a poor rhetoric master come there to better his fortune. Other strangers
before him had complained of it. Always to be going up and down the flights
of steps and the ascents, often very steep, of the city of the Seven Hills;
to be rushing between the Aventine and Sallust's garden, and thence to
the Esquiline and Janiculum! To bruise the feet on the pointed cobbles of
sloping alley-ways! These walks were exhausting, and there seemed to be no
end to this city. Carthage was also large--as large almost as Rome. But
there Augustin was not seeking employment. When he went for a walk there,
he strolled. Here, the bustle of the crowds, and the number of equipages,
disturbed and exasperated the southerner with his lounging habits. Any
moment there was a risk of being run over by cars tearing at full gallop
through the narrow streets: men of fashion just then had a craze for
driving fast. Or again, the passenger was obliged to step aside so
that some lady might go by in her litter, escorted by her household,
from the handicraft slaves and the kitchen staff, to the eunuchs and
house-servants--all this army manoeuvring under the orders of a leader who
held a rod in his hand, the sign of his office. When the street became
clear once more, and at last the palace of the influential personage
to whom a visit had to be paid was reached, there was no admittance
without greasing the knocker. In order to be presented to the master,
it was necessary to buy the good graces of the slave who took the name
(_nomenclator_), and who not only introduced the suppliant, but might, with
a word, recommend or injure. Even after all these precautions, one was not
yet sure of the goodwill of the patron. Some of these great lords, who were
not always themselves sprung from old Roman families, prided themselves
upon their uncompromising nationalism, and made a point of treating
foreigners with considerable haughtiness. The Africans were regarded
unfavourably in Rome, especially in Catholic circles. Augustin must have
had an unpleasant experience of this.
Through the long streets, brilliantly lighted at evening (it would seem
that the artificial lighting of Rome almost equalled the daylight), he
would return tired out to the dwelling of his host, the Manichee. This
dwelling, according to an old tradition, was in the Velabrum district, in
a street which is still to-day called _Via Greca_, and skirts the very old
church of Santa Maria-in-Cosmedina--a poor quarter where swarmed a filthy
mass of Orientals, and where the immigrants from the Levantine countries,
Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, lodged. The warehouses on the Tiber
were not very far off, and no doubt there were numbers of labourers,
porters, and watermen living in this neighbourhood. What a place for
him who had been at Thagaste the guest of the magnificent Romanianus,
and intimate with the Proconsul at Carthage! When he had climbed up the
six flights of stairs to his lodging, and crouched shivering over the
ill-burning movable hearth, in the parsimonious light of a small bronze or
earthenware lamp, while the raw damp sweated through the walls, he felt
more and more his poverty and loneliness. He hated Rome and the stupid
ambition which had brought him there. And yet Rome should have made a vivid
appeal to this cultured man, this æsthete so alive to beauty. Although the
transfer of the Court to Milan had drawn away some of its liveliness and
glitter, it was still all illuminated by its grand memories, and never had
it been more beautiful. It seems impossible that Augustin should not have
been struck by it, despite his African prejudices. However well built the
new Carthage might be, it could not pretend to compare with a city more
than a thousand years old, which at all periods of its history had
maintained the princely taste for building, and which a long line of
emperors had never ceased to embellish.
When Augustin landed at Ostia, he saw rise before him, closing the
perspective of the _Via Appia_, the Septizonium of Septimus Severus--an
imitation, doubtless, on a far larger scale, of the one at Carthage. This
huge construction, water-works probably of enormous size, with its ordered
columns placed line above line, was, so to speak, the portico whence opened
the most wonderful and colossal architectural mass known to the ancient
world. Modern Rome has nothing at all to shew which comes anywhere near it.
