that he gathered together the seeds of sensations and images which,
later on, were to burst forth into fiery and boiling metaphors in the
_Confessions_, and in his homilies and paraphrases of Holy Scripture. Later
on, he will not have the time to observe, or he will have lost the power.
Rhetoric will stretch its commonplace veil between him and the unceasing
springtide of the earth. Ambition will turn him away from those sights
which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then,
later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He
will no longer perceive the creation save at odd moments in a kind of
metaphysical dream, and, so to speak, across the glory of the Creator.
But in these youthful years all things burst upon him with extraordinary
violence and ecstasy. His undulled senses swallowed greedily the whole
banquet offered by this wide world to his hunger for pleasure. The fugitive
beauty of things and beings, with all their charms, revealed itself to
him in its newness: _novissimarum rerum fugaces pulchritudines, earumque
suavitates_. This craving for sensation will still exist in the great
Christian teacher, and betray itself in the warm and coloured figures
of his style. Of course, he was not as a worldly describer, who studies
to produce phrases which present an image, or arranges glittering
pictures--all such endeavours he knew nothing about. But by instinct, and
thanks to his warm African temperament, he was a kind of impressionist and
metaphysical poet.
If the rural landscape of Thagaste is reflected in certain passages--the
pleasantest and most well known--of the _Confessions_, all the intellectual
part of Augustin's work finds its symbolical commentary here in this arid
and light-splashed plain of Madaura. Like it, the thought of Augustin has
no shadows. Like it too, it is lightened by strange and splendid tints
which seem to come from far off, from a focal fire invisible to human eyes.
No modern writer has better praised the light--not only the immortal light
of the blessed, but that light which rests on the African fields, and
is on land and sea; and nobody has spoken of it with more amplitude and
wonder. The truth is, that in no country in the world, not even in Egypt,
in the rose-coloured lands of Karnak and Luxor, is the light more pure and
admirable than in these great bare plains of Numidia and the region of the
Sahara. Is there not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this
play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as
the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing--of
lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of
fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders
into darkness, even as ideas in the obscure depths of the intelligence
which reposes....
Not less than this land, stern even to sadness, but hot and sumptuous, the
town of Madaura must have impressed Augustin.
It was an old Numidian city, proud of its antiquity. Long before the Roman
conquest, it had been a fortress of King Syphax. Afterwards, the conquerors
settled there, and in the second century of our era, Apuleius, the most
famous of its children, could state before a proconsul, not without pride,
that Madaura was a very prosperous colony. It is probable that this old
town was not so much Romanized as its neighbours, Thimgad and Lambesa,
which were of recent foundation and had been built all at once by decree of
the Government. But it may well have been as Roman as Theveste, a no less
ancient city, where the population was probably just as mixed. Madaura,
like Theveste, had its temples with pillars and Corinthian porticoes, its
triumphal arches (these were run up everywhere), its forum surrounded by a
covered gallery and peopled with statues. Statues also were very liberally
distributed in those days. We know of at least three at Madaura which
Augustin mentions in one of his letters: A god Mars in his heroic
nakedness, and another Mars armed from head to foot; opposite, the statue
of a man, in realistic style, stretching out three fingers to neutralize
the evil eye. These familiar figures remained very clear in the
recollection of Augustin. In the evening, or at the hour of the siesta, he
had stretched himself under their pedestals and played at dice or bones in
the cool shade of the god Mars, or of the Man with outstretched fingers.
The slabs of marble of the portico made a good place to play or sleep.
Among these statues, there was one perhaps which interested the lad and
stimulated all his early ambitions--that of Apuleius, the great man of
Madaura, the orator, philosopher, sorcerer, who was spoken of from one end
to the other of Africa. By dint of gazing at this, and listening to the
praises of the great local author, did the young scholar become aware of
his vocation? Did he have from this time a confused sort of wish to become
one day another Apuleius, a Christian Apuleius--to surpass the reputation
of this celebrated pagan? These impressions and admirations of youth have
always a more or less direct influence upon what use a boy makes of his
talents.
