NPNF1-01. The Confessions and Letters of St. Augustin, with a Sketch of his Life and Work

iii

A SELECT LIBRARY

OF THE

NICENE AND

POST-NICENE FATHERS

OF

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

EDITED BY

PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D., LL.D.,

PROFESSOR IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK,

IN CONNECTION WITH A NUMBER OF PATRISTIC SCHOLARS OF EUROPE AND AMERICA.

VOLUME I

THE CONFESSIONS AND LETTERS OF ST. AUGUSTIN,

WITH A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

T&T CLARK

EDINBURGH

__________________________________________________

WM. B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

v

Preface

————————————

Encouraged by the assured co-operation of competent Patristic scholars of Great Britain and the United States, I have undertaken the general editorship of a Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. It is to embrace in about twenty-five large volumes the most important works of the Greek Fathers from Eusebius to Photius, and of the Latin Fathers from Ambrose to Gregory the Great.

The series opens with St. Augustin, the greatest and most influential of all the Christian Fathers. Protestants and Catholics are equally interested in his writings, and most of all in his Confessions, which are contained in this volume. They will be followed by the works of St. Chrysostom, and the Church History of Eusebius.

A few words are necessary to define the object of this Library, and its relation to similar collections.

My purpose is to furnish ministers and intelligent laymen who have no access to the original texts, or are not sufficiently familiar with ecclesiastical Greek and Latin, with a complete apparatus for the study of ancient Christianity. Whatever may be the estimate we put upon the opinions of the Fathers, their historical value is beyond all dispute. They are to this day and will continue to be the chief authorities for the doctrines and usages of the Greek and Roman Churches, and the sources for the knowledge of ancient Christianity down to the age of Charlemagne. But very few can afford to buy, or are able to use such collections as Migne’s Greek Patrology, which embraces 167 quarto volumes, and Migne’s Latin Patrology which embraces 222 volumes.

The three leaders of the now historic Anglo-Catholic movement of Oxford, Drs. Pusey, Newman, and Keble, began, in 1837, the publication of “A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, anterior to the Division of the East and West. Translated by Members of the English Church,” Oxford (John Henry Parker) and London (J. G. F. & J. Rivington). It is dedicated to “William Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England.” The editors were aided by a number of able classical and ecclesiastical scholars. Dr. Pusey, the chief editor and proprietor, and Dr. Keble died in the communion of the church of their fathers to which they were loyally attached; Dr. Newman alone remains, though no more an Anglican, but a Cardinal of the Church of Rome. His connection with the enterprise ceased with his secession (1845).

The Oxford Library was undertaken not so much for an historical, as for an apologetic and dogmatic purpose. It was to furnish authentic proof for the supposed or real agreement of the Anglo-Catholic school with the faith and practice of the ancient church before the Greek schism. The selection was made accordingly. The series embraces 48 vols. It is very valuable as far as it vigoes, but incomplete and unequal. Volume followed volume as it happened to get ready. An undue proportion is given to exegetical works; six volumes are taken up with Augustin’s Commentary on the Psalms, six with Gregory’s Commentary on Job, sixteen with Commentaries of Chrysostom; while many of the most important doctrinal, ethical, and historical works of the Fathers, as Eusebius, Basil, the two Gregorys, Theodoret, Maximus Confessor, John of Damascus, Hilary, Jerome, Leo the Great, were never reached.

In 1866, Mr. T. Clark, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and an Elder in the Free Church of Scotland, who has done more than any publisher for the introduction of German and other foreign theological literature to the English reading community, began to issue the valuable “Ante-Nicene Christian Library”, edited by Rev. Alexander Roberts, D. D., and James Donaldson, LL. D., which was completed in 1872 in 24 volumes, and is now being republished, by arrangement with Mr. Clark, in America in 8 volumes under the editorship of Bishop A. Cleveland Coxe, D. D. (1884–1886). Mr. Clark, in 1871, undertook also the publication of a translation of select works of St. Augustin under the editorial care of Rev. Marcus Dods, D. D., of Glasgow, which was completed in 15 volumes. The projected translation of Chrysostom was abandoned from want of encouragement.

Thus Episcopal divines of England, and Presbyterian divines of Scotland have prepared the way for our American enterprise, and made it possible.

We must also briefly mention a similar collection which was prepared by Roman Catholic scholars of Germany in the interest of their Church, namely the Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. Auswahl der vorzüglichsten patristichen Werke in deutscher Uebersetzung, herausgegeben unter der Oberleitung von Dr. Valentin Thalhofer (Domdekan und Prof. der Theol. in Eichstätt, formerly Professor in Munich). Kempten., Köselsche Buchhandlung. 1869–1886. Published in over 400 small numbers, three or four of which make a volume. An alphabetical Index vol. is now in course of preparation by Ulrich Uhle (Nos. 405 sqq.). The series was begun in 1869 by Dr. Fr. X. Reithmayr, Prof. of Theol. in Munich, who died in 1872. It embraces select writings of most of the Fathers. Seven volumes are devoted to Letters of the Popes from Linus to Pelagius II. (a.d. 67–590).

“The Christian Literature Company,” who republish Clark’s “Ante-Nicene Library,” asked me to undertake the editorship of a Nicene and Post-Nicene Library to complete the scheme. Satisfactory arrangements have been made with Mr. Clark and with Mr. Walter Smith, representing Dr. Pusey’s heirs, for the use of their translations, as far as our plan will permit. Without such a preliminary arrangement I would not have considered the proposal for a moment.

I have invited surviving authors of older translations to revise and edit their work for the American series, and I am happy to state that I received favorable replies. Some of them are among the list of contributors, others (including Cardinal Newman) have, at least, expressed a kindly interest in the enterprise, and wish it success.

