My copy of the Confessions is a dark little book, "a size uncumbersome to
the nicest hand," in the format of an Elzevir, bound in black morocco,
and adorned with "blind-tooled," that is ungilt, skulls and crossbones.
It has lost the title-page with the date, but retains the frontispiece,
engraved by Huret. Saint Augustine, in his mitre and other episcopal
array, with a quill in his hand, sits under a flood of inspiring
sunshine. The dumpy book has been much read, was at some time the
property of Mr. John Philips, and bears one touching manuscript note, of
which more hereafter. It is, I presume, a copy of the translation by Sir
Toby Matthew. The author of the Preface declares, with truth, that the
translator "hath consulted so closely and earnestly with the saint that
he seemeth to have lighted his torch att his fire, and to speak in the
best and most significant English, what and how he would have done had he
understood our language."
There can be no better English version of this famous book, in which
Saint Augustine tells the story of his eager and passionate youth--a
youth tossed about by the contending tides of Love, human and divine.
Reading it to-day, with a mundane curiosity, we may half regret the space
which he gives to theological metaphysics, and his brief tantalising
glimpses of what most interests us now--the common life of men when the
Church was becoming mistress of the world, when the old Religions were
dying of allegory and moral interpretations and occult dreams. But, even
so, Saint Augustine's interest in himself, in the very obscure origins of
each human existence, in the psychology of infancy and youth, in school
disputes, and magical pretensions; his ardent affections, his
exultations, and his faults, make his memoirs immortal among the
unveilings of the spirit. He has studied babies, that he may know his
dark beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil. "Then, by degrees,
I began to find where I was; and I had certain desires to declare my will
to those by whom it might be executed. But I could not do it, . . .
therefore would I be tossing my arms, and sending out certain cryes, . . .
and when they obeyed me not . . . I would fall into a rage, and that
not against such as were my subjects or servants, but against my Elders
and my betters, and I would revenge myself upon them by crying." He has
observed that infants "begin to laugh, first sleeping, and then shortly
waking;" a curious note, but he does not ask wherefore the sense of
humour, or the expression of it, comes to children first in their
slumber. Of what do babies dream? And what do the nested swallows
chirrup to each other in their sleep?
"Such have I understood that such infants are as I could know, and such
have I been told that I was by them who brought me up, though even they
may rather be accounted not to know, than to know these things." One
thing he knows, "that even infancy is subject to sin." From the womb we
are touched with evil. "Myselfe have seene and observed some little
child, who could not speake; and yet he was all in an envious kind of
wrath, looking pale with a bitter countenance upon his foster-brother."
In an envious kind of wrath! Is it not the motive of half our politics,
and too much of our criticism? Such is man's inborn nature, not to be
cured by laws or reforms, not to be washed out of his veins, though
"blood be shed like rain, and tears like a mist." For "an infant cannot
endure a companion to feed with him in a fountain of milk which is richly
abounding and overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute,
and can take no other food but that." This is the Original Sin,
inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are "babes span-long" to suffer,
as the famous or infamous preacher declared. "Where, or at what time,
was I ever innocent?" he cries, and hears no answer from "the dark
backward and abysm" of the pre-natal life.
Then the Saint describes a child's learning to speak; how he amasses
verbal tokens of things, "having tamed, and, as it were, broken my mouth
to the pronouncing of them." "And so I began to launch out more deeply
into the tempestuous traffique and society of mankind." Tempestuous
enough he found or made it--this child of a Pagan father and a Christian
saint, Monica, the saint of Motherhood. The past generations had
"chalked out certain laborious ways of learning," and, perhaps, Saint
Augustine never forgave the flogging pedagogue--the _plagosus Orbilius_
of his boyhood. Long before his day he had found out that the sorrows of
children, and their joys, are no less serious than the sorrows of mature
age. "Is there, Lord, any man of so great a mind that he can think
lightly of those racks, and hooks, and other torments, for the avoiding
whereof men pray unto Thee with great fear from one end of the world to
the other, as that he can make sport at such as doe most sharply inflict
these things upon them, as our parents laughed at the torments which we
children susteyned at our master's hands?" Can we suppose that Monica
laughed, or was it only the heathen father who approved of "roughing it?"