Be that as it will, Augustin could not take a step in Madaura without
running against the legend of Apuleius, who was become almost a divinity
for his fellow-countrymen. He was looked upon not only as a sage, but as
a most wily nigromancer. The pagans compared him to Christ--nay, put him
higher than Christ. In their view he had worked much more astonishing
miracles than those of Jesus or of Apollonius of Tyana. And people told the
extravagant stories out of his _Metamorphoses_ as real, as having actually
happened. Nothing was seen on all sides but wizards, men changed into
animals, animals, or men and women, under some spell. In the inns, a man
watched with a suspicious look the ways of the maidservant who poured out
his drink or handed him a dish. Perhaps some magic potion was mingled with
the cheese or bread that she was laying on the table. It was an atmosphere
of feverish and delirious credulity. The pagan madness got the better of
the Christians themselves. Augustin, who had lived in this atmosphere, will
later find considerable trouble in maintaining his strong common sense amid
such an overflow of marvels.
For the moment, the fantasy of tales filled him with at least as much
enthusiasm as the supernatural. At Madaura he lived in a miraculous world,
where everything charmed his senses and his mind, and everything stimulated
his precocious instinct for Beauty.
More than Thagaste, no doubt, Madaura bore the marks of the building
genius of the Romans. Even to-day their descendants, the Italians, are the
masons of the world, after having been the architects. The Romans were the
building nation above all others. They it was who raised and established
towns upon the same model and according to the same ideal as an oration
or a poem. They really invented the house, _mansio_, not only the shelter
where one lives, but the building which itself lives, which triumphs over
years and centuries, a huge construction ornamental and sightly, existing
as much--and perhaps more--for the delight of the eyes as for usefulness.
The house, the _Town-with-deep-streets_, perfectly ordered, were a great
matter of amazement for the African nomad--he who passes and never settles
down anywhere. He hated them, doubtless, as the haunts of the soldier and
the publican, his oppressors, but he also regarded them with admiration
mixed with jealousy as the true expression of a race which, when it entered
a country, planted itself for eternity, and claimed to join magnificence
and beauty to the manifestation of its strength. The Roman ruins which
are scattered over modern Algeria humiliate ourselves by their pomp--us
who flatter ourselves that we are resuming the work of the Empire and
continuing its tradition. They are a permanent reproach to our mediocrity,
a continual incitement to grandeur and beauty. Of course, the Roman
architecture could not have had on Augustin, this still unformed young
African, the same effect as it has to-day on a Frenchman or a man from
Northern Europe. But it is certain that it formed, without his knowledge,
his thought and his power of sensation, and extended for him the lessons of
the Latin rhetoricians and grammarians.
All that was not exactly very Christian. But from these early school years
Augustin got further and further away from Christianity, and the examples
he had under his eyes, at Madaura were hardly likely to strengthen him
in his faith. It was hardly an edifying atmosphere there for a Catholic
youth who had a lively imagination, a pleasure-loving temperament, and who
liked pagan literature. The greatest part of the population were pagans,
especially among the aristocrats. The Decurions continued to preside at
festivals in honour of the old idols.
These festivals were frequent. The least excuse was taken to engarland
piously the doors of houses with branches, to bleed the sacrificial pig,
or slaughter the lamb. In the evening, squares and street corners were
illuminated. Little candles burned on all the thresholds. During the
mysteries of Bacchus, the town councillors themselves headed the popular
rejoicings. It was an African carnival, brutal and full of colour. People
got tipsy, pretended they were mad. For the sport of the thing, they
assaulted the passers and robbed them. The dull blows on tambourines, the
hysterical and nasal preludes of the flutes, excited an immense elation, at
once sensual and mystic. And all quieted down among the cups and leather
flagons of wine, the grease and meats of banquets in the open air. Even in
a country as sober as Africa, the pagan feasts were never much else than
excuses for gorging and orgies. Augustin, who after his conversion had only
sarcasms for the carnival of Madaura, doubtless went with the crowd, like
many other Christians. Rich and influential people gave the example. There
was danger of annoying them by making a group apart. And then, there was no
resisting the agreeableness of such festivals.
