It reveals to us an Augustin not only very sensitive to beauty, but very
attentive to the sights of the world surrounding him. Cockfights were still
very popular in this Roman society at the ending of the Empire. For a long
time sculptors had found many gracious subjects in the sport. Reading this
passage of Augustin's, one recalls, among other similar designs, that
funeral urn at the Lateran upon which are represented two little boys, one
crying over his beaten cock, while the other holds his tenderly in his
arms and kisses it--the cock that won, identified by the crown held in its
spurs.
Augustin is always very close to these humble realities. Every moment
outside things start up in the dialogues between the master and his
pupils.... They are in bed on a rainy night in November. Gradually, a vague
gleam rests on the windows. They ask each other if that can be the moon, or
the break of day.... Another time, the sun rises in all its splendour, and
they decide to go into the meadow and sit on the grass. Or else, the sky
darkens and lights are brought in. Or again, it is the appearance of
diligent Alyphis, just come back from Milan....
In the same way as he notes these light details in passing, Augustin
welcomes all his guests into his dialogues and admits them to the debate:
his mother, his brother, the cousins, Alypius between his business
journeys, down to the child Adeodatus. He knew the value of ordinary good
sense, the second-sight of a pure heart, or of a pious soul strengthened by
prayer. Monnica used often to come into the room when they were arguing,
to let them know that dinner was ready, or for something of the kind. Her
son asked her to remain. Modestly she shewed her astonishment at such an
honour.
"Mother," said Augustin, "do you not love truth? Then why should I blush
to give you a place among us? Even if your love for truth were only
half-hearted, I ought still to receive you and listen to you. How much more
then, since you love it more than you love me, _and I know how much you
love me_.... Nothing can separate you from truth, neither fear, nor pain
of whatever kind it be--no, nor death itself. Do not all agree that this
is the highest stage of philosophy? How can I hesitate after that to call
myself your disciple?"
And Monnica, utterly confused by such praise, answered with affectionate
gruffness:
"Stop talking! You have never told bigger lies."
Most of the time these conversations were simply dialectic games in the
taste of the period, games a little pedantic, and fatiguing from subtilty.
The boisterous Licentius did not always enjoy himself. He was often
inattentive; and his master scolded him. But all the same, the master
understood how to amuse his two foster-children while he exercised their
intelligence. At the end of one discussion he said to them laughing:
"Just at this hour, the sun warns me to put the playthings I had brought
for the children back in the basket...."
Let us remark in passing that this is the last time, before those
centuries which are coming of universal intellectual silence or arid
scholasticism--the last time that high questions will be discussed in this
graceful light way, and with the same freedom of mind. The tradition begun
by Socrates under the plane-trees on the banks of the Ilissus, is ending
with Augustin under the chestnuts of Cassicium.
And yet, however gay and capricious the form, the substance of these
dialogues, "On the Academics," "On Order," and "On the Happy Life," is
serious, and even very serious. The best proof of their importance in
Augustin's eyes is, that after taking care to have them reported in
shorthand, he eventually published them. The _notarii_ attended these
discussions and let nothing be lost. The rise of the scrivener, of the
notary, dates from this period. The administration of the Lower-Empire was
frightfully given to scribbling. By contact with it, the Church became so
too. Let us not press our complaints about it, since this craze for writing
has procured for us, with a good deal of shot-rubbish, some precious
historical documents. In Augustin's case, these reports of his lectures at
Cassicium have at least the value of shewing us the state of soul of the
future Bishop of Hippo at a decisive moment of his life.
For these _Dialogues_, although they look like school exercises, reveal the
intimate thoughts of Augustin on the morrow of his conversion. While he
seems to be refuting the Academics, he is fighting the errors from which
he, personally, had suffered so long. He clarified his new ideal. No; the
search for truth, without hope of ever reaching it, cannot give happiness.
And genuine happiness is only in God. And if a rhythm is to be found in
things, then it is necessary to make the soul rhythmic also and so enable
it to contemplate God. It is necessary to still within it the noise of the
passions. Hence, the need of inward reformation, and, at a final analysis,
of asceticism.
