cages.
still upon the lips of the devout.
This universal genius, who during forty years was the speaking-trumpet of
Christendom, was also the man of one special century and country. Augustin
of Thagaste is the great African.
Well may we be proud of him and adopt him as one of our glories--we who
have kept up, for now almost a century, a struggle like to that which
he maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who consider Africa
as an extension of France. More than any other writer, he has expressed
the temperament and the genius of his country. This motley Africa, with
its eternal mixture of races at odds with one another, its jealous
sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violence
of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and its
quick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous, its
materialism and its mysticism, its austerity and its luxury, its
resignation to servitude and its instincts of independence, its hunger
to rule--all that comes out with singularly vivid touches in the work of
Augustin. Not only was he his country's voice, but, as far as he could, he
realized its old dream of dominion. The supremacy in spiritual matters that
Carthage disputed so long and bitterly with Rome, it ended by obtaining,
thanks to Augustin. As long as he lived, the African Church was the
mistress of the Churches of the West.
As for me--if I may venture to refer to myself in such a matter--I have had
the joy to recognize in him, besides the Saint and Teacher whom I revere,
the ideal type of the Latin of Africa. The image of which I descried the
outline long ago through the mirages of the South in following the waggons
of my rugged heroes, I have seen at last become definite, grow clear, wax
noble and increase to the very heaven, in following the traces of Augustin.
And even supposing that the life of this child of Thagaste, the son of
Monnica, were not intermingled so deeply with ours, though he were for us
only a foreigner born in a far-off land, nevertheless he would still remain
one of the most fascinating and luminous souls who have shone amid our
darkness and warmed our sadness--one of the most human and most divine
creatures who have trod our highways.
THE FIRST PART
DAYS OF CHILDHOOD
Sed delectabat ludere.
"Only, I liked to play. "
_Confessions_, I, 9.
I
AN AFRICAN FREE-TOWN SUBJECT TO ROME
Little streets, quite white, which climb up to clay-formed hills deeply
furrowed by the heavy winter rains; between the double row of houses,
brilliant in the morning sun, glimpses of sky of a very tender blue; here
and there, in the strip of deep shade which lies along the thresholds,
white figures crouched upon rush-mats--indolent outlines, draped with
bright colours, or muffled in rough and sombre wool-stuffs; a horseman who
passes, bent almost in two in his saddle, the big hat of the South flung
back over his shoulders, and encouraging with his heel the graceful trot of
his horse--such is Thagaste as we see it to-day, and such undoubtedly it
appeared to the traveller in the days of Augustin.
Like the French town built upon its ruins, the African free-city lay in a
sort of plain taken between three round hills. One of them, the highest
one, which is now protected by a _bordj_, must have been defended in old
days by a _castellum_. Full-flowing waters moisten the land. To those
coming from the stony regions about Constantine and Setif, or the vast bare
plain of the Medjerda, Thagaste gives an impression of freshness and cool.
It is a laughing place, full of greenery and running water. To the Africans
it offers a picture of those northern countries which they have never seen,
with its wooded mountains covered by pines and cork trees and ilex. It
presents itself as a land of mountain and forest--especially forest. It is
a hunter's country. Game is plentiful there--boar, hare, redwing, quail,
partridge. In Augustin's time, wild beasts were apparently more numerous in
the district than they are to-day. When he compares his adversaries, the
Donatists, to roaring lions, he speaks like a man who knows what a lion is.
To the east and west, wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits,
streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens--there
you have Thagaste and the country round about--the world, in fact, as
it revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. But towards the
south the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed down
as blunted cones, or jutted in slim Tables of the Law; the sterility
of the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. This
full-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light,
however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs into
waves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight for
the eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a land
of the sun.
To say the least, it is a country of strongly marked features which affords
the strangest contrast with the surrounding districts. This wooded Numidia,
with its flowing brooks, its fields where the cattle graze, differs in the
highest degree from the Numidia towards Setif--a wide, desolate plain,
where the stubble of the wheat-fields, the sandy _steppes_, roll away in
monotonous undulations to the cloudy barrier of Mount Atlas which closes
the horizon. And this rough and melancholy plain in its turn offers a
striking contrast with the coast region of Boujeiah and Hippo, which is not
unlike the Italian Campania in its mellowness and gaiety. Such clear-cut
differences between the various parts of the same province doubtless
explain the essential peculiarities of the Numidian character. The bishop
Augustin, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this
country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it
the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature.
