historical reality which Christianity is, he had as yet but dim glimpses
of it. He had given up his superficial unbelief, and yet did not believe
in anything definite. He drifted into a sort of agnosticism compounded of
mental indolence and discouragement. When he scrutinized his conscience to
the depths, the most he could find was a belief in the existence of God and
His providence--quite abstract ideas which he was incapable of enlivening.
But whatever was the use of speculating upon Truth and the Sovereign Good!
The main thing to do was to live.
Now that his future was certain, Augustin endeavoured to arrange his life
with a view to his tranquillity. He had no longer very large ambitions.
What he principally wanted to do was to create for himself a nice little
existence, peaceful and agreeable, one might almost say, middle-class. His
present fortune, although small, was still enough for that, and he was in a
hurry to enjoy it.
Accordingly, he had not been long in Milan ere he sent for his mistress and
his son. He had rented an apartment in a house which gave on a garden. The
owner, who did not live there, allowed him the use of the whole house. A
house, the dream of the sage! And a garden in Virgil's country! Augustin,
the professor, should have been wonderfully happy. His mother soon joined
him. Gradually a whole tribe of Africans came down on him, and took
advantage of his hospitality. Here was his brother, Navigius, his two
cousins, Rusticus and Lastidianus, his friend Alypius, who could not make
up his mind to part from him, and probably Nebridius, another of his
Carthage friends. Nothing could be more in harmony with the customs of the
time. The Rhetorician to the City of Milan had a post which would pass
for superb in the eyes of his poor relations. He was acquainted with very
important people, and had access to the Imperial Court, whence favours and
bounties came. Immediately, the family ran to put themselves under his
protection and be enrolled beneficiaries, to get what they could out of
his new fortune and credit. And then these immigrations of Africans and
Orientals into the northern countries always come about in the same way. It
is enough if one of them gets on there: he becomes immediately the drop of
ink on the blotting-paper.
The most important person in this little African phalanstery was
unquestionably Monnica, who had taken in hand the moral and material
control of the house. She was not very old--not quite fifty-four--but she
wanted to be in her own country. That she should have left it, and faced
the weariness of a long journey over sea and land, she must have had very
serious reasons. The poverty into which she had fallen since the death of
her husband would not be an adequate explanation of her departure from
her native land. She had still some small property at Thagaste; she could
have lived there. The true motives of her departure were of an altogether
different order. First of all, she passionately loved her son, to the point
that she was not able to live away from him. Let us recall Augustin's
touching words: "For she loved to keep me with her, as mothers are wont,
yes, far more than most mothers." Besides that, she wanted to save him. She
completely believed that this was her work in the world.
Beginning from now, she is no longer the widow of Patricius: she is already
Saint Monnica. Living like a nun, she fasted, prayed, mortified her body.
By long meditating on the Scriptures, she had developed within her the
sense of spiritual realities, so that before long she astonished Augustin
himself. She had visions; perhaps she had trances. As she came over the sea
from Carthage to Ostia, the ship which carried her ran into a wild gale.
The danger became extreme, and the sailors themselves could no longer hide
their fear. But Monnica intrepidly encouraged them. "Never you fear, we
shall arrive in port safe and sound!" God, she declared, had promised her
this.
If, in her Christian life, she knew other minutes more divine, that was
truly the most heroic. Across Augustin's calm narrative, we witness the
scene. This woman lying on the deck among passengers half dead from fatigue
and terror, suddenly flings back her veils, stands up before the maddened
sea, and with a sudden flame gleaming over her pale face, she cries to the
sailors: "What do you fear? We shall get to port. _I am sure of it!_" The
glorious act of faith!
At this solemn moment, when she saw death so near, she had a clear
revelation of her destiny; she knew with absolute certainty that she was
entrusted with a message for her son, and that her son would receive this
message, in spite of all, in spite of the wildness of the sea--aye, in
spite of his own heart.