The Nicene and Post-Nicene Library will be more complete and more systematic as well as much cheaper than any which has yet appeared in the English language. By omitting the voluminous Patristic commentaries on the Old Testament we shall gain room for more important and interesting works not embraced in the Oxford or Edinburgh series; and by condensing three or more of these volumes into one, and counting upon a large number of subscribers, the publishers viithink themselves justified in offering the Library on terms which are exceedingly liberal, considering the great expense and risk. It will be published in the same handsome style as their Ante-Nicene Library.

May the blessing of the Great Head of the Church accompany and crown this work.

Philip Schaff.

New York, October, 1886.

ix

Contents.

__________

I.      Prolegomena: St. Augustin’s Life and Work

By Philip Schaff, D.D.

Chapter I.—Literature

Chapter II.—Sketch of the Life of St. Augustin

Chapter III.—Estimate of St. Augustin

Chapter IV.—Writings of St. Augustin

Chapter V.—The Influence of St. Augustin upon Posterity and his Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism

Chief Events in the Life of St. Augustin

II.   The Confessions of St. Augustin:

Translated by J.G. Pilkington, M.A.

Translator’s Preface

St. Augustin’s Opinion on his Confessions

The Confessions

III. The Letters of St. Augustin:

Translated by J.G. Cunningham, M.A.

Translator’s Preface

The Letters

1

Prolegomena.

——————

St. Augustin’s Life and Work

From Schaff’s Church History, Revised Edition.

New York 1884. Vol. III. 988-1028.

Revised and enlarged with additions to literature till 1886.

CHAPTER I.—Literature.

I. sources.

Augustin’s Works. S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis episcopi Opera…Post Lovaniensium theologorum recensionem [which appeared at Antwerp in 1577 in 11 vols.], castigatus [referring to tomus primus, etc.] denuo ad MSS. codd. Gallicanos, etc. Opera et studio monachorum ordinis S. Benedicti e congregatione S. Mauri [Fr. Delfau, Th. Blampin, P. Coustant, and Cl. Guesnié]. Paris, 1679-1700, 11 tom. in 8 fol. vols. The same edition reprinted, with additions, at Antwerp, 1700-1703, 12 parts in 9 fol.; and at Venice, 1729-’34, in 11 tom. in 8 fol. (this edition is not to be confounded with another Venice edition of 1756-’69 in 18 vols. 4to, which is full of printing errors); also at Bassano, 1807, in 18 vols.; by Gaume fratres, Paris, 1836-’39, in 11 tom. in 22 parts (a very elegant edition); and lastly by J. P. Migne, Petit-Montrouge, 1841-’49, in 12 tom. (“Patrol. Lat.” tom. xxxii.-xlvii.). Migne’s edition gives, in a supplementary volume (tom. xii.), the valuable Notitia literaria de vita, scriptis et editionibus Aug. from Schönemann’s “Bibliotheca historico-literaria Patrum Lat.” vol. ii. Lips. 1794, the Vindiciæ Augustinianæ of Cardinal Noris (Norisius), and the writings of Augustin first published by Fontanini and Angelo Mai. So far the most complete and convenient edition.

But a thoroughly reliable critical edition of Augustin is still a desideratum and will be issued before long by a number of scholars under the direction of the Imperial Academy of Vienna in the “Corpus Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum.”

On the controversies relating to the merits of the Bened. edition, which was sharply criticized by Richard Simon, and the Jesuits, but is still the best and defended by the Benedictines, see the supplementary volume of Migne, xxi. p. 40 sqq., and Thuillier: Histoire de la nouvelle éd. de S. Aug. par les PP. Bénédictins, Par. 1736.

The first printed edition of Augustin appeared at Basle, 1489-’95; another, in 1509, in 11 vols.; then the edition of Erasmus published by Frobenius, Bas. 1528-’29, in 10 vols., fol.; the Editio Lovaniensis, of sixteen divines of Louvain, Antw. 1577, in 11 vols. and often reprinted at Paris, Geneva, and Cologne.

Several works of Augustin have been often separately edited, especially the Confessions and the City of God. Compare a full list of the editions down to 1794 in Schönemann’s Bibliotheca, vol. ii. p. 73 sqq.; for later editions see Brunet, Manuel du libraire, Paris 1860, tom. I. vol. 557-567. Since then William Bright (Prof. of Ecclesiast. Hist. at Oxford) has published the Latin text of Select Anti-Pelagian Treatises of St. Aug. and the Acts of the Second Council of Orange. Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1880. With a valuable Introduction of 68 pages.

English translations of select works of Augustin are found in the “Oxford Library of the Fathers,” ed. by Drs. Pusey, Keble, and Newman, viz.: The Confessions, vol. I., 1838, 4th ed., 1853; Sermons on the N. T., vol. xvi., 1844, and vol. xx. 1845; Short Treatises, vol. xxii., 1847; Exposition of the Psalms, vols. xxiv., xxv., xxx., xxxii., xxxvii., xxxix., 1847, 1849, 1850, 1853, 1854; Homilies on John, vols. xxvi. and xxix., 1848 and 1849. Another translation by Marcus Dods and others, Edinb. (T. & T. Clark), 1871-’76, 15 vols., containing the City of God, the Anti-Donatist, the Anti-Pelagian, the Anti-Manichæan writings, Letters, On the Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, the Enchiridion, On Catechising, On Faith and the Creed, Commentaries on the Sermon on the Mount, and the Harmony of the Gospels, Lectures on John, and Confessions. There are several separate translations and editions of the Confessions: the first by Sir Tobias Matthews (a Roman Catholic) 1624, said, by Dr. Pusey, to be very inaccurate 2and subservient to Romanism; a second by Rev. W. Watts, D.D., 1631, 1650; a third by Abr. Woodhead (only the first 9 books). Dr. Pusey, in the first vol. of the Oxford Library of the Fathers, 1838 (new ed. 1883), republished the translation of Watts, with improvements and explanatory notes, mostly borrowed from Dubois’s Latin ed. Dr. Shedd’s edition, Andover, 1860, is a reprint of Watts (as republished in Boston in 1843), preceded by a thoughtful introduction, pp. v.-xxxvi. H. de Romestin translated minor doctrinal tracts in Saint Augustin. Oxford 1885.