Of course, Thagaste did not pretend to be a capital. It was a free-town of
the second or third order; but its distance from the great centres gave it
a certain importance. The neighbouring free-towns, Thubursicum, Thagura,
were small. Madaura and Theveste, rather larger, had not perhaps the same
commercial importance. Thagaste was placed at the junction of many Roman
roads. There the little Augustin, with other children of his age, would
have a chance to admire the out-riders and equipages of the Imperial
Mail, halted before the inns of the town. What we can be sure of is that
Thagaste, then as now, was a town of passage and of traffic, a half-way
stopping-place for the southern and coast towns, as well as for those of
the Proconsulate and Numidia. And like the present Souk-Ahras, Thagaste
must have been above all a market. Bread-stuffs and Numidian wines were
bartered for the flocks of the Aures, leather, dates, and the esparto
basket-work of the regions of Sahara. The marbles of Simitthu, the
citron-wood of which they made precious tables, were doubtless handled
there. The neighbouring forests could furnish building materials to the
whole country. Thagaste was the great mart of woodland Numidia, the
warehouse and the bazaar, where to this day the nomad comes to lay in a
stock of provisions, and stares with childish delight at the fine things
produced by the inventive talent of the workers who live in towns.
Thus images of plenty and joy surrounded the cradle of Augustin. The smile
of Latin beauty welcomed him also from his earliest steps. It is true that
Thagaste was not what is called a fine city. The fragments of antiquity
which have been unearthed there are of rather inferior workmanship. But how
little is needed to give wings to the imagination of an intelligent child!
At all events, Thagaste had a bathing-hall paved with mosaics and perhaps
ornamented with statues; Augustin used to bathe there with his father.
And again, it is probable that, like the neighbouring Thubursicum and
other free-cities of the same level, it had its theatre, its forum, its
nymph-fountains, perhaps even its amphitheatre. Of all that nothing
has been found. Certain inscribed stone tablets, capitals and shafts
of columns, a stone with an inscription which belonged to a Catholic
church--that is all which has been discovered up to this present time.
Let us not ask for the impossible. Thagaste had columns--nay, perhaps a
whole street between a double range of columns, as at Thimgad. That would
be quite enough to delight the eyes of a little wondering boy. A column,
even injured, or scarcely cleansed from wrack and rubbish, has about it
something impressive. It is like a free melody singing among the heavy
masses of the building. To this hour, in our Algerian villages, the mere
sight of a broken column entrances and cheers us--a white ghost of beauty
streaming up from the ruins among the modern hovels.
There were columns at Thagaste.
II
THE FAMILY OF A SAINT
It was in this pleasant little town, shaded and beautified for many years
now by the arts of Rome, that the parents of Augustin lived.
His father, Patricius, affords us a good enough type of the Romanized
African. He belonged to the order of _Decuriones_, to the "very brilliant
urban council of Thagaste" (_splendidissimus ordo Thagastensis_), as an
inscription at Souk-Ahras puts it. Although these strong epithets may be
said to be part of the ordinary official phraseology, they indicate, just
the same, the importance which went with such a position. In his township,
Patricius was a kind of personage. His son assures us that he was poor, but
we may suspect the holy bishop of exaggerating through Christian humility.
Patricius must certainly have owned more than twenty-five acres of land,
for this was made a condition of being elected to the _curia_. He had
vineyards and orchards, of which Augustin later on recalled the plentiful
and sweet-tasting fruits. In short, he lived in considerable style. It
is true that in Africa household expenses have never at any time been a
great extravagance. Still, the sons of Patricius had a pedagogue, a slave
specially engaged to keep them under his eye, like all the children of
families comfortably off.
It has been said that as Augustin's father was a member of the _curia_,
he must have been a ruined man. The Decurions, who levied taxes and made
themselves responsible for their collection, were obliged to supply any
deficiency in the revenue out of their own money. Patricius, it is thought,
must have been one of the numerous victims of this disastrous system. But
no doubt there were a good many exceptions. Besides, there is nothing in
Augustin's reminiscences which authorizes us to believe that his father
ever knew embarrassment, to say nothing of actual poverty. What seems by
far the most probable is that he lived as well as he could upon the income
of his estate as a small country landowner. In Africa people are satisfied
with very little. Save for an unusually bad year following a time of long
drought, or a descent of locusts, the land always gives forth enough to
feed its master.