When this sublime emotion had subsided, it left with her the conviction
that sooner or later Augustin would change his ways. He had lost himself,
he was mistaken about himself. This business of rhetorician was unworthy
of him. The Master of the field had chosen him to be one of the great
reapers in the time of harvest. For a long while Monnica had foreseen the
exceptional place that Augustin was to take in the Church. Why fritter
away his talent and intelligence in selling vain words, when there were
heresies to combat, the Truth to make shine forth, when the Donatists were
capturing the African basilicas from the Catholics? What, in fact, was the
most celebrated rhetorician compared to a bishop--protector of cities,
counsellor of emperors, representative of God on earth? All this might
Augustin be. And he remained stubborn in his error! Prayers and efforts
must be redoubled to draw him from that. It was also for herself that she
struggled, for the dearest of her hopes as a mother. To bear a soul to
Jesus Christ--and a chosen soul who would save in his turn souls without
number--for this only had she lived. And so it was that on the deck, tired
by the rolling of the ship, drenched by the seas that were breaking on
board, and hardly able to stand in the teeth of the wind, she cried out to
the sailors: "What do you fear? We shall get to port. I am sure of it...."
At Milan she was regarded by Bishop Ambrose as a model parishioner. She
never missed his sermons and "hung upon his lips as a fountain of water
springing up to eternal life." And yet it does not appear that the great
bishop understood the mother any better than he did the son: he had not
the time. For him Monnica was a worthy African woman, perhaps a little odd
in her devotion, and given to many a superstitious practice. Thus, she
continued to carry baskets of bread and wine and pulse to the tombs of the
martyrs, according to the use at Carthage and Thagaste. When, carrying
her basket, she came to the door of one of the Milanese basilicas, the
doorkeeper forbade her to enter, saying that it was against the bishop's
orders, who had solemnly condemned such practices because they smacked
of idolatry. The moment she learned that this custom was prohibited by
Ambrose, Monnica, very much mortified, submitted to take away her basket,
for in her eyes Ambrose was the providential apostle who would lead her son
to salvation. And yet it must have grieved her to give up this old custom
of her country. Save for the fear of displeasing the bishop, she would
have kept it up. Ambrose was gratified by her obedience, her fervour and
charity. When by chance he met the son, he congratulated him on having such
a mother. Augustin, who did not yet despise human praise, no doubt expected
that Ambrose would in turn pay some compliments to himself. But Ambrose did
not praise him at all, and perhaps he felt rather vexed.
He himself, however, was always very busy; he had hardly any time to profit
by the pious exhortations of the bishop. His day was filled by his work
and his social duties. In the morning he lectured. The afternoon went in
friendly visits, or in looking up men of position whom he applied to for
himself or his relations. In the evening, he prepared to-morrow's lecture.
In spite of this very full and stirring life, which would seem to satisfy
all his ambitions, he could not manage to stifle the cry of his heart in
distress. He did not feel really happy. In the first place, it is doubtful
whether he liked Milan any better than Rome. He felt the cold there very
much. The Milanese winters are very trying, especially for a southerner.
Thick fogs rise from the canals and the marsh lands which surround the
city. The Alpine snows are very near. This climate, damper and frostier
even than at Rome, did no good to his chest. He suffered continually from
hoarseness; he was obliged to interrupt his lectures--a most disastrous
necessity for a man whose business it is to talk. These attacks became so
frequent that he was forced to wonder if he could keep on long in this
state. Already he felt that he might be obliged to give up his profession.
Then, in those hours when he lost heart, he flung to the winds all his
youthful ambitions. As a last resort, the voiceless rhetorician would take
a post in one of the administrative departments of the Empire. The idea of
being one day a provincial governor did not rouse any special repugnance.
What a fall for him! "Yes, but it is the wisest, the wisest thing,"
retorted the ill-advising voice, the one we are tempted to listen to when
we doubt ourselves.
Friendship, as always with Augustin, consoled him for his hopeless
thoughts. Near him was "the brother of his heart," the faithful Alypius,
and also Nebridius, that young man so fond of metaphysical discussions.
Nebridius had left his rich estate in the Carthaginian suburbs, and a
mother who loved him, simply to live with Augustin in the pursuit of truth.