German translations of select writings of Aug. in the Kempten Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, 1871-79, 8 vols. There are also separate translations and editions of the Confessions (by Silbert, 5th ed., Vienna, 1861; by Kautz, Arnsberg, 1840; by Gröninger, 4th ed., Münster, 1859; by Wilden, Schaffhausen, 1865; by Rapp, 7th ed., Gotha, 1878), of the Enchiridion, the Meditations, and the City of God (Die Stadt Gottes, by Silbert, Vienna, 1827, 2 vols.).

French translations: Les Confessions, by Dubois, Paris, 1688, 1715, 1758, 1776; and by Janet, Paris, 1857; a new translation with a preface by Abbé de la Mennais, Paris, 1822, 2 vols.; another by L. Moreau, Paris, 1854. La Cité de Dieu, by Emile Saisset, Paris, 1855, with introd. and notes, 4 vols.; older translations by Raoul de Præsles, Abbeville, 1486; Savetier, Par. 1531; P. Lombert, Par. 1675, and 1701; Abbé Goujet, Par. 1736 and 1764, reprinted at Bourges 1818; L. Moreau, with the Latin text, Par. 1846, 3 vols. Les Soliloques, by Pélissier, Paris, 1853. Les Lettres, by Poujoulat, Paris, 1858, 4 vols. Le Manuel, by d’Avenel, Rennes, 1861.

II. BIOGRAPHIES.

Possidius (Calamensis episcopus, a pupil and friend of Aug.): Vita Augustini (brief, but authentic, written 432, two years after his death, in tom. x. Append. 257-280, ed. Bened., and in nearly all other editions).

Benedictini Editores: Vita Augustini ex ejus potissimum scriptis concinnata, in 8 books (very elaborate and extensive), in tom. xi. 1-492, ed. Bened. (in Migne’s reprint, tom. i. col. 66-578).

The biographies of Aug. by Tillemont (Mém. tom. xiii.); Ellies Dupin (in “Nouvelle bibliothèque des auteurs ecclésiastiques,” tom. ii. and iii.); P. Bayle (in his “Dictionnaire historique et critique,” art. Augustin); Remi Ceillier (in “Histoire générale des auteurs sacrés et ecclés.,” vol. xi. and xii.); Cave (in “Lives of the Fathers,” vol. ii.); Kloth (Der heil Aug., Aachen, 1840, 2 vols.); Böhringer (Kirchengeschichte in Biographien, vol. i. P. iii. p. 99 sqq., revised ed. Leipzig, 1877-’78, 2 parts); Poujoulat (Histoire de S. Aug. Par. 1843 and 1852, 2 vols.; the same in German by Fr. Hurter, Schaff h. 1847, 2 vols.); Eisenbarth (Stuttg. 1853); C. Bindemann (Der heil. Aug. Berlin, 1844, ‘55, ‘69, 3 vols., the best work in German); Edw. L. Cutts (St. Augustin, London, 1880); E. de Pressensé (in Smith and Wace, “Dictionary of Christ. Biogr.” I. 216-225); Ph. Schaff (St. Augustin, Berlin, 1854; English ed. New York and London, 1854, revised and enlarged in St. Augustin, Melanchthon and Neander; three biographies, New York and London, 1886, pp. 1-106). On Monnica see Braune: Monnica and Augustin. Grimma, 1846.

III. special treatises on the system of augustin.

(1) The Theology of Augustin. The Church Histories of Neander, Baur, Hase (his large work, 1885, vol. I. 514 sqq.), and the Doctrine Histories of Neander, Gieseler, Baur, Hagenbach, Shedd, Nitzsch, Schwane, Bach, Harnack (in preparation, first vol., 1886).

The voluminous literature on the Pelagian controversy embraces works of G. J. Voss, Garnier, Jansen (died 1638; Augustinus, 1640, 3 vols.; he read Aug. twenty times and revived his system in the R. Cath. Church, but was condemned by the Pope), Cardinal Noris (Historia Pelagiana, Florence, 1673), Walch (Ketzergeschichte, vols. IV. and V., 1768 and 1770), Wiggers (Augustinismus und Pelagianismus, 1821 and 1833), Bersot (Doctr. de St. Aug. sur la liberté et la Providence, Paris, 1843), Jacobi (Lehre des Pelagius, 1842), Jul. Müller (Lehre von der Sünde, 5th ed. 1866, Engl. transl. by Urwick, 1868), Mozley (Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, London, 1855, very able), W. Bright (Introduction to his ed. of the Anti-Pelag. writings of Aug. Oxford 1880), and others. See Schaff, vol III. 783-785.

Van Goens: De Aur. August. apologeta, sec. 1 de Civitate Dei. Amstel. 1838.

Nirschl (Rom. Cath.). Ursprung und Wesen des Bösen nach der Lehre des heil. Augustin. 1854.

F. Ribbeck: Donatus und Augustinus, oder der erste entscheidende Kampf zwischen Separatismus und Kirche. Elberfeld, 1858, 2 vols.

Fr. Nitzsch: Augustin’s Lehre vom Wunder. Berlin, 1865.