To hunt, to ride horseback, now and then to go on parade, to look after
his small-holders and agricultural slaves, to drive one of those bargains
in which African cunning triumphs--such were the employments of Patricius.
In short, he drifted through life on his little demesne. Sometimes this
indolent man was overcome by a sudden passion for work; or again he was
seized by furious rages. He was violent and brutal. At such moments he
struck out right and left. He would even have hit his wife or flogged the
skin off her back if the quietude of this woman, her dignity and Christian
mildness, had not overawed him. Let us not judge this kind of conduct by
our own; we shall never understand it. The ancient customs, especially the
African customs, were a disconcerting mixture of intense refinement and
heedless brutality.
That is why it will not do to exaggerate the outbursts of Patricius, which
his son mentions discreetly. Although he may not have been very faithful to
his wife, that was in those days, more than in ours, a venial sin in the
eyes of the world. At heart the African has always longed for a harem in
his house; he inclines naturally to the polygamy of Muslemism. In Carthage,
and elsewhere, public opinion was full of indulgence for the husband who
allowed himself liberties with the serving-women. People laughed at it, and
excused the man. It is true they were rather harder on the matron who took
the same kind of liberty with her men-slaves. However, that went on too.
The Bishop of Hippo, in his sermons, strongly rebuked the Christian married
couples for these frequent adulteries which were scarcely regarded as
errors.
Patricius was a pagan, and this partly explains his laxity. It would
doubtless be going too far to say that he remained faithful to paganism
all his life. It is not likely that this urban councillor of Thagaste was
a particularly assured pagan. Speculative and intellectual considerations
made a very moderate appeal to him. He was not an arguer like his son. He
was pagan from habit, from that instinctive conservatism of the citizen
and landowner who sticks obstinately to his class and family traditions.
Prudence and diplomacy had also something to do with it. Many great
landlords continued to defend and practise paganism, probably from motives
similar to those of Patricius himself. As for him, he had no desire to get
wrong with the important and influential people of the country; he might
have need of their protection to save his small property from the ravenous
public treasury. Moreover, the best-paid posts were still controlled by the
pagan priesthood. And so Augustin's father thought himself very wise in
dealing cautiously with a religion which was always so powerful, and
rewarded its adherents so well.
But for all that, it is undeniable that paganism about this time was in an
awkward position from a political point of view. The Government eyed it
with disapproval. Since the death of Constantine, the "accursed emperors"
had waged against it a furious war. In 353, just before the birth of
Augustin, Constantius promulgated an edict renewing the order for the
closing of the temples and the abolition of sacrifices--and that too under
pain of death and confiscation. But in distant provinces, such as Numidia,
the action of the central power was slow and irregular. It was often
represented by officials who were hostile or indifferent to Christianity.
The local aristocracy and their following scoffed at it more or less
openly. In their immense villas, behind the walls of their parks, the rich
landowners offered sacrifices and organized processions and feasts as
if there were no law at all. Patricius knew all that. And, on the other
side, he could take note of the encroachments of the new religion. During
the first half of the fourth century Thagaste had been conquered by the
Donatists. Since the edict of Constans against these schismatics, the
inhabitants of the little city had come back to Catholicism out of fear of
the severity of the imperial government. But the settlement was far from
being complete and final. As a consequence of the edict, the whole region
of the Aures had been in revolution. The Bishop of Bagai, fortified in
his episcopal city and basilica, had stood an actual siege from the Roman
troops. Almost everywhere the struggle between Donatists and Catholics
still went on below the surface. There cannot be the least doubt that
Thagaste took its share in these quarrels. To those who urged him to be
baptized, the father of Augustin might well answer with ironic politeness:
"I am only waiting till you agree among yourselves, to see where the truth
lies. " In his heart this rather lukewarm pagan had no inveterate dislike to
Christianity.
What proves it at once is that he married a Christian.