Romanianus was also there, but for a less disinterested reason. The Mæcenas
of Thagaste, after his ostentatious expenditure, found that his fortune
was threatened. A powerful enemy, who had started a law-suit against him,
worked to bring about his downfall. Romanianus had come to Milan to
defend himself before the Emperor, and to win the support of influential
personages about the Court. And so it came about that he saw a great deal
of Augustin.
Besides this little band of fellow-countrymen, the professor of rhetoric
had some very distinguished friends among the aristocracy. He was
especially intimate with that Manlius Theodorus whom the poet Claudian
celebrates, and to whom he himself later on was to dedicate one of his
books. This rich man, who had been Proconsul at Carthage, where no doubt he
had met Augustin, lived at this time retired in the country, dividing his
leisure hours between the study of the Greek philosophers, especially of
the Platonists, and the cultivation of his vineyards and olive trees.
Here, as at Thagaste, in these beautiful villas on the shores of the
Italian lakes, the son of Monnica gave himself up once more to the
sweetness of life. "I liked an easy life," he avows in all simplicity.
He felt himself to be more Epicurean than ever. He might have chosen
Epicureanism altogether, if he had not always kept a fear of what is beyond
life. But when he was the guest of Manlius Theodoras, fronting the dim blue
mountains of lake Como, framed in the high windows of the _triclinium_,
he did not think much about what is beyond life. He said to himself: "Why
desire the impossible? So very little is needed to satisfy a human soul."
The enervating contact of luxury and comfort imperceptibly corrupted him.
He became like those fashionable people whom he knew so well how to charm
with his talk. Like the fashionable people of all times, these designated
victims of the Barbarians built, with their small daily pleasures, a
rampart against all offensive or saddening realities, leaving the important
questions without answer, no longer even asking them. And they said:
"I have beautiful books, a well-heated house, well-trained slaves, a
delightfully arranged bathroom, a comfortable vehicle: life is sweet. I
don't wish for a better. What's the use? This one is good enough for me."
At the moment when his tired intellect gave up everything, Augustin was
taken in the snare of easy enjoyment, and desired to resemble these people
at all points, to be one of them. But to be one of them he must have a
higher post than a rhetorician's, and chiefly it would be necessary to put
all the outside forms and exterior respectability into his life that the
world of fashion shews. Thus, little by little, he began to think seriously
of marriage.
His mistress was the only obstacle in the way of this plan. He got rid of
her.
That was a real domestic drama, which he has tried to hide; but it must
have been extremely painful for him, to judge by the laments which he gives
vent to, despite himself, in some phrases, very brief and, as it were,
ashamed. In this drama Monnica was certainly the leader, though it is
likely that Augustin's friends also played their parts. No doubt, they
objected to the professor of rhetoric, that he was injuring his reputation
as well as his future by living thus publicly with a concubine. But
Monnica's reasons were more forcible and of quite another value.
To begin with, it is very natural that she should have suffered in her
maternal dignity, as well as in her conscience as a Christian, by having to
put up with the company of a stranger who was her son's mistress. However
large we may suppose the house where the African tribe dwelt, a certain
clashing between the guests was unavoidable. Generally, disputes as to
who shall direct the domestic arrangements divide mother-in-law and
daughter-in-law who live under one roof. What could be Monnica's feelings
towards a woman who was not even a daughter-in-law and was regarded by her
as an intruder? She did not consider it worth while to make any attempt at
regulating the entanglement of her son by marrying them: this person was
of far too low a class. It is all very well to be a saint, but one does
not forget that one is the widow of a man of curial rank, and that a
middle-class family with self-respect does not lower itself by admitting
the first-comer into its ranks by marriage. But these were secondary
considerations in her eyes. The only one which could have really preyed on
her mind is that this woman delayed Augustin's conversion. On account of
her, as Monnica saw plainly, he put off his baptism indefinitely. She was
the chain of sin, the unclean past under whose weight he stifled. He must
be freed from her as soon as possible.