Perhaps he was even brought to these love-feasts by those in whose charge
he was. For, in fact, to whom had he been entrusted? Doubtless to some
host of Patricius, a pagan like himself. Or did he lodge with his master,
a grammarian, who kept a boarding-house for the boys? Almost all these
schoolmasters were pagan too. Is it wonderful that the Christian lessons
of Monnica and the nurses at Thagaste became more and more blurred in
Augustin's mind? Many years after, an old Madaura grammarian, called
Maximus, wrote to him in a tone of loving reproach: "Thou hast drawn away
from us"--_a secta nostra deviasti_. Did he wish to hint that at this time
Augustin had glided into paganism? Nothing is more unlikely. He himself
assures us that the name of Christ remained always "graven on his heart."
But while he was at Madaura he lived indifferently with pagans and
Christians.
Besides that, the teaching he got was altogether pagan in tone. No doubt he
picked out, as he always did, the subjects which suited him. Minds such as
his fling themselves upon that which is likely to nourish them: they throw
aside all the rest, or suffer it very unwillingly. Thus Augustin never
wavered in his dislike for Greek: he was a poor Greek scholar. He detested
the Greeks by instinct. According to Western prejudice, these men of
the East were all rascals or amusers. Augustin, as a practical African,
always regarded the Greeks as vain, discoursing wits. In a word, they
were not sincere people whom it would be safe to trust. The entirely
local patriotism of the classical Greek authors further annoyed this Roman
citizen who was used to regard the world as his country: he thought them
very narrow-minded to take so much interest in the history of some little
town. As for him, he looked higher and farther. It must be remembered that
in the second half of the fourth century the Greek attitude, broadened and
fully conscious of itself, set itself more and more against Latinism, above
all, politically. There it lay, a hostile and impenetrable block before the
Western peoples. And here was a stronger reason for a Romanized African to
dislike the Greeks.
So he painfully construed the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, very cross at the
difficulties of a foreign language which prevented him from grasping the
plots of the fine, fabulous narratives. There were, however, abridgments
used in the schools, a kind of summaries of the Trojan War, written by
Latin grammarians under the odd pseudonyms of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys
of Crete. But these abridgments were very dry for an imagination like
Augustin's. He much preferred the _Æneid_, the poem admired above all
by the Africans, on account of the episode devoted to the foundation of
Carthage. Virgil was his passion. He read and re-read him continually;
he knew him by heart. To the end of his life, in his severest writings,
he quoted verses or whole passages out of his much-loved poet. Dido's
adventure moved him to tears. They had to pluck the book out of his hands.
Now the reason is that there was a secret harmony between Virgil's soul and
the soul of Augustin. Both were gracious and serious. One, the great poet,
and one, the humble schoolboy, they both had pity on the Queen of Carthage,
they would have liked to save her, or at any rate to mitigate her sadness,
to alter a little the callousness of Æneas and the harshness of the Fates.
But think of it! Love is a divine sickness, a chastisement sent by the
gods. It is just, when all's said, that the guilty one should endure her
agony to the very end. And then, such very great things are going to arise
out of this poor love! Upon it depends the lot of two Empires. What counts
a woman before Rome and Carthage? Besides, she was bound to perish: the
gods had decreed it.... There was in all that a concentrated emotion, a
depth of sentiment, a religious appeal which stirred Augustin's heart,
still unaware of itself. This obedience of the Virgilian hero to the
heavenly will, was already an adumbration of the humility of the future
Christian.