How did Monnica become the wife of Patricius? How did these two beings, so
little alike, between whom there was such a great difference of age, not to
mention all the rest, come to join their fate? Those are questions which
it would never have occurred to the people of Thagaste to ask. Patricius
married to be like everybody else--and also because he was well over forty,
and his mother an old woman who would soon be no longer able to run his
house.
Monnica also had her mother. The two old women had a meeting, with many
politenesses and ceremonious bowings, and because the thing appeared to
them reasonable and most suitable, they settled the marriage. Had Patricius
ever seen the girl that he was going to take, according to custom, so as to
have a child-bearer and housewife? It is quite likely he had not. Was she
pretty, rich, or poor? He considered such matters as secondary, since the
marriage was not a love-match but a traditional duty to fulfil. If the
union was respectable, that was quite enough. But however the matter fell
out, what is certain is that Monnica was very young. She was twenty-two
when Augustin was born, and he was probably not her first child. We know
that she was hardly marriageable when she was handed over, as Arab parents
do to-day with their adolescent or little girls, to the man who was going
to marry her. Now in Africa girls become marriageable at a very early age.
They are married at fourteen, sometimes even at twelve. Perhaps she was
seventeen or eighteen at most when she married Patricius. She must have had
first a son, Navigius, whom we shall meet later on at Milan, and also a
daughter, of whom we do not even know the name, but who became a nun, and
superior of a convent in the diocese of Hippo. For us the features of these
two other children of Monnica and Patricius are obliterated. They are
concealed by the radiance of their illustrious great brother.
Monnica was fond of telling stories of her girlhood to her son. He has
handed down some of them to us.
She was brought up strictly, according to the system of that time. Both her
parents came of families which had been Christian, and Catholic-Christian,
for many generations. They had never been carried away by the Donatist
schism; they were people very obstinate in their convictions--a character
quite as frequent in Africa as its opposite, the kind of Numidian or Moor,
who is versatile and flighty. It is not unimportant that Augustin came from
this hard-headed race, for this it was, with the aid of God's grace, that
saved him--the energetic temper of his will.
Still, if the faith of the young Monnica was confirmed from her earliest
years, it is not so much to the lessons of her mother that she owed it,
as to the training of an old woman-servant of whom she always spoke with
gratitude. In the family of her master, this old woman had a place like the
one which to-day in a Turkish family is held by the nurse, the _dada_, who
is respected by all the harem and all the household. Doubtless she herself
was born in the house and had seen all the children born. She had carried
Monnica's father on her back when he was little, just as the Kabylian
women or the Bedouin nomads carry their babies still. She was a devoted
slave, just a bit unreasonable--a veritable housedog who in the zeal of
guardianship barks more than is necessary at the stranger who passes. She
was like the negress in the Arab houses to-day, who is often a better
Muslem, more hostile to the Christian, than her employers. The old woman
in Monnica's family had witnessed the last persecutions; she had perhaps
visited the confessors in prison; perhaps she had seen flow the blood of
the martyrs. These exciting and terrible scenes would have been graven on
her memory. What inflamed stories the old servant must have told her young
mistresses, what vital lessons of constancy and heroism! Monnica listened
to them eagerly.
Because of her great faith, this simple slave was revered as a saint by
her owners, who entrusted her with the supervision of their daughters. She
proved a stern governess, who would stand no trifling with her rules. She
prevented these girls from drinking even water except at meals. Cruel
suffering for little Africans! Thagaste is not far from the country of
thirst. But the old woman said to them:
"You drink water now because you can't get at the wine. In time to come,
when you are married and have bins and cellars of your own, you'll turn up
your nose at water, and your habit of drinking will be too much for you. "
Monnica came near fulfilling the prophecy of the honest woman. It was
before she was married. As she was very well-behaved and very temperate,
she used to be sent to the cellar to draw the wine from the cask. Before
pouring it into the flagon she would sip just a little. Being unaccustomed
to wine, she was not able to drink more; it was too strong for her gullet.
She did this, not because she liked the wine, but from naughtiness, to play
a trick on her parents who trusted her, and also, of course, because it was
prohibited. Each time she swallowed a little more, and so it went on till
she ended by finding it rather nice, and came to drinking greedily one
cup after another. One day a slave-girl, who went with her to the cellar,
began to grumble. Monnica gave her a sharp answer. Upon this the girl
called Monnica a drunkard. . . . Drunkard! This bitter taunt so humiliated the
self-respect of the future saint, that she got the better of her taste for
drink. Augustin does not say it was through piety she did this, but because
she felt the ugliness of such a vice.