Convinced therefore that such was her bounden duty, she worked continually
to make him break off. By way of putting him in some sort face to face with
a deed impossible to undo, she searched to find him a wife, with the fine
eagerness that mothers usually put into this kind of hunt. She discovered
a girl who filled, as they say, all the requirements, and who realized all
the hopes of Augustin. She had a fortune considerable enough not to be a
burthen on her husband. Her money, added to the professor's salary, would
allow the pair to live in ease and comfort. So they were betrothed. In
the uncertainty about all things which was Augustin's state just then, he
allowed his mother to work at this marriage. No doubt he approved, and like
a good official he thought it was time for him to settle down.
From that moment, the separation became inevitable. How did the poor
creature who had been faithful to him during so many years feel at this
ignominious dismissal? What must have been the parting between the child
Adeodatus and his mother? How, indeed, could Augustin consent to take him
from her? Here, again, he has decided to keep silent on this painful drama,
from a feeling of shame easy to understand. Of course, he was no longer
strongly in love with his mistress, but he was attached to her by some
remains of tenderness, and by that very strong tie of pleasure shared. He
has said it in words burning with regret. "When they took from my side, as
an obstacle to my marriage, her with whom I had been used for such a long
time to sleep, my heart was torn at the place where it was stuck to hers,
and the wound was bleeding." The phrase casts light while it burns. "At the
place where my heart stuck to hers"--_cor ubi adhærebat_. He acknowledges
then that the union was no longer complete, since at many points he had
drawn apart. If the soul of his mistress had remained the same, his had
changed: however much he might still love her, he was already far from her.
Be that as it will, she behaved splendidly in the affair--this forsaken
woman, this poor creature whom they deemed unworthy of Augustin. She was a
Christian; perhaps she perceived (for a loving woman might well have this
kind of second-sight) that it was a question not only of the salvation of
a loved being, but of a divine mission to which he was predestined. She
sacrificed herself that Augustin might be an apostle and a saint--a great
servant of God. So she went back to her Africa, and to shew that she
pardoned, if she could not forget, she vowed that she would never know any
other man. "She who had slept" with Augustin could never be the wife of any
one else.
However low she may have been to begin with, the unhappy woman was great at
this crisis. Her nobility of soul humiliated Augustin, and Monnica herself,
and punishment was not slow in falling on them both--on him, for letting
himself be carried away by sordid plans for success in life, and upon her,
the saint, for having been too accommodating. As soon as his mistress was
gone, Augustin suffered from being alone. "I thought that I should be
miserable," says he, "without the embraces of a woman." Now his promised
bride was too young: two years must pass before he could marry her. How
could he control himself till then? Augustin did not hesitate: he found
another mistress.
There was Monnica's punishment, cruelly deceived in her pious intentions.
In vain did she hope a great deal of good from this approaching marriage:
the silence of God shewed her that she was on the wrong track. She begged
for a vision, some sign which would reveal to her how this new-planned
marriage would turn out. Her prayer was not heard.
"Meanwhile," says Augustin, "my sins were being multiplied." But he did
not limit himself to his own sins: he led others into temptation. Even in
matrimonial matters, he felt the need of making proselytes. So he fell upon
the worthy Alypius. He, to be sure, guarded himself chastely from women,
although in the outset of his youth, to be like everybody else, he had
tried pleasure with women; but he had found that it did not suit his taste.
However, Augustin put conjugal delights before him with so much heat, that
he too began to turn his thoughts that way, "not that he was overcome by
the desire of pleasure, _but out of curiosity_." For Alypius, marriage
would be a sort of philosophic and sentimental experience.
Here are quite modern expressions to translate very old conditions of soul.
The fact is, that these young men, Augustin's friends and Augustin himself,
were startlingly like those of a generation already left behind, alas! who
will probably keep in history the presumptuous name they gave themselves:
_The Intellectuals_.
Like us, these young Latins of Africa, pupils of the rhetoricians and the
pagan philosophers, believed in hardly anything but ideas. All but ready to
affirm that Truth is not to be come at, they thought, just the same, that
a vain hunt after it was a glorious risk to run, or, at the very least, an
exciting game. For them this game made the whole dignity and value of life.