Gangauf: Des heil. August. Lehre von Gott dem dreieinigen. Augsburg, 1866. Emil Feuerlein: Ueber die Stellung Augustin’s in der Kirchen=und Kulturgeschichte, in Sybel’s “Histor. Zeitschrift” for 1869, vol. XI. 270-313. Naville: Saint Augustin, Etude sur le développement de sa pensée. Genève, 1872. Ernst: Die Werke und Tugenden der Ungläubigen nach Augustin. Freiburg, 1872. Aug. Dorner (son of Is. A. D.): Augustinus, sein theol. System und seine religionsphilosophische Anschauung. Berlin, 1873 (comp. his art. in Herzog’s “Encycl.” 2d ed. I. 781-795, abridged in Schaff-Herzog I. 174 sqq.). Ch. H. Collett: St. Aug., a Sketch of his Life and Writings as affecting the controversy with Rome. London, 1883. H. Reuter (Prof. of Church 3History in Göttingen): Augustinische Studien, in Brieger’s “Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte,” for 1880-’86 (several articles on Aug.’s doctrine of the church, of predestination, the kingdom of God, etc.,—very valuable).

(2) The Philosophy of Augustin is discussed in the larger Histories of Philosophy by Brucker, Tennemann, Rixner, H. Ritter (vol. vi. pp. 153-443), Erdmann (Grundriss der Gesch. der Philos. I. 231 sqq.), Ueberweg (Hist. of Philos., transl. by Morris, New York, vol. I. 333-346); Prantl (Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, Leipzig, 1853, I. 665-672); Huber (Philosophie der Kirchenväter, München, 1859), and in the following special works:

Theod. Gangauf: Metaphysische Psychologie des heil. Augustinus. 1ste Abtheilung, Augsburg, 1852. T. Théry: Le génie philosophique et littéraire de saint Augustin. Par. 1861. Abbé Flottes: Études sur saint Aug., son génie, son âme, sa philosophie. Montpèllier, 1861. Nourrisson: La philosophie de saint Augustin (ouvrage couronné par l’Institut de France), deuxiéme éd. Par. 1866, 2 vols. Reinkens: Geschichtsphilosophie des Aug. Schaffhausen, 1866. Ferraz: De la psychologie de S. Augustin, 2d ed. Paris, 1869. Schütz: Augustinum non esse ontologum. Monast. 1867. A. F. Hewitt: The Problems of the Age, with Studies in St. Augustin. New York, 1868. G. Loesche: De Augustino Plotinizante. Jenae, 1880 (68 pages).

(3) On Aug. as a Latin author see Bähr: Geschichte der röm Literatur, Suppl. II. Ebert: Geschichte der latein. Literatur (Leipzig, 1874, I. 203 sqq.). Villemain: Tableau de l’éloquence chrétienne au IV^e siècle (Paris, 1849).

CHAPTER II.—A Sketch of the Life of St. Augustin.

It is a venturesome and delicate undertaking to write one’s own life, even though that life be a masterpiece of nature and the grace of God, and therefore most worthy to be described. Of all autobiographies none has so happily avoided the reef of vanity and self-praise, and none has won so much esteem and love through its honesty and humility as that of St. Augustin.

The “Confessions,” which he wrote in the forty-fourth year of his life, still burning in the ardor of his first love, are full of the fire and unction of the Holy Spirit. They are a sublime composition, in which Augustin, like David in the fifty-first Psalm, confesses to God, in view of his own and of succeeding generations, without reserve the sins of his youth; and they are at the same time a hymn of praise to the grace of God, which led him out of darkness into light, and called him to service in the kingdom of Christ.¹¹    Augustin himself says of his Confessions: “Confessionum mearum libri tredecim et de malis et de bonis meis Deum laudant justum et bonum, atque in eum excitant humanum intellectum et affectum.” Retract. 1. ii. c. 6. He refers to his Confessions also in his Epistola ad Darium, Ep. CCXXXI. cap. 5; and in his De dono perseverantiæ, cap. 20 (53). Here we see the great church teacher of all times “prostrate in the dust, conversing with God, basking in his love; his readers hovering before him only as a shadow.” He puts away from himself all honor, all greatness, all merit, and lays them gratefully at the feet of the All-merciful. The reader feels on every hand that Christianity is no dream nor illusion, but truth and life, and he is carried along in adoration of the wonderful grace of God.

Aurelius Augustinus, born on the 13th of November, 354,²²    He died, according to the Chronicle of his friend and pupil Prosper Aquitanus, the 28th of August, 430 (in the third month of the siege of Hippo by the Vandals); according to his biographer Possidius he lived seventy-six years. The day of his birth Augustin states himself, De vita beata, § 6 (tom. i. 300): “Idibus Novemoris mihi natalis dies erat.” at Tagaste, an unimportant village of the fertile province of Numidia in North Africa, not far from Hippo Regius, inherited from his heathen father, Patricius,³³    He received baptism shortly before his death. a passionate sensibility, from his Christian mother, Monnica (one of the noblest women in the history of Christianity, of a highly intellectual and spiritual cast, of fervent piety, most tender affection, and all-conquering love), the deep yearning towards God so grandly expressed in his sentence: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it rests in Thee.”⁴⁴    Conf. i. 1: “Fecisti nos ad Te, et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te.” In all his aberrations, which we would hardly know, if it were not from his own free confession, he never sunk to anything mean, but remained, like Paul in his Jewish fanaticism, a noble intellect and an honorable character, with burning love for the true and the good. This yearning, and his reverence for the sweet and holy name of Jesus, though crowded into the background, attended him in his studies at the schools of Madaura and Carthage, on his journeys to Rome and Milan, and on his tedious wanderings through the labyrinth of carnal pleasures, Manichæan mock-wisdom, Academic skepticism, and Platonic idealism; till at last the prayers of his mother, the sermons of Ambrose, the biography 4of St. Anthony, and above all, the Epistles of Paul, as so many instruments in the hand of the Holy Spirit, wrought in the man of three and thirty years that wonderful change which made him an incalculable blessing to the whole Christian world, and brought even the sins and errors of his youth into the service of the truth.⁵⁵    For particulars respecting the course of Augustin’s life, see my work above cited, and other monographs. Comp. also the fine remarks of Dr. Baur in his posthumous Lectures on Doctrine-History (1866), vol. i. Part ii. p. 26 sqq. He compares the development of Augustin with the course of Christianity from the beginning to his time, and draws a parallel between Augustin and Origen.

