Sin is what is essential to the direct relation, since it explains how a beneficent Deity can cause men to suffer, and how, in spite of this, individual souls can be what is of most importance in the created world. It is therefore not surprising that the theology upon which the Reformation relied should be due to a man whose sense of sin was abnormal.
So much for the pears. Let us now see what the Confessions have to say on some other subjects.
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Augustine relates how he learnt Latin, painlessly, at his mother’s knee, but hated Greek, which they tried to teach him at school, because he was «urged vehemently with cruel threats and punishments.» To the end of his life, his knowledge of Greek remained slight. One might have supposed that he would go on, from this contrast, to draw a moral in favor of gentle methods in education. What he says, however, is:
«It is quite clear, then, that a free curiosity has more power to make us learn these things than a terrifying obligation. Only this obligation restrains the waverings of that freedom by Thy laws, O my God, Thy laws, from the master’s rod to the martyr’s trials, for Thy laws have the effect of mingling for us certain wholesale bitters, which recall us to Thee away from that pernicious blithesomeness, by means of which we depart from Thee.»
The schoolmaster’s blows, though they failed to make him know Greek, cured him of being perniciously blithesome, and were, on this ground, a desirable part of education. For those who make sin the most important of all human concerns, this view is logical. He goes on to point out that he sinned, not only as a school-boy, when he told lies and stole food, but even earlier; indeed he devotes a whole chapter (Bk. I, Ch. VII) to proving that even infants at the breast are full of sin—gluttony, jealousy, and other horrible vices.
When he reached adolescence, the lusts of the flesh overcame him. «Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust which hath licence through man’s viciousness, though forbidden by Thy
laws, took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it?» *
His father took no pains to prevent this evil, but confined himself to giving help in Augustine’s studies. His mother, Saint Monica, on the contrary, exhorted him to chastity, but in vain. And even she did not, at that time, suggest marriage, «lest my prospects might be embarrassed by the clog of a wife.»
At the age of sixteen he went to Carthage, «where there seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved
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* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. II.
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to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety. . . . To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness.» * These words describe his relation to a mistress whom he loved faithfully for many years, †and by whom he had a son, whom he also loved, and to whom, after his conversion, he gave much care in religious education.
The time came when he and his mother thought he ought to begin to think of marrying. He became engaged to a girl of whom she approved, and it was held necessary that he should break with his mistress. «My mistress,» he says, «being torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Africa [ Augustine was at this time in Milan], vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her.» ‡ As, however, the marriage could not take place for two years, owing to the girl’s youth, he took meanwhile another mistress, less official and less acknowledged. His conscience increasingly troubled him, and he used to pray: «Give me chastity and continence, only not yet.» § At last, before the time had come for his marriage, religion won a complete victory, and he dedicated the rest of his life to celibacy.
To return to an earlier time: in his nineteenth year, having achieved proficiency in rhetoric, he was recalled to philosophy by Cicero. He tried reading the Bible, but found it lacking in Ciceronian dignity. It was at this time that he became a Manichæan, which grieved his mother. By profession he was a teacher of rhetoric. He was addicted to astrology, to which, in later life, he was averse, because it teaches that «the inevitable cause of thy sin is in the sky.» ∥ He read philosophy, so far as it could be read in Latin; he mentions particularly Aristotle Ten Categories, which, he says, he understood without the help of a teacher. «And what did it profit me, that I, the vilest slave of evil passions, read by myself all the books of so-called ‘liberal’ arts;
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* Confessions, Bk. III, Ch. I.
§ Ibid., Bk. VIII, Ch. VII.
€ Ibid., Bk. IV, Ch. II.
â
€ Ibid., Bk. VI, Ch. XV. ¡
â
ˆ Ibid., Bk. IV, Ch. III. ¥
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and understood whatever I could read? . . . For I had my back to the light, and my face to the things enlightened; whence my face . . . itself was not enlightened.» * At this time he believed that God was a vast and bright body, and he himself a part of that body. One could wish that he had told in detail the tenets of the Manichæans, instead of merely saying they were erroneous.
It is interesting that Saint Augustine’s first reasons for rejecting the doctrines of Manichæus were scientific. He remembered—so he tells us †—what he had learned of astronomy from the writings of the best astronomers, «and I compared them with the sayings of Manichæus, who in his crazy folly has written much and copiously upon these subjects; but none of his reasoning of the solstices, nor equinoxes, nor eclipses, nor whatever of this kind I had learned in books of secular philosophy, was satisfactory to me. But I was commanded to believe; and yet it corresponded not with the reasonings obtained by calculations, and by my own observations, but was quite contrary.» He is careful to point out that scientific mistakes are not in themselves a sign of errors as to the faith, but only become so when delivered with an air of authority as known through divine inspiration. One wonders what he would have thought if he had lived in the time of Galileo.
In the hope of resolving his doubts, a Manichæan bishop named Faustus, reputed the most learned member of the sect, met him and reasoned with him. But «I found him first utterly ignorant of liberal sciences, save grammar, and that but in an ordinary way. But because he had read some of Tully’s Orations, a very few books of Seneca, some things of the poets, and such few volumes of his own sect, as were written in Latin and in logical order, and was daily practised in speaking, he acquired a certain eloquence, which proved the more pleasing and
seductive, because under the control of his good sense, and with a certain natural grace.» ‡
He found Faustus quite unable to solve his astronomical difficulties. The books of the Manichæans, he tells us, «are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, and stars, sun, and moon,» which do not agree with what has been discovered by astronomers; but when he questioned Faustus on these matters, Faustus frankly confessed his ignorance. «Even for this I liked him the better. For the modesty of a candid
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* Confessions, Bk. IV, Ch. XVI.
€ Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. III.
â
€ Ibid., Bk. V, Ch. VI. ¡
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mind is even more attractive than the knowledge of those things which I desired; and such I
found him, in all the more difficult and subtle questions.» *
This sentiment is surprisingly liberal; one would not have expected it in that age. Nor is it quite in harmony with Saint Augustine’s later attitude towards heretics.
At this time he decided to go to Rome, not, he says, because there the income of a teacher was higher than at Carthage, but because he had heard that classes were more orderly. At Carthage, the disorders perpetrated by students were such that teaching was almost impossible; but at Rome, while there was less disorder, students fraudulently evaded payment.
In Rome, he still associated with the Manichæans, but with less conviction of their rightness. He began to think that the Academics were right in holding that men ought to doubt everything. †He still, however, agreed with the Manichæans in thinking «that it is not we ourselves that sin, but that some other nature (what, I know not) sins in us,» and he believed Evil to be some kind of substance. This makes it clear that, before as after his conversion, the question of sin preoccupied him.
After about a year in Rome, he was sent to Milan by the Prefect Symmachus, in response to a request from that city for a teacher of rhetoric. At Milan he became acquainted with Ambrose, «known to