Although they had spasms of worldly ambition, they really despised whatever
was not pure speculation. In their eyes, the world was ugly; action
degrading. They barred themselves within the ideal garden of the sage, "the
philosopher's corner," as they called it, and jealously they stopped up all
the holes through which the painful reality might have crept through to
them. But where they differed from us, is that they had much less dryness
of soul, with every bit as much pedantry--but such ingenuous pedantry!
That's what saved them--their generosity of soul, the youth of their
hearts. They loved each other, and they ended by growing fond of life and
getting in contact with it again. Nebridius journeyed from Carthage to
Milan, abandoning his mother and family, neglecting considerable interests,
not only to talk philosophy with Augustin, but to live with him as a
friend. From this moment they might have been putting in practice those
words of the Psalm, which Augustin ere long will be explaining to his monks
with such tender eloquence: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for
brethren to dwell together in unity!"
This is not baseless hypothesis: they had really a plan for establishing a
kind of lay monastery, where the sole rule would be the search after Truth
and the happy life. There would be about a dozen solitaries. They would
make a common stock of what means they possessed. The richest, and among
these Romanianus, promised to devote their whole fortune to the community.
But the recollection of their wives brought this naive plan to nothing.
They had neglected to ask the opinions of their wives, and if these, as
was likely, should refuse to enter the convents with their husbands, the
married men could not face the scheme of living without them. Augustin
especially, who was on the point of starting a new connection, declared
that he would never find the courage for it. He had also forgotten that
he had many dependents: his whole family lived on him. Could he leave his
mother, his son, his brother, and his cousins?
In company with Alypius and Nebridius, he sincerely lamented that this
fair dream of coenobite life was impracticable. "We were three famishing
mouths," he says, "complaining of our distress one to another, and waiting
upon Thee that Thou mightest give us our meat in due season. And in all
the bitterness that Thy mercy put into our worldly pursuits, we sought the
reason why we suffered; and all was darkness. Then we turned to each other
shuddering, and asked: 'How much longer can this last?'..."
One day, a slight commonplace fact which they happened upon brought home
to them still more cruelly their intellectual poverty. Augustin, in his
official position as municipal orator, had just delivered the official
panegyric of the Emperor. The new year was opening: the whole city was
given over to mirth. And yet he was cast down, knowing well that he had
just uttered many an untruth, and chiefly because he despaired of ever
being happy. His friends were walking with him. Suddenly, as they crossed
the street, they came upon a beggar, quite drunk, who was indulging in the
jolliest pranks. So there was a happy man! A few pence had been enough
to give him perfect felicity, whereas they, the philosophers, despite
the greatest efforts and all their knowledge, could not manage to win
happiness. No doubt, as soon as the drunkard grew sober, he would be more
wretched than before. What matters that, if this poor joy--yes, though it
be an illusion--can so much cheer a poor creature, thus raise him so far
above himself! That minute, at least, he shall have lived in full bliss.
And to Augustin came the temptation to do as the beggar-man, to throw
overboard his philosophical lumber and set himself simply to live without
afterthoughts, since life is sometimes good.
But an instinct, stronger than the instinct of pleasure, said to him:
"_There is something else!_--Suppose that were true?--Perhaps you might be
able to find out." This thought tormented him unceasingly. Now eager, now
disheartened, he set about trying to find the "something else."
V
THE CHRIST IN THE GARDEN
"I was tired of devouring time and of being devoured by it." The whole
moral crisis that Augustin is about to undergo might be summed up in these
few words so concentrated and so strong. No more to scatter himself among
the multitude of vain things, no more to let himself flow along with the
minutes as they flowed; but to pull himself together, to escape from the
rout so as to establish himself upon the incorruptible and eternal, to
break the chains of the old slave he continues to be so as to blossom forth
in liberty, in thought, in love--that is the salvation he longs for. If it
be not yet the Christian salvation, he is on the road which leads to that.