But Augustin knew full well that these truths must be adapted to the
weakness of the two lads he was teaching, and also to the common run of
mankind. He has not yet in these years the uncompromising attitude which
ere long will give him a sterner virtue--an attitude, however, unceasingly
tempered by his charity and by the persistent recollections of his reading.
It was now that he shaped the rule of conduct in worldly morals and
education which the Christian experience of the future will adopt: "If you
have always order in your hearts," he said to his pupils, "you must return
to your verses. _For a knowledge of liberal sciences, but a controlled and
exact knowledge_, forms men who will love the truth.... But there are other
men, or, to put it better, other souls, who, although held in the body, are
sought for the eternal marriage by the best and fairest of spouses. For
these souls it is not enough to live; they wish to live happy.... But as
for you, go, _meanwhile_, and find your Muses!"
"Go and find your Muses!" What a fine saying! How human and how wise! Here
is clearly indicated the double ideal of those who continue to live in the
world according to the Christian law of restraint and moderation, and of
those who yearn to live in God. With Augustin the choice is made. He will
never more look back. These Dialogues at Cassicium are his supreme farewell
to the pagan Muse.
II
THE ECSTASY OF SAINT MONNICA
They stayed through the winter at Cassicium. However taken up he might be
by the work of the estate and the care of his pupils, Augustin devoted
himself chiefly to the great business of his salvation.
The _Soliloquies_, which he wrote then, render even the passionate tone of
the meditations which he perpetually gave way to during his watches and
nights of insomnia. He searched for God, moaning: _Fac me, Pater, quærere
te_--"Cause me to seek Thee, O my Father." But still, he sought Him more as
a philosopher than as a Christian. The old man in him was not dead. He had
not quite stripped off the rhetorician or the intellectual. The over-tender
heart remained, which had so much sacrificed to human love. In those ardent
dialogues between himself and his reason, it is plain to see that reason
is not quite the mistress. "I love only God and the soul," Augustin states
with a touch of presumption. And his reason, which knows him well, answers:
"Do you not then love your friends?"--"I love the soul; how therefore
should I not love them?" What does this phrase, of such exquisite
sensibility, and even already so aloof from worldly thoughts--what does
it lack to give forth a sound entirely Christian? Just a slight change of
accent.
He himself began to see that he would do better not to philosophize so much
and to draw nearer the Scripture, in listening to the wisdom of that with
a contrite and humble heart. Upon the directions of Ambrose, whose advice
he had asked by letter, he tried to read the prophet Isaiah, because
Isaiah is the clearest foreteller of the Redemption. He found the book so
difficult that he lost heart, and he put it aside till later. Meanwhile,
he had forwarded his resignation as professor of Rhetoric to the Milan
municipality. Then, when the time was come, he sent to Bishop Ambrose
a written confession of his errors and faults, and represented to him
his very firm intention to be baptized. He was quietly baptized on the
twenty-fifth of April, during the Easter season of the year 387, together
with his son Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius. Alypius had prepared most
piously, disciplining himself with the harshest austerities, to the point
of walking barefoot on the frozen soil.
So now the solitaries of Cassicium are back in Milan. Augustin's two pupils
were gone. Trygetius doubtless had rejoined the army. Licentius had gone
to live in Rome. But another fellow-countryman, an African from Thagaste,
Evodius, formerly a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, came to join
the small group of new converts. Evodius, the future Bishop of Uzalis, in
Africa, and baptized before Augustin, was a man of scrupulous piety and
unquestioning faith. He talked of devout subjects with his friend, who,
just fresh from baptism, experienced all the quietude of grace. They spoke
of the community which St. Ambrose had either founded or organized at
the gates of Milan, and in comparison with a life so austere, Augustin
perceived that the life he had led at Cassicium was still stained with
paganism. He must carry out his conversion to the end and live as a hermit
after the manner of Antony and the solitaries of the Thebaid. Then it
occurred to him that he still owned a little property at Thagaste--a house
and fields. There they would settle and live in self-denial like the
monks. The purity of the young Adeodatus predestined him to this ascetic
existence. As for Monnica, who long since had taken the widow's veil, she
had to make no change in her ways to lead a saintly life in the company of
her son and grandson. It was agreed among them all to go back to Africa,
and to start as soon as possible.