Dominating the Roman Forum, and the Fora of various Emperors--labyrinths of
temples, basilicas, porticoes, and libraries--the Capitol and the Palatine
rose up like two stone mountains, fashioned and sculptured, under the heap
of their palaces and sanctuaries. All these blocks rooted in the soil,
suspended, and towering up from the flanks of the hills, these interminable
regiments of columns and pilasters, this profusion of precious marbles,
metals, mosaics, statues, obelisks--in all that there was something
enormous, a lack of restraint which disturbed the taste and floored the
imagination. But it was, above all, the excessive use of gold and gilding
that astonished the visitor. Originally indigent, Rome became noted for
its greed of gold. When the gold of conquered nations began to come into
its hands, it spread it all over with the rather indiscreet display of
the upstart. When Nero built the Golden House he realized its dream. The
Capitol had golden doors. Statues, bronzes, the roofs of temples, were all
gilded. All this gold, spread over the brilliant surfaces and angles of
the architecture, dazzled and tired the eyes: _Acies stupet igne metalli_,
said Claudian. For the poets who have celebrated it, Rome is the city of
gold--_aurata Roma_.
A Greek, such as Lucian, had perhaps a right to be shocked by this
architectural debauch, this beauty too crushing and too rich. A Carthage
rhetorician, like Augustin, could feel at the sight of it nothing but the
same irritated admiration and secret jealousy as the Emperor Constans felt
when he visited his capital for the first time.
Even as the Byzantine Cæsar, and all the provincials, Augustin, no doubt,
examined the curiosities and celebrated works which were pointed out to
strangers: the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; the baths of Caracalla and
Diocletian; the Pantheon; the temple of Roma and of Venus; the Place of
Concord; the theatre of Pompey; the Odeum, and the Stadium. Though he might
be stupefied by all this, he would remember, too, all that the Republic
had taken from the provinces to construct these wonders, and would say to
himself: "'Tis we who have paid for them." In truth, all the world had
been ransacked to make Rome beautiful. For some time a muffled hostility
had been brewing in provincial hearts against the tyranny of the central
power, especially since it had shewn itself incapable of maintaining peace,
and the Barbarians were threatening the frontiers. Worn out by so many
insurrections, wars, massacres, and pillages, the provinces had come to ask
if the great complicated machine of the Empire was worth all the blood and
money that it cost.
For Augustin, moreover, the crisis was drawing near which was to end in his
return to the Catholic faith. He had been a Christian, and as such brought
up in principles of humility. With these sentiments, he would perhaps
decide that the pride and vanity of the creature at Rome claimed far too
much attention, and was even sacrilegious. It was not only the emperors who
disputed the privileges of immortality with the gods, but anybody who took
it into his head, provided that he was rich or had any kind of notoriety.
Amid the harsh and blinding gilt of palaces and temples, how many statues,
how many inscriptions endeavoured to keep an obscure memory green, or the
features of some unknown man! Of course, at Carthage too, where they copied
Rome, as in all the big cities, there were statues and inscriptions in
abundance upon the Forum, the squares, and in the public baths. But what
had not shocked Augustin in his native land, did shock him in a strange
city. His home-sick eyes opened to faults which till then had been veiled
by usage. In any case, this craze for statues and inscriptions prevailed at
Rome more than anywhere else. The number of statues on the Forum became so
inconvenient, that on many occasions certain ones were marked for felling,
and the more insignificant shifted. The men of stone drove out the living
men, and forced the gods into their temples. And the inscriptions on the
walls bewildered the mind with such a noise of human praise, that ambition
could dream of nothing beyond. It was all a kind of idolatry which revolted
the strict Christians; and in Augustin, even at this time, it must have
offended the candour of a soul which detested exaggeration and bombast.
The vices of the Roman people, with whom he was obliged to live cheek by
jowl, galled him still more painfully. And to begin with, the natives hated
strangers. At the theatres they used to shout: "Down with the foreign
residents!" Acute attacks of xenophobia often caused riots in the city.
Some years before Augustin arrived, a panic about the food supply led to
the expulsion, as useless mouths, of all foreigners domiciled in Rome,
even the professors. Famine was an endemic disease there. And then, these
lazy people were always hungry. The gluttony and drunkenness of the Romans
roused the wonder and also the disgust of the sober races of the Empire--of
the Greeks as well as the Africans. They ate everywhere--in the streets, at
the theatre, at the circus, around the temples. The sight was so ignoble,
and the public intemperance so scandalous, that the Prefect, Ampelius, was
obliged to issue an order prohibiting people who had any self-respect from
eating in the street, the keepers of wine-shops from opening their places
before ten o'clock in the morning, and the hawkers from selling cooked meat
in the streets earlier than a certain hour of the day. But he might as well
have saved himself the trouble. Religion itself encouraged this greediness.