There is a certain roughness in this story of childhood, the roughness of
ancient customs, with which is always mingled some decency or dignity.
Christianity did the work of polishing the soul of Monnica. At the time we
are dealing with, if she was already a very devout young girl, she was far
as yet from being the grand Christian that she became afterwards.
When she married Patricius she was a girl very reserved and cold to all
appearances (in reality, she was very passionate), precise in attending to
her religious duties, even a little strict, with her exaggeration of the
Christian austerity in her hate of all the brutalities and all the careless
morals that paganism condoned. Nevertheless, this rigid soul knew how to
bend when it was necessary. Monnica had tact, suppleness, and, when it
was needed, a very acute and very reasonable practical sense of which she
gave many a proof in the bringing up and management of her son Augustin.
This soul, hard for herself, veiled her uncompromising religion under an
unchangeable sweetness which was in her rather the work of grace than a
natural gift.
There can be little doubt that her behaviour and character greatly
disturbed Patricius at the beginning of their married life. Perhaps he
regretted the marriage.
What use had he for this nun alongside of him!
Both of them must have suffered the usual annoyances which always appeared
before long in unions of this kind between pagan and Christian. True, it
was no longer the time of Tertullian, the heroic century of persecutions,
when the Christian women glided into the prisons to kiss the shackles of
the martyrs. (What a revenge did woman take then for her long and enforced
confinement to the women's apartments! And how outrageous such conduct must
have seemed to a husband brought up in the Roman way! ) But the practices
of the Christian life established a kind of intermittent divorce between
husbands and wives of different religion. Monnica often went out, either
alone, or accompanied by a faithful bondwoman. She had to attend the
services of the Church, to go about the town visiting the poor and giving
alms. And there were the fast-days which occurred two or three times a
week, and especially the long fast of Lent--a grievous nuisance when the
husband wanted to give a dinner-party just on those particular days! On
the vigil of festivals, Monnica would spend a good part of the night in
the Basilica. Regularly, doubtless on Sundays, she betook herself to the
cemetery, or to some chapel raised to the memory of a martyr who was often
buried there--in fact, they called these chapels "Memorials" (_memoriæ_).
There were many of these chapels--even too many in the opinion of austere
Christians. Monnica went from one to another carrying in a large basket
made of willow branches some pieces of minced meat, bread, and wine mixed
with water. She met her friends in these places. They would sit down around
the tombs, of which some were shaped like tables, unpack the provisions,
and eat and drink piously in honour of the martyr. This was a residue
of pagan superstition among the Christians. These pious _agapæ_, or
love-feasts, often turned into disgusting orgies. When Augustin became
Bishop of Hippo he had considerable trouble to get his people out of the
habit of them. Notwithstanding his efforts, the tradition still lasts.
Every Friday the Muslem women keep up the custom of visiting the cemeteries
and the marabouts. Just as in the time of St. Monnica, they sit around the
tombs, so cool with their casing of painted tiles, in the shade of the
cypress and eucalyptus. They gobble sweetmeats, they gossip, they laugh,
they enjoy themselves--the husbands are not there.
Monnica made these visits in a really pious state of mind, and was far
from trying to find in them opportunities for lewdness or carouse. She was
content to drink a little wine very carefully--she always bore in mind her
youthful sin. Besides, this wine weakened with water that she brought from
the house, was tepid by the time she reached the cemetery; it would be a
drink of very moderate relish, little likely to stimulate the senses. She
distributed what was left of it among the needy, together with the contents
of her basket, and came back modestly to her house.
But however staid and reserved she might be, still these outings gave rise
to scandalous talk. They annoyed a suspicious husband. All the Africans are
that. Marital jealousy was not invented by Islam. Moreover, in Monnica's
time men and women took part in these funeral love-feasts and mingled
together disturbingly. Patricius got cross about it, and about a good many
other things too. His old mother chafed his suspicions by carrying to
him the ugly gossip and even the lies of the servants about his wife. By
dint of patience and mildness and attentions, Monnica ended by disarming
her mother-in-law and making it clear that her conduct was perfect. The
old woman flew into a rage with the servants who had lied to her, and
denounced them to her son. Patricius, like a good head of a household, had
them whipped to teach them not to lie any more. Thanks to this exemplary
punishment, and the good sense of the young wife, peace reigned once more
in the family.