"Being yet a childe, I began to beg Thy ayde and succour; and I did
loosen the knots of my tongue in praying Thee; and I begged, being yet a
little one, with no little devotion, that I might not be beaten at the
schoole." One is reminded of Tom Tulliver, who gave up even praying that
he might learn one part of his work: "Please make Mr. --- say that I am
not to do mathematics."
The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor wit, "but he took
delight in playing." "The plays and toys of men are called business,
yet, when children fall unto them, the same men punish them." Yet the
schoolmaster was "more fed upon by rage," if beaten in any little
question of learning, than the boy; "if in any match at Ball I had been
maistered by one of my playfellows." He "aspired proudly to be
victorious in the matches which he made," and I seriously regret to say
that he would buy a match, and pay his opponent to lose when he could not
win fairly. He liked romances also, "to have myne eares scratched with
lying fables"--a "lazy, idle boy," like him who dallied with Rebecca and
Rowena in the holidays of Charter House.
Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh,
was "The Greek Dunce." Both of these great men, to their sorrow and
loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. "But what the
reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while I was taught it, being
a child, I do not yet understand." The Saint was far from being alone in
that distaste, and he who writes loathed Greek like poison--till he came
to Homer. Latin the Saint loved, except "when reading, writing, and
casting of accounts was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse
paynefull or penal than the very Greeke. I wept for Dido's death, who
made herselfe away with the sword," he declares, "and even so, the saying
that two and two makes foure was an ungrateful song in mine ears; whereas
the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very
Ghost of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity."
In short, the Saint was a regular Boy--a high-spirited, clever, sportive,
and wilful creature. He was as fond as most boys of the mythical tales,
"and for that I was accounted to be a towardly boy." Meanwhile he does
not record that Monica disliked his learning the foolish dear old heathen
fables--"that flood of hell!"
Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of
self-accusation, there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint
Augustine was _une jeunesse orageuse_. "And what was that wherein I took
delight but to love and to be beloved." There was ever much sentiment
and affection in his amours, but his soul "could not distinguish the
beauty of chast love from the muddy darkness of lust. Streams of them
did confusedly boyl in me"--in his African veins. "With a restless kind
of weariness" he pursued that Other Self of the Platonic dream,
neglecting the Love of God:
"Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!"
The course of his education--for the Bar, as we should say--carried him
from home to Carthage, where he rapidly forgot the pure counsels of his
mother "as old wife's consailes." "And we delighted in doing ill, not
only for the pleasure of the fact, but even for the affection of prayse."
Even Monica, it seems, justified the saying:
"Every woman is at heart a Rake."
Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine says, "but she
desired not even that so very much, lest the cloggs of a wife might have
hindered her hopes of me . . . In the meantime the reins were loosed to
me beyond reason." Yet the sin which he regrets most bitterly was
nothing more dreadful than the robbery of an orchard! Pears he had in
plenty, none the less he went, with a band of roisterers, and pillaged
another man's pear tree. "I loved the sin, not that which I obtained by
the same, but I loved the sin itself." There lay the sting of it! They
were not even unusually excellent pears. "A Peare tree ther was, neere
our vineyard, heavy loaden with fruite, which tempted not greatly either
the sight or tast. To the shaking and robbing thereof, certaine most
wicked youthes (whereof I was one) went late at night. We carried away
huge burthens of fruit from thence, not for our owne eating, but to be
cast before the hoggs."
Oh, moonlit night of Africa, and orchard by these wild seabanks where
once Dido stood; oh, laughter of boys among the shaken leaves, and sound
of falling fruit; how do you live alone out of so many nights that no man
remembers? For Carthage is destroyed, indeed, and forsaken of the sea,
yet that one hour of summer is to be unforgotten while man has memory of
the story of his past.
Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the Saint, but a long
remorse for this great sin, which he earnestly analyses. Nor is he so
penitent but that he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of his mis-
doing in the Sense of Humour! "It was a delight and laughter which
tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we were upon the point of
deceiving them who feared no such thing from us, and who, if they had
known it, would earnestly have procured the contrary."
Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set, as people say
now--"the Depravers" or "Destroyers"; though he loved them little, "whose
actions I ever did abhor, that is, their Destruction of others, amongst
whom I yet lived with a kind of shameless bashfulness." In short, the
"Hell-Fire Club" of that day numbered a reluctant Saint among its
members! It was no Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which
won him from this perilous society. "It altered my affection, and made
me address my prayers to Thee, O Lord, and gave me other desires and
purposes than I had before. All vain hopes did instantly grow base in
myne eyes, and I did, with an incredible heat of hart, aspire towards the
Immortality of Wisdom." Thus it was really "Saint Tully," and not the
mystic call of _Tolle_! _Lege_! that "converted" Augustine, diverting the
current of his life into the channel of Righteousness. "How was I
kindled then, oh, my God, with a desire to fly from earthly things
towards Thee."
There now remained only the choice of a Road. Saint Augustine dates his
own conversion from the day of his turning to the strait Christian
orthodoxy. Even the Platonic writings, had he known Greek, would not
have satisfied his desire. "For where was that Charity that buildeth
upon the foundation of Humility, which is Christ Jesus? . . . These
pages" (of the Platonists) "carried not in them this countenance of
piety--the tears of confession, and that sacrifice of Thine which is an
afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, the salvation of Thy
people, the Spouse, the City, the pledge of Thy Holy Spirit, the Cup of
our Redemption. No man doth there thus express himself. Shall not my
soul be subject to God, for of Him is my salvation? For He is my God,
and my salvation, my protectour; I shall never be moved. No man doth
there once call and say to him: 'Come unto me all you that labour.'"
The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint Augustine instinctively
knew he lacked--the grace of Humility, nor the Comfort that is not from
within but from without. To these he aspired; let us follow him on the
path by which he came within their influence; but let us not forget that
the guide on the way to the City was kind, clever, wordy, vain old Marcus
Tullius Cicero. It is to the City that all our faces should be set, if
we knew what belongs to our peace; thither we cast fond, hopeless,
backward glances, even if we be of those whom Tertullian calls "Saint
Satan's Penitents." Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the
path--one of the few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love
which is our only rest. It may be worth while to follow him to the
journey's end.
The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine "to the loving and
seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom
itself, wheresoever it was." Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the
Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was
repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going further than Mr.
Pater's book, "Marius, the Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an
English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that
date found not too simple. But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was
Augustine's ideal; that verbose and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as
it did the early scholars when learning revived. Augustine had dallied a
little with the sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his
mother more than his wild life.
But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, and
met "a glorious young man," who informed her that "where she was there
should her son be also." Curious it is to think that this very semblance
of a glorious young man haunts the magical dreams of heathen Red Indians,
advising them where they shall find game, and was beheld in such
ecstasies by John Tanner, a white man who lived with the Indians, and
adopted their religion. The Greeks would have called this appearance
Hermes, even in this guise Odysseus met him in the oak wood of Circe's
Isle. But Augustine was not yet in his mother's faith; he still taught
and studied rhetoric, contending for its prizes, but declining to be
aided by a certain wizard of his acquaintance. He had entered as a
competitor for a "Tragicall poeme," but was too sportsmanlike to seek
victory by art necromantic. Yet he followed after Astrologers, because
they used no sacrifices, and did not pretend to consult spirits. Even
the derision of his dear friend Nebridius could not then move him from
those absurd speculations. His friend died, and "his whole heart was
darkened;" "mine eyes would be looking for him in all places, but they
found him not, and I hated all things because they told me no news of
him." He fell into an extreme weariness of life, and no less fear of
death. He lived but by halves; having lost _dimidium animae suae_, and
yet dreaded death, "Lest he might chance to have wholy dyed whome I
extremely loved." So he returned to Carthage for change, and sought
pleasure in other friendships; but "Blessed is the man that loves Thee
and his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee. For he only never loseth
a dear friend to whom all men are dear, for His sake, who is never lost."
Here, on the margin of the old book, beside these thoughts, so beautiful
if so helpless, like all words, to console, some reader long dead has
written:--
"Pray for your poor servant, J. M."
And again,
"Pray for your poor friend."