The pagan sacrifices were scarcely more than pretexts for stuffing. Under
Julian, who carried the great public sacrifices of oxen to an abusive
extent, the soldiers got drunk and gorged themselves with meat in the
temples, and came out staggering. Then they would seize hold of any
passers-by, whom they forced to carry them shoulder-high to their barracks.
All this must be kept in mind so as to understand the strictness and
unyielding attitude of the Christian reaction. This Roman people, like the
pagans in general, was frightfully material and sensual. The difficulty of
shaking himself free from matter and the senses is going to be the great
obstacle which delays Augustin's conversion; and if it was so with him, a
fastidious and intellectual man, what about the crowd? Those people thought
of nothing but eating and drinking and lewdness. When they left the tavern
or their squalid rooms, they had only the obscenities of mimes, or the
tumbles of the drivers in the circus, or the butcheries in the amphitheatre
to elevate them. They passed the night there under the awnings provided by
the municipality. Their passion for horse-races and actors and actresses,
curbed though it was by the Christian emperors, continued even after
the sack of Rome by the Barbarians. At the time of the famine, when the
strangers were expelled, they excepted from this wholesale banishment three
thousand female dancers with the members of their choirs, and their leaders
of orchestra.
The aristocracy did not manifest tastes much superior. Save a few
cultivated minds, sincerely fond of literature, the greatest number only
saw in the literary pose an easy way of being fashionable. These became
infatuated about an unknown author, or an ancient author whose books were
not to be had. They had these books sought for and beautifully copied.
They, "who hated study like poison," spoke only of their favourite author:
the others did not exist for them. As a matter of fact, music had ousted
literature: "the libraries were closed like sepulchres." But fashionable
people were interested in an hydraulic organ, and they ordered from the
lute-makers "lyres the size of chariots." Of course, this musical craze was
sheer affectation. Actually, they were only interested in sports: to race,
to arrange races, to breed horses, to train athletes and gladiators. As a
pastime, they collected Oriental stuffs. Silk was then fashionable, and so
were precious stones, enamels, heavy goldsmiths' work. Rows of rings were
worn on each finger. People took the air in silk robes, held together by
brooches carved in the figures of animals, a parasol in one hand, and a fan
with gold fringes in the other. The costumes and fashions of Constantinople
encroached upon the old Rome and the rest of the Western world.
Immense fortunes, which had gathered in the hands of certain people, either
through inheritance or swindling, enabled them to keep up a senseless
expenditure. Like the American millionaires of to-day, who have their
houses and properties in both hemispheres, these great Roman lords
possessed them in every country in the Empire. Symmachus, who was Prefect
of the City when Augustin was in Rome, had considerable estates not only in
Italy and in Sicily, but even in Mauretania. And yet, in spite of all their
wealth and all the privileges they enjoyed, these rich people were neither
happy nor at ease. At the least suspicion of a despotic power, their lives
and property were threatened. Accusations of magic, of disrespect to
the Cæsar, of plots against the Emperor--any pretext was good to plunder
them. During the preceding reign, that of the pitiless Valentinian, the
Roman nobility had been literally decimated by the executioner. A certain
vice-Prefect, Maximinus, had gained a sinister reputation for cleverness in
the art of manufacturing suspects. By his orders, a basket at the end of a
string was hung out from one of the windows of the Prætorium, into which
denunciations might be cast. The basket was in use day and night.
It is clear that at the time that Augustin settled in Rome this abominable
system was a little moderated. But accusation by detectives was always in
the air. And living in this atmosphere of mistrust, hypocrisy, bribery, and
cruelty--small wonder if the Carthaginian fell into bitter reflections upon
Roman corruption. However impressive from the front, the Empire was not
nice to look at close at hand.