A son of so many prayers and tears could not be lost, and the faithful mother who travailed with him in spirit with greater pain than her body had in bringing him into the world,⁶⁶    Conf. ix. c. 8: “Quæ me parturivit et carne, ut in hanc temporalem, et carde, ut in æternam lucem nascerer.” L. v. 9: “Non enim satis eloquor, quid erga me habebat anima, et quanto majore sollicitudine nie partur iebat spiritu, quam carne pepererat.” In De dono persev. c. 20, he ascribes his conversion under God “to the faithful and daily tears” of his mother. was permitted, for the encouragement of future mothers, to receive shortly before her death an answer to her prayers and expectations, and was able to leave this world with joy without revisiting her earthly home. For Monnica died on a homeward journey, in Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, in her fifty-sixth year, in the arms of her son, after enjoying with him a glorious conversation that soared above the confines of space and time, and was a foretaste of the eternal Sabbath-rest of the saints. If those moments, he says, could be prolonged for ever, they would more than suffice for his happiness in heaven. She regretted not to die in a foreign land, because she was not far from God, who would raise her up at the last day. “Bury my body anywhere, “was her last request, “and trouble not yourselves for it; only this one thing I ask, that you remember me at the altar of my God, wherever you may be.”⁷⁷    Conf. l. ix. c. 11: “Tantum illud vos rogo, ut ad Domini altare memineritis mei, ubs fuertis.” This must be explained from the already prevailing custom of offering prayers for the dead, which, however, had rather the form of thanksgiving for the mercy of God shown to them, than the later form of intercession for them. Augustin, in his Confessions, has erected to Monnica a noble monument that can never perish.

If ever there was a thorough and fruitful conversion, next to that of Paul on the way to Damascus, it was that of Augustin, when, in a garden of the Villa Cassiciacum, not far from Milan, in September of the year 386, amidst the most violent struggles of mind and heart—the birth-throes of the new life—he heard that divine voice of a child: “Take, read!” and he “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. xiii. 14). It is a touching lamentation of his: “I have loved Thee late, Thou Beauty, so old and so new; I have loved Thee late! And lo! Thou wast within, but I was without, and was seeking Thee there. And into Thy fair creation I plunged myself in my ugliness; for Thou was with me, and I was not with Thee! Those things kept me away from Thee, which had not been, except they had been in Thee! Thou didst call, and didst cry aloud, and break through my deafness. Thou didst glimmer, Thou didst shine, and didst drive away my blindness. Thou didst breathe, and I drew breath, and breathed in Thee. I tasted Thee, and I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burn for Thy peace. If I, with all that is within me, may once live in Thee, then shall pain and trouble forsake me; entirely filled with Thee, all shall be life to me.”

He received baptism from Ambrose in Milan on Easter Sunday, 387, in company with his friend and fellow-convert Alypius, and his natural son Adeodatus (given by God). It impressed the divine seal upon the inward transformation. He broke radically with the world; abandoned the brilliant and lucrative vocation of a teacher of rhetoric, which he had followed in Rome and Milan; sold his goods for the benefit of the poor; and thenceforth devoted his rare gifts exclusively to the service of Christ, and to that service he continued faithful to his latest breath. After the death of his mother, whom he revered and loved with the most tender affection, he went a second time to Rome for several months, and wrote books in defence of true Christianity against false philosophy and against the Manichæan heresy. Returning to Africa, he spent three years, with his friends Alypius and Evodius, on an estate in his native Tagaste, in contemplative and literary retirement.

Then, in 391, he was chosen presbyter against his will, by the voice of the people, which, as 5in the similar cases of Cyprian and Ambrose, proved to be the voice of God, in the Numidian maritime city of Hippo Regius (now Bona); and in 395 he was elected bishop in the same city. For eight and thirty years, until his death, he labored in this place, and made it the intellectual centre of Western Christendom.⁸⁸    He is still known among the inhabitants of the place as “the great Christian” (Rumi Kebir). Gibbon (ch. xxxiii. ad ann. 430) thus describes the place which became so famous through Augustin: “The maritime colony of Hippo, about two hundred miles westward of Carthage, had formerly acquired the distinguishing epithet of Regius, from the residence of the Numidian kings; and some remains of trade and populousness still adhere to the modern city, which is known in Europe by the corrupted name of Bona.” Sallust mentions Hippo once in his history of the Jugurthine War. A part of the wealth with which Sallust built and beautified his splendid mansion and gardens in Rome, was extorted from this and other towns of North Africa while governor of Numidia. Since the French conquest of Algiers Hippo Regius was rebuilt under the name of Bona and is now one of the finest towns in North Africa, numbering over 10,000 inhabitants, French, Moors, and Jews.

His outward mode of life was extremely simple, and mildly ascetic. He lived with his clergy in one house in an apostolic community of goods, and made this house a seminary of theology, out of which ten bishops and many lower clergy went forth. Females, even his sister, were excluded from his house, and could see him only in the presence of others. But he founded religious societies of women; and over one of these his sister, a saintly widow, presided.⁹⁹    He mentions a sister, “soror mea, sancta proposita” [monasterii], without naming her, Epist. 211, n. 4 (ed. Bened.), alias Ep. 109. He also had a brother by the name of Navigius. He once said in a sermon, that he had nowhere found better men, and he had nowhere found worse, than in monasteries. Combining, as he did, the clerical life with the monastic, he became unwittingly the founder of the Augustinian order, which gave the reformer Luther to the world. He wore the black dress of the Easter cœnobites, with a cowl and a leathern girdle. He lived almost entirely on vegetables, and seasoned the common meal with reading or free conversation, in which it was a rule that the character of an absent person should never be touched. He had this couplet engraved on the table:

“Quisquis amat dictis absentum rodere vitam,

Hanc mensam vetitam noverit esse sibi.”