Thus, just after his baptism, Augustin shews but one desire: to bury
himself in a retreat, to lead a humble and hidden life, divided between the
study of the Scripture and the contemplation of God. Later on, his enemies
were to accuse him of having become a convert from ambition, in view of the
honours and riches of the episcopate. This is sheer calumny. His conversion
could not have been more sincere, more disinterested--nor more heroic
either: he was thirty-three years old. When we think of all he had loved
and all he gave up, we can only bow the head and bend the knee before the
lofty virtue of such an example.
In the course of the summer the caravan started and crossed the Apennines
to set sail at Ostia. The date of this exodus has never been made quite
clear. Perhaps Augustin and his companions fled before the hordes of the
usurper Maximus, who, towards the end of August, crossed the Alps and
marched on Milan, while the young Valentinian with all his Court took
refuge at Aquileia. In any case, it was a trying journey, especially in the
hot weather. When Monnica arrived she was very enfeebled. At Ostia they had
to wait till a ship was sailing for Africa. Propitious conditions did not
offer every day. At this period, travellers were at the mercy of the sea,
of the wind, and of a thousand other circumstances. Time did not count; it
was wasted freely. The ship sailed short distances at a time, skirting the
coasts, where the length of the stay at every point touched depended on the
master. On board these ships--feluccas hardly decked over--if the crossing
was endless and unsafe, it was, above all, most uncomfortable. People were
in no hurry to undergo the tortures of it, and spaced them out as much
as possible by frequent stoppages. On account of all these reasons, our
Africans made a rather long stay at Ostia. They lodged, no doubt, with
Christian brethren, hosts of Augustin or Monnica, in a tranquil house far
out of earshot of the cosmopolitan crowd which overflowed in the hotels on
the quay.
Ostia, situated at the mouth of the Tiber, was both the port and
bond-warehouse of Rome. The Government stores-ships landed the African oil
and corn there. It was a junction for commerce, the point where immigrants
from all parts of the Mediterranean disbarked. To-day there is only left
a wretched little village. But at some distance from this hamlet, the
excavations of archæologists have lately brought to light the remains of
a large town. They have discovered at the entrance a place of burial with
arcosol-tombs; and here perhaps the body of St. Monnica was laid. In this
place of graves they came upon also a beautiful statue injured--a funeral
Genius, or a Victory, with large folded wings like those of the Christian
angels. Further on, the forum with its shops, the guard-house of the
night-cohort, baths, a theatre, many large temples, arcaded streets paved
with large flags, warehouses for merchandise. There may still be seen,
lining the walls, the holes in which the ends of the amphoræ used to be
dropped to keep them upright. All this wreckage gives an idea of a populous
centre where the stir of traffic and shipping was intense.
And yet in this noisy town, Augustin and his mother found means to withdraw
themselves and join together in meditation and prayer. Amid this rather
vulgar activity, in a noise of trade and seafaring, a mystic scene develops
where the purified love of mother and son gleams upon us as in a light of
apotheosis. They had at Ostia a foretaste, so to speak, of the eternal
union in God. This was in the house where they had come on arrival. They
talked softly, resting against a window which looked upon the garden....
But the scene has been made popular by Ary Scheffer's too well-known
painting. You remember it: two faces, pale, bloodless, stripped of flesh,
in which live only the burning eyes cast upward to the sky--a dense sky,
baffling, heavy with all the secrets of eternity. No visible object,
nothing, absolutely nothing, distracts them from their contemplation. The
sea itself, although indicated by the painter, almost blends into the
blue line of the horizon. Two souls and the sky--there you have the whole
subject.