But Augustin was, above all, home-sick. When he strolled tinder the shady
trees of the Janiculum or Sallust's gardens, he already said to himself
what he would repeat later to his listeners at Hippo: "Take an African, put
him in a place cool and green, and he won't stay there. He will feel he
must go away and come back to his blazing desert." As for himself, he had
something better to regret than a blazing desert. In front of the City of
Gold, stretched out at his feet, and the horizon of the Sabine Hills, he
remembered the feminine softness of the twilights upon the Lake of Tunis,
the enchantment of moonlit nights upon the Gulf of Carthage, and that
astonishing landscape to be discovered from the height of the terrace of
Byrsa, which all the grandeur of the Roman _campagna_ could not make him
forget.
II
THE FINAL DISILLUSION
'The new professor had managed to secure a certain number of pupils whom
he gathered together in his rooms. He could make enough to live at Rome
by himself, if he could not support there the woman and child he had left
behind at Carthage. In this matter of finding work, his host and his
Manichee friends had done him some very good turns. Although forced to
conceal their beliefs since the edict of Theodosius, there were a good many
Manichees in the city. They formed an occult Church, strongly organized,
and its adepts had relations with all classes of Roman society. Possibly
Augustin presented himself as one driven out of Africa by the persecution.
Some compensation would be owing to this young man who had suffered for the
good cause.
It was his friend Alypius, "the brother of his heart," who, having preceded
him to Rome to study law at his parents' wishes, now was the most useful in
helping Augustin to make himself known and find pupils. Himself a Manichee,
converted by Augustin, and a member of one of the leading families in
Thagaste, he had not long to wait for an important appointment in the
Imperial administration. He was assessor to the Treasurer-General, or
"Count of the Italian Bounty Office," and decided fiscal questions. Thanks
to his influence, as well as to his acquaintances among the Manichees, he
was a valuable friend for the new arrival, a friend who could aid him, not
only with his purse, but with advice. Without much capacity for theorizing,
this Alypius was a practical spirit, a straight and essentially honest
soul, whose influence was excellent for his impetuous friend. Of very
chaste habits, he urged Augustin to restraint. And even in abstract
studies, the religious controversies which Augustin dragged him into, his
strong good sense moderated the imaginative dashes, the overmuch subtilty
which sometimes led the other beyond healthy reason.
Unhappily they were both very busy--the judge and the rhetorician--and
although their friendship became still greater during this stay in Rome,
they were not able to see each other as much as they desired. Their
pleasures, too, were perhaps not the same. Augustin did not in the least
care about being chaste, and Alypius had a passion for the amphitheatre--a
passion which his friend disapproved of. Some time earlier, at Carthage,
Augustin had filled him with disgust of the circus. But hardly was Alypius
arrived in Rome, than he became mad about the gladiatorial shows. Some
fellow-students took him to the amphitheatre, almost by force. Thereupon,
he said that he would stay, since they had dragged him there; but he bet
that he would keep his eyes shut all through the fight, and that nothing
could make him open them. He sat down on the benches with those who had
brought him, his eyelids pressed down, refusing to look. Suddenly there was
a roar of shouting, the shout of the crowd hailing the fall of the first
wounded. His lids parted of themselves; he saw the flow of blood. "At the
sight of the blood" says Augustin, "he drank in ruthlessness; no longer
did he turn away, but fixed his gaze, and he became mad--and he knew no
more.... He was fascinated by the criminal atrocity of this battle, and
drunk with the pleasure of blood."
These breathless phrases of the _Confessions_ seem to throb still with the
wild frenzy of the crowd. They convey to us directly the kind of Sadic
excitement which people went to find about the arena. Really, a wholesome
sight for future Christians, for all the souls that the brutality of
pagan customs revolted! The very year that Augustin was at Rome, certain
prisoners of war, Sarmatian soldiers, condemned to kill each other in the
amphitheatre, chose suicide rather than this shameful death. There was in
this something to make him reflect--him and his friends. The fundamental
injustices whereon the ancient world rested--the crushing of the slave
and the conquered, the contempt for human life--these things they touched
with the finger when they looked on at the butcheries in the amphitheatre.
All those whose hearts sickened with disgust and horror before these
slaughter-house scenes, all those who longed for a little more mildness, a
little more justice, were all recruits marked out for the peaceful army of
the Christ.