He often preached five days in succession, sometimes twice a day, and set it as the object of his preaching, that all might live with him, and he with all, in Christ. Wherever he went in Africa, he was begged to preach the world of salvation.¹⁰¹⁰    Possidius says, in his Vita Aug.: “Cæterum episcopatu suscepto multo instantius ac ferventius, majore auctoritate, non in una tantum regione, sed ubicunque rogatus venisset, verbum satutis alacriter, ac suaviter pullulante atque crescente Domini ecclesia, prædicavit.” He faithfully administered the external affairs connected with his office, though he found his chief delight in contemplation. He was specially devoted to the poor, and, like Ambrose, upon exigency, caused the church vessels to be melted down to redeem prisoners. But he refused legacies by which injustice was done to natural heirs, and commended the bishop Aurelius of Carthage for giving back unasked some property which a man has bequeathed to the church, when his wife unexpectedly bore him children.

Augustin’s labors extended far beyond his little diocese. He was the intellectual head of the North African and the entire Western church of his time. He took active interest in all theological and ecclesiastical questions. He was the champion of the orthodox doctrine against Manichæan, Donatist, and Pelagian. In him was concentrated the whole polemic power of the catholic church of the time against heresy and schism; and in him it won the victory over them.

In his last years he took a critical review of his literary productions, and gave them a thorough sifting in his Retractations. His latest controversial works, against the Semi-Pelagians, written in a gentle spirit, date from the same period. He bore the duties of his office alone till his seventy-second year, when his people unanimously elected his friend Heraclius to be his assistant.

The evening of his life was troubled by increasing infirmities of body and by the unspeakable wretchedness which the barbarian Vandals spread over his country in their victorious invasion, 6destroying cities, villages, and churches, without mercy, and even besieging the fortified city of Hippo.¹¹¹¹    Possidius, c. 28, gives a vivid picture of the ravages of the Vandals, which have become proverbial. Comp. also Gibbon, ch. xxxiii. Yet he faithfully persevered in his work. The last ten days of his life he spent in close retirement, in prayers and tears and repeated reading of the penitential Psalms, which he can caused to be written on the wall over his bed, that he might have them always before his eyes. Thus with an act of penitence he closed his life. In the midst of the terrors of the siege and the despair of his people he could not suspect what abundant seed he had sown for the future.

In the third month of the siege of Hippo, on the 28th of August, 430, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, in full possession of his faculties, and in the presence of many friends and pupils, he past gently and peacefully into that eternity to which he had so long aspired. “O how wonderful,” wrote he in his Meditations,¹²¹²    I freely combine several passages. “how beautiful and lovely are the dwellings of Thy house, Almighty God! I burn with longing to behold Thy beauty in Thy bridal-chamber.…O Jerusalem, holy city of God, dear bride of Christ, my heart loves thee, my soul has already long sighed for thy beauty!…The King of kings Himself is in the midst of thee, and His children are within thy walls. There are the hymning choirs of angels, the fellowship of heavenly citizens. There is the wedding-feast of all who from this sad earthly pilgrimage have reached thy joys. There is the far-seeing choir of the prophets; there the company of the twelve apostles; there the triumphant army of innumerable martyrs and holy confessors. Full and perfect love there reigns, for God is all in all. They love and praise, they praise and love Him evermore.…Blessed, perfectly and forever blessed, shall I too be, if, when my poor body shall be dissolved,… I may stand before my King and God, and see Him in His glory, as He Himself hath deigned to promise: ‘Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am; that they may behold My glory which I had with Thee before the world was.’” This aspiration after the heavenly Jerusalem found grand expression in the hymn De gloria et gaudiis Paradisi:

“Ad perennis vitæ fontem mens sativit arida.”

It is incorporated in the Meditations of Augustin, and the ideas originated in part with him, but were not brought into poetical form till long afterwards by Peter Damiani.¹³¹³    Comp. Opera, tom. vi. p. 117 (Append.); Daniel: Thesaurus hymnol. i. 116 sqq., and iv. 203 sq., and Mone: Lat. Hymner, i. 422 sqq. Mone ascribes the poem to an unknown writer of the sixth century, but Trench (Sacred Latin Poetry, 2d ed., 315) and others attribute it to Cardinal Peter Damiani, the friend of Pope Hildebrand (d. 1072). Augustin wrote his poetry in prose.

He left no will, for in his voluntary poverty he had no earthly property to dispose of, except his library; this he bequeathed to the church, and it was fortunately preserved from the depredations of the Arian barbarians.¹⁴¹⁴    Possidius says, Vita, c. 31: “Testamentum nullum fecit, guia unde faceret, pauper Dei non habuit. Ecclesiæ bibliothecam omnesgue codices diligenter posteris custodiendos semper jubebat.”

Soon after his death Hippo was taken and destroyed by the Vandals.¹⁵¹⁵    The inhabitants escaped to the sea. There appears no bishop of Hippo after Augustin. In the seventh century the old city was utterly destroyed by the Arabians, but two miles from it Bona was built of its ruins. Comp. Tillemont, xiii. 945, and Gibbon, ch. xxxiii. Gibbon says, that Bona, “in the sixteenth century, contained about three hundred families of industrious, but turbulent manufacturers. The adjacent territory is renowned for a pure air, a fertile soil, and plenty of exquisite fruits.” Since the French conquest of Algiers, Bona was rebuilt in 1832, and is gradually assuming a French aspect. It is now one of the finest towns in Algeria, the key to the province of Constantine, has a public garden, several schools, considerable commerce, and a population of over ten thousand of French, Moors, and Jews, the great majority of whom are foreigners. The relics of St. Augustin have been recently transferred from Pavia to Bona. See the letters of abbé Sibour to Poujoulat sur la translation de ia relique de saint Augustin de Pavie à Hippone, in Poujoulat’s Histoire de saint Augustin, tom. i. p. 413 sqq. Africa was lost to the Romans. A few decades later the whole West-Roman empire fell in ruins. The culmination of the African church was the beginning of its decline. But the work of Augustin could not perish. His ideas fell like living seed into the soil of Europe, and produced abundant fruits in nations and countries of which he had never heard.¹⁶¹⁶    Even in Africa Augustin’s spirit reappeared from time to time notwithstanding the barbarian confusion, as a light in darkness, first in Vigilius, bishop of Thapsus, who, at the close of the fifth century, ably defended the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and the person of Christ, and to whom the authorship of the so-called Athanasian Creed has sometimes been ascribed; in Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe, one of the chief opponents of Semi-Pelagianism, and the later Arianism, who with sixty catholic bishops of Africa was banished for several years by the Arian Vandals to the island of Sardinia, and who was called the Augustin of the sixth century (died 533); and in Facundus of Hermiane (died 570), and Fulgentius Ferrandus, and Liberatus, two deacons of Carthage, who took a prominent part in the Three
   Chapter controversy.