Certainly, Augustin did not perceive very plainly in these turbid years
of his youth the full religious significance of Virgil's poem. Carried
away by his headstrong nature, he yielded to the heart-rending charm of
the romantic story: he lived it, literally, with the heroine. When his
schoolmasters desired him to elaborate the lament of the dying Queen Dido
in Latin prose, what he wrote had a veritable quiver of anguish. Without
the least defence against lust and the delusions of the heart, he spent
intellectually and in a single outburst all the strength of passion.
He absorbed every love-poem with the eagerness of a participating soul. If
he took pleasure in the licentiousness of Plautus and Terence, if he read
delightfully those comedies wherein the worst weaknesses are excused and
glorified, I believe that he took still more pleasure in the Latin Elegiacs
who present without any shame the romantic madness of Alexandrine love.
For what sing these poets even to weariness, unless it be that no one can
resist the Cyprian goddess, that life has no other end but love? Love for
itself, to love for the sake of loving--there is the constant subject of
these sensualists, of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid. After the story
of Dido, the youthful reader was ravished by the story of Ariadne, even
more disturbing, because no remorse modifies the frenzy of it. He read:
_Now while the careless hero flees, beating the wave with his
and casting to the gales of the open sea his idle promises,--there,
standing among the shingle of the beach, the daughter of Minos follows
him, alas! with her beautiful sad eyes: she stares, astonied, like to a
Bacchante changed into a statue. She looks forth, and her heart floats
upon the great waves of her grief. She lets slip from her head her
fine-spun coif, she tears away the thin veils which cover her bosom,
and the smooth cincture which supports her quivering breasts. All that
slips from her body into the salt foam which ripples round her feet.
But little she cares for her coif or for her apparel carried away by
the tide! Lost, bewildered, with all her heart and all her soul, she is
clinging to thee, O Theseus._
And if Augustin, when he had read these burning verses of Catullus, looked
through the Anthologies which were popular in the African schools, he
would come upon "The Vigil of Venus," that eclogue which ends with such a
passionate cry:
_O my springtime, when wilt thou come? When shall I be as the swallow?
When shall I cease to be silent?... May he love to-morrow, he
has not loved yet. And he who has already loved, may he love again
to-morrow._
Imagine the effect of such exhortations on a youth of fifteen! Truly, this
springtide of love, which the poet cries for in his distress, the son
of Monnica knew well was come for him. How he must have listened to the
musical and melancholy counsellor who told his pain to the leaves of the
book! What stimulant and what food for his boyish longings and dreams! And
what a divine chorus of beauties the great love-heroines of ancient epic
and elegy, Helen, Medea, Ariadne, Phædra, formed and re-formed continually
in his dazzled memory! When we of to-day read such verses at Augustin's
age, some bitterness is mixed with our delight. These heroes and heroines
are too far from us. These almost chimerical beings withdraw from us into
outlying lands, to a vanished world which will never come again. But for
Augustin, this was the world he was born into--it was his pagan Africa
where pleasure was the whole of life, and one lived only for the lusts of
the flesh. And the race of fabulous princesses--they were not dead, those
ladies: they were ever waiting for the well-beloved in the palaces at
Carthage. Yes, the scholar of Madaura lived wonderful hours, dreaming thus
of love between the pages of the poets. These young dreams before love
comes are more bewitching than love itself: a whole unknown world suddenly
discovered and entered with a quivering joy of discovery at each step. The
unused strength of illusion appears inexhaustible, space becomes deeper and
the heart more strong....
A long time afterwards, when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to
us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from
having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will
say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human
heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom--yea, the pleasure
of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is
holy, stands alone. You will find nothing in any voluptuousness fit to be
compared to it. I say not that this other pleasure is less, for that which
is called less hath only to increase to become equal. No, I shall not say
that all other pleasure is less. No comparison can be made. It is another
kind, it is another reality."
VI
THE HOLIDAYS AT THAGASTE
In the city of Apuleius, the Christian Monnica's son became simply a pagan.