For Alypius, especially, it was not a bad thing to have known this
blood-drunkenness at first hand: he shall be only the more ashamed when
he falls at the feet of the merciful God. Equally useful was it for him
to have personal experience of the harshness of men's justice; and in the
fulfilment of his duties as a judge to observe its errors and flaws. While
he was a student at Carthage he just escaped being condemned to death upon
a false accusation of theft--the theft of a piece of lead! Already they
were dragging him, if not to the place of capital punishment, at least to
prison, when a chance meeting with a friend of his who was a senator saved
him from the threatening mob. At Rome, while Assessor to the Count of the
Italian Bounty Office, he had to resist an attempt to bribe him, and by
doing so risked losing his appointment, and, no doubt, something worse
too. Official venality and dishonesty were evils so deeply rooted, that
he himself nearly succumbed. He wanted some books copied, and he had the
temptation to get this done at the charge of the Treasury. This peculation
had, in his eyes, a good enough excuse, and it was certain to go
undetected. Nevertheless, when he thought it over he changed his mind, and
virtuously refrained from giving himself a library at the expense of the
State.
Augustin, who relates these anecdotes, draws the same moral from them as
we do, to wit--that for a man who was going to be a bishop and, as such,
administrator and judge, this time spent in the Government service was a
good preparatory school. Most of the other great leaders of this generation
of Christians had also been officials; before ordination, they had been
mixed up in business and politics, and had lived freely the life of their
century. So it was with St. Ambrose, with St. Paulinus of Nola, with
Augustin himself, and Evodius and Alypius, his friends.
And yet, however absorbed in their work the two Africans might be, it
is pretty near certain that intellectual questions took the lead of
all others. This is manifest in Augustin's case at least. He must have
astonished the good Alypius when he got to Rome by acknowledging that he
hardly believed in Manicheeism any longer. And he set forth his doubts
about their masters' cosmogony and physical science, his suspicions
touching the hidden immorality of the sect. As for himself, the
controversies, which were the Manichees' strong point, did not dazzle him
any longer. At Carthage, but lately, he had heard a Catholic, a certain
Helpidius, oppose to them arguments from Scripture, which they were unable
to refute. To make matters worse, the Manichee Bishop of Rome made a bad
impression on him from the very outset. This man, he tells us, was of rough
appearance, without culture or polite manners. Doubtless this unmannerly
peasant, in his reception of the young professor, had not shewn himself
sufficiently alive to his merits, and the professor felt aggrieved.
From then, his keen dialectic and his satirical spirit (Augustin had
formidable powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon
the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted
as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the
primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God
of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light,
which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness,
were immersed in certain plants and liquors. Hence, the distinction they
made between clean and unclean food. All those foods were pure which
contained some part of the Divine Light; impure, those which did not. The
purity of food became evident by certain qualities of taste, smell, and
appearance. But now Augustin found a good deal of arbitrariness in these
distinctions, and a good deal of simplicity in the belief that the Divine
Light dwelt in a vegetable. "Are they not ashamed," he said, "to search God
with their palates or with their nose? And if His presence is revealed by
a special brilliancy, by the goodness of the taste or the smell, why allow
that dish and condemn this, which is of equal savour, light, and perfume?
"Yea, why do they look upon the golden melon as come out of God's
treasure-house, and yet will have none of the golden fat of the ham or the
yellow of an egg? Why does the whiteness of lettuce proclaim to them the
Divinity, and the whiteness of cream nothing at all? And why this horror
of meat? For, look you, roast sucking-pig offers us a brilliant colour, an
agreeable smell, and an appetizing taste--sure signs, according to them, of
the Divine Presence."... Once started on this topic, Augustin's vivacity
has no limits. He even drops into jokes which would offend modern
shamefacedness by their Aristophanic breadth.
These arguments, to say the truth, did not shake the foundations of the
doctrine, and if a doctrine must be judged according to its works, the
Manichees might entrench themselves behind their rigid moral rules, and
their conduct. Contrary to the more accommodating Catholicism, they paraded
a puritan intolerance. But Augustin had found out at Carthage that this
austerity was for the most part hypocrisy. At Rome he was thoroughly
enlightened.