7

CHAPTER III.—Estimate of St. Augustin.

Augustin, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, schoolman, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full. It was his need and his delight to wrestle again and again with the hardest problems of thought, and to comprehend to the utmost the divinely revealed matter of the faith.¹⁷¹⁷    Or, as he wrote to a friend about the year 410, Epist. 120, C. 1, § 2 (tom. ii. p. 347, ed. Bened. Venet.; in older ed., Ep. 122): “Ut quod credis intelligas…non ut fidem resinas, sed ea quæ fidei firmitate jam tenes, etiam rationis luce conspicias.” He continues, ibid. c. 3: “Absit namque, ut hoc in nobis Deus oderit, in quo nos reliquis animalibus exccellentiores creavit. Absit, inquam, ut ideo credamus, ne rationem accipiamus vel quæramus; cum etiam credere non possemns, nisi rationales animas haberemus.” In one of his earliest works, Contra Academ. l. iii. c. 20, § 43, he says of himself: “Ita sum affectus, ut quid sit verum non credendo solum, sed etiam intelligendo apprehendere impatienter desiderem.” He always asserted, indeed, the primacy of faith, according to his maxim: Fides præcedit intellectum; appealing, with theologians before him, to the well known passage of Isaiah vii. 9 (in the LXX.): “Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis.”¹⁸¹⁸    Ἐὰν μὴ πιστεύσητε, οὐδὲ μὴ συνῆτε. But the proper translation of the Hebrew is: “If ye will not believe [in me, בִּי for כִּי], surely ye shall not be established (or, not remain).” But to him faith itself was an acting of reason, and from faith to knowledge, therefore, there was a necessary transition.¹⁹¹⁹    Comp. De præd. sanct. cap. 2, § 5 (tom. x. p. 792): “Ipsum credere nihil aliud est quam cum assensione cogiitare. Nom enim omnis qui cogitat, credit, cum ideo cogitant, plerique ne credant: sed cogitat omnis qui credit, et credendo cogitat et cogitando credit. Fides si non cogitetur, nulia est.” Ep. 120, cap. 1, § 3 (tom. ii. 347), and Ep. 137, c. 4, § 15 (tom. ii. 408): “Intellectui fides aditum aperit, infidelitas claudit.” Augustin’s view of faith and knowledge is discussed at large by Gangauf, Metaphysische Psychologie des heil. Augustinus, i. pp. 31–76, and by Nourrisson, La phliosophie de saint Augustin, tom. ii. 282–290. He constantly looked below the surface to the hidden motives of actions and to the universal laws of diverse events. The Metaphysician and the Christian believer coalesced in him. His meditatio passes with the utmost ease into oratio, and his oratio into meditatio. With profundity he combined an equal clearness and sharpness of thought. He was an extremely skilful and a successful dialectician, inexhaustible in arguments and in answers to the objections of his adversaries.

He has enriched Latin literature with a greater store of beautiful, original, and pregnant proverbial sayings, than any classic author, or any other teacher of the church.²⁰²⁰    Prosper Aquitanus collected in the year 450 or 451 from the works of Augustin 392 sentences (see the Appendix to the tenth vol. of the Bened. ed. p. 223 sqq., and in Migne’s ed. of Prosper Aquitanus, col. 427–496), with reference to theological purport and the Pelagian controversies. We recall some of the best which he has omitted:
   “Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo pates.”
   “Distingue tempora, et concordabit Scriptura.”
   “Cor nostrum inquietum est, donec requiescat in Te.”
   “Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis.”
   “Non vincit nisi veritas, victoria veritatis est caritas.”
   “Ubi amor, ibi trinitas.”
   “Fides præcedit intellectum.”
   “Deo servire vera libertas est.”
   “Nulia infelicitas frangit, quem felicitas nulla corrumpit.”
   The famous maxim of ecclesiastical harmony: “In necessarlis unitas, in dublis (or, non ccessarlis) libertas, in omnibus (in utrisque) caritas,”—which is often ascribed to Augustin, dates in this form not from him, but from a much later period. Dr. Lucke (in a special treatise on the antiquity of the author, the original form, etc., of this sentence, Göttingen, 1850) traces the authorship to Rupert Meldenius, an irenical German theologian of the seventeenth century. Baxter, also, who lived during the intense conflict of English Puritanism and Episcopacy, and grew weary of the “fury of theologians,” adopted a similar sentiment. The sentence is held by many who differ widely in the definition of what is “necessary” and what is “doubtful.” The meaning of “charity in all things” is above doubt, and a moral duty of every Christian, though practically violated by too many in all denominations.

8

He had a creative and decisive hand in almost every dogma of the Latin church, completing some, and advancing others. The centre of his system is the free redeeming grace of God in Christ, operating through the actual, historical church. He is evangelical or Pauline in his doctrine of sin and grace, but catholic (that is, old-catholic, not Roman Catholic) in his doctrine of the church. The Pauline element comes forward mainly in the Pelagian controversy, the catholic-churchly in the Donatist; but each is modified by the other.