Women, friends of Monnica, were amazed that the good understanding was
not oftener upset, at least in an open manner, between husband and wife.
Everybody in Thagaste knew the quick-tempered and violent character of
Patricius. And yet there were no signs that he beat his wife. Nor did
any one say he did. Other women who had less passionate husbands were
nevertheless beaten by them. When they came to Monnica's house they shewed
her the marks of the whacks they had got, their faces swollen from blows,
and they burst out in abuse of men, clamouring against their lechery,
which, said these matrons, was the cause of the ill-treatment they had to
endure.
"Blame your own tongue," retorted Monnica.
According to her, women should close their eyes to the infidelities of
their husbands and avoid arguing with them when they were angry. Silence,
submissiveness, were the all-powerful arms. And since, as a young woman,
she had a certain natural merriment, she added, laughing:
"Remember what was read to you on your wedding-day. You were told that you
are the handmaids of your husbands. Don't rebel against your masters! . . . "
Possibly this was a keen criticism of the pagan code, so hard in its rules.
Still, in this matter, the Roman law was in agreement with the Gospel.
Sincere Christian as she was, the wife of Patricius never had any quarrel
with him on account of his infidelities. So much kindness and resignation
touched the dissolute and brutal husband, who besides was an excellent
man and warm-hearted. The modesty of his wife, after a while, made her
attractive in his eyes. He loved her, so to speak, on the strength of
his respect and admiration for her. He would indeed have been a churl to
find fault with a wife who interfered with him so little and who was a
perfect housekeeper, as we shall see later on when we come to her life at
Cassicium. In one point, where even she did not intend it, she forwarded
the interests of her husband by gaining him the good-will of the Christians
in Thagaste; while he, on his side, could say to the pagans who looked
askance at his marriage: "Am I not one of yourselves? "
In spite of all the differences between him and Monnica, Patricius was a
contented husband.
III
THE COMFORT OF THE MILK
Augustin came into this world the thirteenth of November of the year of
Christ 354.
It was just one little child more in this sensual and pleasure-loving
Africa, land of sin and of carnal productiveness, where children are
born and die like the leaves. But the son of Monnica and Patricius was
predestined: he was not to die in the cradle like so many other tiny
Africans.
Even if he had not been intended for great things, if he had been only a
head in the crowd, the arrival of this baby ought, all the same, to affect
us, for to the Christian, the destiny of the obscurest and humblest of
souls is a matter of importance. Forty years afterwards, Augustin, in his
_Confessions_, pondered this slight ordinary fact of his birth, which
happened almost unnoticed by the inhabitants of Thagaste, and in truth it
seems to him a great event, not because it concerns himself, bishop and
Father of the Church, but because it is a soul which at this imperceptible
point of time comes into the world.
Let us clearly understand Augustin's thought. Souls have been ransomed by a
Victim of infinite value. They have themselves an infinite value. Nothing
which goes on in them can be ignored. Their most trifling sins, their
feeblest stirrings towards virtue, are vital for the eternity of their lot.
All shall be attributed to them by the just Judge. The theft of an apple
will weigh perhaps as heavily in the scales as the seizure of a province
or a kingdom. The evil of sin is in the evil intention. Now the fate
of a soul, created by God, on Him depends. Hence everything in a human
life assumes an extreme seriousness and importance. In the history of a
creature, all is worthy of being examined, weighed, studied, and perhaps
also, for the edification of others, told.
Here is an altogether new way of regarding life, and, proceeding from that,
of understanding art. Even as the slaves, thanks to Christianity, came into
the spiritual city, so the most minute realities by this outlook are to be
included in literature. The _Confessions_ will be the first model of the
art of the new era. A deep and magnificent realism, because it goes even
to the very depths of the divine--utterly distinct, at any rate, from
our surface realism of mere amusement--is about to arise from this new
conception. Without doubt, in Augustin's eyes, beauty dwells in all things,
in so far forth as beauty is a reflection of the order and the thought
of the Word. But it has also a more essential character--it has a moral
signification and value. Everything, in a word, can be the instrument of
the loss or the redemption of a soul. The most insignificant of our actions
reverberates to infinitude on our fate. Regarded from this point, both
things and beings commence to live a life more closely leagued together and
at the same time more private; more individual and more general. All is in
the lump, and nevertheless all is separate. Our salvation concerns only
ourselves, and yet through charity it becomes involved with the salvation
of our fellows.