Doubtless, some Catholic reader, himself bereaved, is imploring the
prayers of a dear friend dead; and sure we need their petitions more than
they need ours, who have left this world of temptation, and are at peace.
After this loss Saint Augustine went to Rome, his ambition urging him,
perhaps, but more his disgust with the violent and riotous life of
students in Carthage. To leave his mother was difficult, but "I lyed to
my mother, yea, such a mother, and so escaped from her." And now he had
a dangerous sickness, and afterwards betook himself to converse with the
orthodox, for example at Milan with Saint Ambrose. In Milan his mother
would willingly have continued in the African ritual--a Pagan
survival--carrying wine and food to the graves of the dead; but this
Saint Ambrose forbade, and she obeyed him for him "she did extremely
affect for the regard of my spirituall good."
From Milan his friend Alipius preceded him to Rome, and there "was
damnably delighted" with the gladiatorial combats, being "made drunk with
a delight in blood." Augustine followed him to Rome, and there lost the
girl of his heart, "so that my heart was wounded, as that the very blood
did follow." The lady had made a vow of eternal chastity, "having left
me with a son by her." But he fell to a new love as the old one was
departed, and yet the ancient wound pained him still "after a more
desperate and dogged manner."
_Haeret letalis arundo_!
By these passions his conversion was delayed, the carnal and spiritual
wills fighting against each other within him. "Give me chastity and
continency, O Lord," he would pray, "but do not give it yet," and perhaps
this is the frankest of the confessions of Saint Augustine. In the midst
of this war of the spirit and the flesh, "Behold I heard a voyce, as if
it had been of some boy or girl from some house not farre off, uttering
and often repeating these words in a kind of singing voice,
"_Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege_,
Take up and read, take up and read."
So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of
his Virgilian lots, read:--
"Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness,"
with what follows. "Neither would I read any further, neither was there
any cause why I should." Saint Augustine does not, perhaps, mean us to
understand (as his translator does), that he was "miraculously called."
He knew what was right perfectly well before; the text only clinched a
resolve which he has found it very hard to make. Perhaps there was a
trifle of superstition in the matter. We never know how superstitious we
are. At all events, henceforth "I neither desired a wife, nor had I any
ambitious care of any worldly thing." He told his mother, and Monica
rejoiced, believing that now her prayers were answered.
Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine. It was the
maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred. Much stranger stories are
told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner. He gave up rhetoric; another man
was engaged "to sell words" to the students of Milan. Being now
converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of
his mother's death, and of that ecstatic converse they held "she and I
alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of
our lodging at Ostia." They
"Came on that which is, and heard
The vast pulsations of the world."
"And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able
to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and
we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower
of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again,
where words are begun and ended."
Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to lie
beside her husband in Africa, she said: "Lay this Body where you will.
Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, that you will
remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be." "But upon the
ninth day of her sickness, in the six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and
the three-and-thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was
discharged from the prison of her body."
The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems, than it had been at
the death of his friend. But he could remember how "she related with
great dearness of affection, how she never heard any harsh or unkind word
to be darted out of my mouth against her." And to this consolation was
added who knows what of confidence and tenderness of certain hope, or a
kind of deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the pain of a heart very
often tried and inured to every pain. For it is certain that "this green
wound" was green and grievous for a briefer time than the agony of his
earlier sorrows. He himself, so earnest in analysing his own emotions,
is perplexed by the short date of his tears, and his sharpest grief: "Let
him read it who will, and interpret it as it pleaseth him."
So, with the death of Monica, we may leave Saint Augustine. The most
human of books, the "Confessions," now strays into theology. Of all
books that which it most oddly resembles, to my fancy at least, is the
poems of Catullus. The passion and the tender heart they have in common,
and in common the war of flesh and spirit; the shameful inappeasable love
of Lesbia, or of the worldly life; so delightful and dear to the poet and
to the saint, so despised in other moods conquered and victorious again,
among the battles of the war in our members. The very words in which the
Veronese and the Bishop of Hippo described the pleasure and gaiety of an
early friendship are almost the same, and we feel that, born four hundred
years later, the lover of Lesbia, the singer of Sirmio might actually
have found peace in religion, and exchanged the earthly for the heavenly
love.