It is living poetry congealed in abstract thought. The attitude of the
characters, majestically seated, instead of leaning on the window-ledge,
has, in Scheffer's picture, I know not what touch of stiffness, of slightly
theatrical. And the general impression is a cold dryness which contrasts
with the lyric warmth of the story in the _Confessions_.
For my part, I always thought, perhaps on the testimony of the picture,
that the window of the house at Ostia opened above the garden in view of
the sea. The sea, symbol of the infinite, ought to be present--so it seemed
to me--at the final conversation between Monnica and Augustin. At Ostia
itself I was obliged to give up this too literary notion; the sea is not
visible there. No doubt at that time the channel was not so silted up as it
is to-day. But the coast lies so low, that just hard by the actual mouth of
the Tiber, the nearness of the sea can only be guessed by the reflection of
the waves in the atmosphere, a sort of pearly halo, trembling on the edge
of the sky. At present I am inclined to think that the window of the house
at Ostia was very likely turned towards the vast melancholy horizon of the
_Agro Romano_. "We passed through, one after another," says Augustin, "all
the things of a material order, unto heaven itself." Is it not natural to
suppose that these things of a material order--these shapes of the earth
with its plantations, its rivers, towns, and mountains--were under their
eyes? The bleak spectacle which unrolled before their gaze agreed, at all
events, with the disposition of their souls.
This great desolate plain has nothing oppressive, nothing which retains
the eyes upon details too material. The colours about it are pale and
slight, as if on the point of swooning away. Immense sterile stretches,
fawn-coloured throughout, with here and there shining a little pink, a
little green; gorse, furze-bushes by the deep banks of the river, or a few
_boschetti_ with dusty leaves, which feebly stand out upon the blondness
of the soil. To the right, a pine forest. To the left, the undulations of
the Roman hills expire into an emptiness infinitely sad. Afar, the violet
scheme of the Alban mountains, with veiled and dream-like distances, shape
indefinitely against the pearl light, limpid and serene, of the sky.
Augustin and Monnica, resting on the window-ledge, looked forth. Doubtless
it was towards evening, at the hour when southern windows are thrown open
to the cool after a burning day. They looked forth. "We marvelled," says
Augustin, "at the beauty of Thy works, O my God!..." Rome was back there
beyond the hills, with its palaces, its temples, the gleam of its gilding
and its marbles. But the far-off image of the imperial city could not
conquer the eternal sadness which rises from the _Agro_. An air of funeral
loneliness lay above this plain, ready to be engulfed by the creeping
shadows. How easy it was to break free of these vain corporeal appearances
which decomposed of themselves! "Then," Augustin resumes, "we soared with
glowing hearts still higher." (He speaks as if he and his mother were risen
with equal flight to the vision. It is more probable that he was drawn
up by Monnica, long since familiar with the ways of the spirit, used to
visions, and to mystic talks with God....) Where was this God? All the
creatures, questioned by their anguished entreaty, answered: _Quære super
nos_--"Seek above us!" They sought; they mounted higher and higher: "And
so we came to our own minds, and passed beyond them into the region of
unfailing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of
truth.... And as we talked, and we strove eagerly towards this divine
region, _by a leap with the whole force of our hearts, we touched it for
an instant_.... Then we sighed, we fell back, and left there fastened the
first fruits of the Spirit, and heard again the babble of our own tongues,
this mortal speech wherein each word has a beginning and an ending."
"We fell back!" The marvellous vision had vanished. But a great silence was
about them, silence of things, silence of the soul. And they said to each
other:
"If the tumult of the flesh were hushed; hushed these shadows of earth,
sea, sky; suppose this vision endured, and all other far inferior modes of
vision were taken away, and this alone were to ravish the beholder, and
absorb him, and plunge him in mystic joy, so that eternal life might be
like this moment of comprehension which has made us sigh with Love--might
not that be the fulfilment of 'Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord'? Ah,
when shall this be? Shall it not be, O my God, when we rise again among the
dead...?"