In this spirit let us look at the cradle of Augustin. Let us look at it
with the eyes of Augustin himself, and also, perchance, of Monnica. Bending
over the frail body of the little child he once was, he puts to himself
all the great desperate questions which have shaken humanity for thousands
of years. The mystery of life and death rises before him, formidable. It
tortures him to the point of anguish, of confusion: "Yet suffer me to speak
before Thy mercy, me who am but dust and ashes. Yea, suffer me to speak,
for, behold, I speak not to man who scorns me, but to Thy mercy. Even Thou
perhaps dost scorn me, but Thou wilt turn and have pity. For what is it
that I would say, O Lord my God, save that I know not whence I came hither
into this dying life, shall I call it, or living death? . . . And, lo, my
infancy has long been dead, and I live. But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest
and in whom nothing ever dies--tell me, I beseech Thee, O God, and have
mercy on my misery, tell me whether another life of mine died before my
infancy began. "
One is reminded here of Pascal's famous prosopopoeia: "I know not who
has put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor myself. I am in a
terrible ignorance about everything. . . . All I know is that I must soon die,
but what I know least of all is this very death which I cannot escape. "
The phrases of the _Pensées_ are only the echo of the phrases of the
_Confessions_. But how different is the tone! Pascal's charge against human
ignorance is merciless. The God of Port-Royal has the hard and motionless
face of the ancient Destiny: He withdraws into the clouds, and only shews
Himself at the end to raise up His poor creature. In Augustin the accent
is tender, trusting, really like a son, and though he be harassed, one can
discern the thrill of an unconquerable hope. Instead of crushing man under
the iron hand of the Justice-dealer, he makes him feel the kindness of the
Father who has got all ready, long before its birth, for the feeble little
child: "The comforts of Thy pity received me, as I have heard from the
father and mother of my flesh. . . . And so the comfort of woman's milk was
ready for me. For my mother and my nurses did not fill their own bosoms,
but Thou, O Lord, by their means gavest me the food of infancy, according
to Thy ordinance. . . . "
And see! his heart overflows at this remembrance of his mother's milk. The
great doctor humbles his style, makes it simple and familiar, to tell us of
his first mewlings, and of his baby angers and joys. He too was a father;
he knew what is a new-born child, and a young mother who gives it suck,
because he had seen that with his own eyes close beside him. All the small
bothers which mingle with the pleasures of fatherhood he had experienced
himself. In his own son he studied himself.
* * * * *
This child, born of a Christian mother, and who was to become the great
defender of the faith, was not christened at his birth. In the early
Church, and especially in the African Church, it was not usual to do so.
The baptismal day was put as far off as possible, from the conviction that
the sins committed after the sacrament were much more serious than those
which went before. The Africans, very practical folk, clearly foresaw that
they would sin again even after baptism, but they wanted to sin at a better
rate, and lessen the inflictions of penance. This penance in Augustin's
time was far from being as hard as in the century before. Nevertheless, the
remembrance of the old severity always remained, and the habit was taken to
put off baptism so as not to discourage sinners overmuch.
Monnica, always sedulous to conform with the customs of her country and
the traditions of her Church, fell in with this practice. Perhaps she may
have had also the opposition of her husband to face, for he being a pagan
would not have cared to give too many pledges to the Christians, nor to
compromise himself in the eyes of his fellow-pagans by shewing that he
was so far under the control of Christian zealots as to have his child
baptized out of the ordinary way. There was a middle course, and this was
to inscribe the child among the catechumens. According to the rite of the
first admission to the lowest order of catechumens, the sign of the cross
was made on Augustin's forehead, and the symbolic salt placed between his
lips. And so they did not baptize him. Possibly this affected his whole
life. He lacked the baptismal modesty. Even when he was become a bishop, he
never quite cast off the old man that had splashed through all the pagan
uncleannesses. Some of his words are painfully broad for chaste ears. The
influence of African conditions does not altogether account for this. It is
only too plain that the son of Patricius had never known entire virginity
of soul.