He was near his sixteenth year: the awkward time of early virility was
beginning for him. Prepared at Madaura, it suddenly burst out at Thagaste.
Augustin came back to his parents, no doubt during the vacation. But
this vacation lasted perhaps a whole year. He had come to the end of his
juvenile studies. The grammarians at Madaura could teach him nothing more.
To round off his acquirements, it would be necessary to attend the lectures
of some well-known rhetorician. Now there were very good rhetoricians only
at Carthage. Besides, it was a fashion, and point of honour, for Numidian
families to send their sons to finish their education in the provincial
capital. Patricius was most eager to do this for his son, who at Madaura
had shewn himself a very brilliant pupil and ought not therefore to be
pulled up half-way down the course. But the life of a student cost a good
deal, and Patricius had no money. His affairs were always muddled. He was
obliged to wait for the rents from his farms, to grind down his tenants,
and, ultimately, despairing of any other way out of it, to ask for an
advance of money from a rich patron. That needed time and diplomacy.
Days and months went by, and Augustin, with nothing to do, joined in with
easily-made friends and gave himself up to the pleasures of his time of
life, like all the young townsmen of Thagaste--pleasures rather rough and
little various, such as were to be got in a little free-town of those days,
and as they have remained for the natives of to-day, whether they live
a town or country life. To hunt, to ride horseback, to play at games of
chance, to drink, eat, and make love--they wanted nothing beyond that. When
Augustin in his _Confessions_ accuses himself of his youthful escapades he
uses the most scathing language. He speaks of them with horror and disgust.
Once more we are tempted to believe that he exaggerates through an excess
of Christian remorse. There are even some who, put on their guard by this
vehement tone, have questioned the historical value of the _Confessions_.
They argue that when the Bishop of Hippo wrote these things his views and
feelings had altered. He could no longer judge with the same eye and in
the same spirit the happenings of his youth. All this is only too certain:
when he wrote, it was as a Christian he judged himself, and not as a cold
historian who refuses to go beyond the brutal fact. He tried to unravel
the origin and to trace the consequences of the humblest of his actions,
because this is of the highest importance for salvation. But however severe
his judgment may be, it does not impair the reality of the fact itself.
Moreover, in natures like his, acts which others would hardly think of
have a vibration out of all proportion with the act itself. The evil of sin
depends upon the consciousness of the sin and the pleasure taken in it.
Augustin was very intelligent and very sensual.
In any case, young Africans develop early, and the lechery of the race
is proverbial. It must have been a good deal stronger at a time when
Christianity still had to fight against pagan slackness in these matters,
ere Islam had imposed its hypocritical austerity upon the general conduct.
There is even room for wonder that in Augustin's case this crisis of
development did not happen earlier than his sixteenth year. It seems that
it was only more violent. In what language he describes it! "I dared to
roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves beneath the shade." But he
was not yet in love--this he points out himself. In his case then it was
simple lust. "From the quagmire of concupiscence, from the well of puberty,
exhaled a mist which clouded and befogged my heart, so that I could not
distinguish between the clear shining of affection and the darkness of
lust.... I could not keep within the kingdom of light, where friendship
binds soul to soul.... And so I polluted the brook of friendship with the
sewage of lust." Let us not try to make it clearer than he has left it
himself. When one thinks of all the African vices, one dare not dwell upon
such avowals. "Lord," he says, "I was loathsome in Thy sight." And with
pitiless justice he analyses the effect of the evil: "It stormed confusedly
within me, whirling my thoughtless youth over the precipices of desire. And
I wandered still further from Thee, and Thou didst leave me to myself; the
torrent of my fornications tossed and swelled and boiled and ran over." And
during this time: "Thou saidst nothing, O my God!" This silence of God is
the terrible sign of hardened sin, of hopeless damnation. It meant utter
depravity of the will; he did not even feel remorse any more.