Little by little they came down to earth. The dying colours of the
sunset-tide smouldered into the white mists of the _Agro_. The world
entered into night. Then Monnica, impelled by a certain presentiment, said
to Augustin:
"My son, as for me, I find no further pleasure in life. What I am still to
do, or why I still linger here, I know not.... There was only one thing
made me want to tarry a little longer in this life, that I might see you a
Christian and a Catholic before I died. My God has granted me this boon far
beyond what I hoped for. So what am I doing here?"
She felt it; her work was done. She had exhausted, as Augustin says, all
the hope of the century--_consumpta spe sæculi_. For her the parting was
near. This ecstasy was that of one dying, who has raised a corner of the
veil, and who no longer belongs to this world.
* * * * *
And, in fact, five or six days later she fell ill. She had fever. The
climate of Ostia bred fevers, as it does to-day, and it was always
unsanitary on account of all the foreigners who brought in every infection
of the Orient. Furthermore, the weariness of a long journey in summer had
worn out this woman, old before her time. She had to go to bed. Soon she
got worse, and then lost consciousness. They believed she was in the agony.
They all came round her bed--Augustin, his brother Navigius, Evodius, the
two cousins from Thagaste, Rusticus, and Lastidianus. But suddenly she
shuddered, raised herself, and asked in a bewildered way:
"Where was I?"
Then, seeing the grief on their faces, she knew that she was lost, and she
said in a steady voice:
"You will bury your mother here."
Navigius, frightened by this sight of death, protested with all his
affection for her:
"No. You will get well, mother. You will come home again. You won't die in
a foreign land."
She looked at him with sorrowful eyes, as if hurt that he spoke so little
like a Christian, and turning to Augustin:
"See how he talks," she said.
And after a silence, she went on in a firmer voice, as if to impress on her
sons her final wishes:
"Lay this body where you will, and be not anxious about it. Only I beseech
you, remember me at the altar of God, wherever you are."
That was the supreme renunciation. How could an African woman, so much
attached to her country, agree to be buried in a stranger soil? Pagan
notions were still very strong in this community, and the place of burial
was an important consideration. Monnica, like all other widows, had settled
upon hers. At Thagaste she had had her place prepared beside her husband
Patricius. And here now she appeared to give that up. Augustin's companions
were astonished at such abnegation. As for himself, he marvelled at the
completeness of the change worked in his mother's soul by Grace. And as he
thought over all the virtues of her life, the strength of her faith--from
that moment, he had no doubt that she was a saint.
She still lingered for some time. Finally, on the ninth day of her illness,
she died at the age of fifty-six.
Augustin closed her eyes. A great sorrow surged into his heart. And yet he
who was so quick to tears had the courage not to cry.... Suddenly a noise
of weeping rose in the room of death: it was the young Adeodatus, who
lamented at the sight of the corpse. He sobbed in such a heartbroken way
that those who were there, demoralized by the distress of it, were obliged
to rebuke him. This struck Augustin so deeply, that many years afterwards
the broken sound of this sobbing still haunted his ears. "Methought," he
says, "that it was my own childish soul which thus broke out in the weeping
of my son." As for him, with the whole effort of his reason struggling
against his heart, he only wanted to think of the glory which the saint
had just entered into. His companions felt likewise. Evodius caught up a
psalter, and before Monnica's body, not yet cold, he began to chant the
Psalm, "My song shall be of mercy and judgment; unto Thee, O Lord, will I
sing." All who were in the house took up the responses.
In the meantime, while the layers-out were preparing the corpse for burial,
the brethren drew Augustin into another room. His friends and relations
stood round him. He consoled the others and himself. He spoke, as the
custom was, upon the deliverance of the faithful soul and the happiness
which is promised. They might have imagined that he had no sense of grief,
"But in Thy hearing, O my God, where none of them could hear, I was chiding
the softness of my heart, and holding back the tide of sorrow.... Alas!
well did I know what I was choking down in my heart."