They named him Aurelius Augustinus. Was Aurelius his family name? We cannot
tell. The Africans always applied very fantastically the rules of Roman
nomenclature. Anyhow, this name was common enough in Africa. The Bishop of
Carthage, primate of the province and a friend of Augustin, was also called
Aurelius. Pious commentators have sought to find in this name an omen of
Augustin's future renown as an orator. They have remarked that the word
_aurum_, gold, is contained in Aurelius--a prophetic indication of the
golden mouth of the great preacher of Hippo.
Meanwhile, he was a baby like any other baby, who only knew, as he tells
us, how to take his mother's breast. However, he speaks of nurses who
suckled him; no doubt these were servants or slaves of the household.
They gave him their milk, like those Algerian women who, to-day, if their
neighbour is called away, take her child and feed it. Besides, with them
children are weaned much later than with us. You can see mothers sitting at
their doors put down their work and call to a child of two or three playing
in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember
these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they
made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer.
The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the
servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the
populace and small trader class. He learned Punic without thinking about
it, in playing with other children of Thagaste, just as the sons of our
colonists learn Arab in playing with little boys who wear chechias on their
heads.
He is a Christian, a bishop, already a venerated Father, consulted by the
whole Catholic world, and he tells us all that. He tells it in a serious
and contrite way, with a manifest anxiety to attribute to God, as the sole
cause, all the benefits which embellished his childhood, as well as to
deplore his faults and wretchedness, fatal consequence of the original
Fall. And still, we can make out clearly that these suave and far-off
memories have a charm for him which he cannot quite guard himself against.
The attitude of the author of the _Confessions_ is ambiguous and a little
constrained. The father who has loved his child, who has joined in his
games, struggles in him against the theologian who later on was to uphold
the doctrine of Grace against the heretics. He feels that he must shew, not
only that Grace is necessary for salvation and that little children ought
to be baptized, but that they are capable of sinning. Yes, the children sin
even at nurse. And Augustin relates this story of a baby that he had seen:
"I know, because I have seen, jealousy in a babe. It could not speak, yet
it eyed its foster-brother _with pale cheeks and looks of hate_. " Children
are already men. The egoism and greediness of the grown man may be already
descried in the newly born.
However, the theologian of Grace was not able to drive from his mind
this verse of the Gospel: _Sinite ad me parvulos venire_--"Suffer little
children to come unto Me. " But he interprets this in a very narrow sense,
luring it into an argument which furthers his case. For him, the small
height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can
enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to
take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from
their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness for
symbols, favoured.
Well, let us dare to say it: Augustin goes wrong here. Such is the penalty
of human thought, which in its justest statements always wounds some
truth less clear or mutilates some tender sentiment. Radically, Augustin
is right. The child is wicked as man is. We know it. But against the
relentlessness of the theologian we place the divine gentleness of Christ:
"Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of
God. "
IV
THE FIRST GAMES
"I loved to play," Augustin says, in telling us of those far-off years.
Is it surprising if this quick and supple intelligence, who mastered
without effort, and as if by instinct, the encyclopædic knowledge of his
age, who found himself at his ease amidst the deepest abstractions, did, at
the beginning, take life as a game?
The amusements of the little Africans of to-day are not very many, nor very
various either. They have no inventive imagination. In this matter their
French playfellows have taught them a good deal. If they play marbles, or
hopscotch, or rounders, it is in imitation of the _Roumis_. And yet they
are great little players. Games of chance attract them above all. At these
they spend hour after hour, stretched out flat on their stomachs in some
shady corner, and they play with an astonishing intensity of passion. All
their attention is absorbed in what they are about; they employ on the game
all the cunning of their wits, precociously developed, and so soon stuck
fast in material things.
When Augustin recalls the games of his childhood, he only mentions "nuts,"
handball, and birds. To capture a bird, that winged, light, and brilliant
thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth. But in
Africa, where there are plenty of birds, big people as well as little
love them. In the Moorish cafés, in the wretchedest _gourbis_, cages made
of reeds are hung on the walls, all rustling with trills and fluttering
of wings. Quail, thrushes, nightingales are imprisoned in them. The
nightingale, the singing-bird beyond all others, so difficult to tame, is
the honoured guest, the privileged dweller in these rustic cages.