Dr. Baur incorrectly makes freedom the fundamental idea of the Augustinian system. But this much better suits the Pelagian; while Augustin started (like Calvin and Schleiermacher) from the idea of the absolute dependence of man upon God. He changed his idea of freedom during the Pelagian controversy. Baur draws an ingenious and suggestive comparison between Augustin and Origen, the two greatest intellects among the church fathers. “There is no church teacher of the ancient period,” says he,²¹²¹    Vorlesungen über die christl. Dogmengeschichte, vol. 1. P. 11. p. 30 sq.“who, in intellect and in grandeur and consistency of view, can more justly be placed by the side of Origen than Augustin; none who, with all the difference in individuality and in mode of thought, so closely resembles him. How far both towered above their times, is most clearly manifest in the very fact that they alone, of all the theologians of the first six centuries, became the creators of distinct systems, each proceeding from a definite idea, and each completely carried out; and this fact proves also how much the one system has that is analogous to the other. The one system, like the other, is founded upon the idea of freedom; in both there is a specific act, by which the entire development of human life is determined; and in both this is an act which lies far outside of the temporal consciousness of the individual; with this difference alone, that in one system the act belongs to each separate individual himself, and only falls outside of his temporal life and consciousness; in the other, it lies within the sphere of the temporal history of man, but is only the act of one individual. If in the system of Origen nothing gives greater offence than the idea of the pre-existence and fall of souls, which seems to adopt heathen ideas into the Christian faith, there is in the system of Augustin the same overleaping of individual life and consciousness, in order to explain from an act in the past the present sinful condition of man; but the pagan Platonic point of view is exchanged for one taken from the Old Testament.…What therefore essentially distinguishes the system of Augustin from that of Origen, is only this: the fall of Adam is substituted for the pre-temporal fall of souls, and what in Origen still wears a heathen garb, puts on in Augustin a purely Old Testament form.”

The learning of Augustin was not equal to his genius, nor as extensive as that of Origen and Eusebius, but still considerable for his time, and superior to that of any of the Latin fathers, with the single exception of Jerome. He had received in the schools of Madaura and Carthage the usual philosophical and rhetorical preparation for the forum, which stood him in good stead also in theology. He was familiar with Latin literature, and was by no means blind to the excellencies of the classics, though he placed them far below the higher beauty of the Holy Scriptures. The Hortensius of Cicero (a lost work) inspired him during his university course with enthusiasm for philosophy and for the knowledge of truth for its own sake; the study of Platonic and Neo-Platonic works (in the Latin version of the rhetorician Victorinus) kindled in him an incredible fire²²²²    Adv. Academicos, 1. ii. c. 2, § 5: “Etiam mihi ipsi de me incredibile incendium concitarunt.” And in several passages of the Civitas Dei (viii. 3–12 xxii. 27) he speaks very favourably of Plato, and also of Aristotle, and thus broke the way for the high authority of the Aristotelian philosophy with the scholastics of the middle age.; though in both he missed the holy name of Jesus and the cardinal virtues of love and humility, and found in them only beautiful ideals without power to conform 9him to them. His City of God, his book on heresies, and other writings, show an extensive knowledge of ancient philosophy, poetry, and history, sacred and secular. He refers to the most distinguished persons of Greece and Rome; he often alludes to Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotin, Porphyry, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, Vergil, to the earlier Greek and Latin fathers, to Eastern and Western heretics. But his knowledge of Greek literature was mostly derived from Latin translations. With the Greek language, as he himself frankly and modestly confesses, he had, in comparison with Jerome, but a superficial acquaintance.²³²³    It is sometimes asserted that he had no knowledge at all of the Greek. So Gibbon, for example, says (ch. xxxiii.): “The superficial learning of Augustin was confined to the Latin language.” But this is a mistake. In his youth he had a great aversion to the glorious language of Hellas because he had a bad teacher and was forced to it (Conf. i. 14). He read the writings of Plato in a Latin translation (vii. 9). But after his baptism, during his second residence in Rome, he resumed the study of Greek with greater zest, for the sake of his biblical studies. In Hippo he had, while presbyter, good opportunity to advance in it, since his bishop, Aurelius, a native Greek, understood his mother tongue much better than the Latin. In his books he occasionally makes reference to the Greek. In his work Contra Jul. i. c. 6 § 21 (tom. x. 510), he corrects the Pelagian Julian in a translation from Chrysostom, quoting the original. “Ego ipsa verba Græca quæ a Joanne dicta sunt ponam: διὰ τοῦτο καὶ τὰ παιδία βαπτίζομεν, καίτοι ƒμαρτήματα οὐκ ἔχοντα, quod est Latine: Ideo et infantes baptizamus, quamvis peccata non habentes.” Julian had freely rendered this: “cum non sint coinquinati peccato,” and had drawn the inference: “Sanctus Joannes Constantinopolitanus [John Chrysostom] negat esse in parvulis originale peccatum.” Augustin helps himself out of the pinch by arbitrarily supplying propria to ἁμαρτήματα, so that the idea of sin inherited from another is not excluded. The Greek fathers, however, did not consider hereditary corruption to be proper sin or guilt at all, but only defect, weakness, or disease. In the City of God, lib. xix. c. 23, he quotes a passage from Porphyry’s ἐκ λογίων φιλοσοφία, and in book xviii. 23, he explains the Greek monogram ἰχθύς. He gives the derivation of several Greek words, and correctly distinguishes between such synonyms as γεννάω and τίκτω, εὐχή and προσευχή, πνοή and πνεῦμα. It is probable that he read Plotin, and the Panarion of Epiphanius or the summary of it, in Greek (while the Church History of Eusebius he knew only in the translation of Rufinus). But in his exegetical and other works he very rarely consults the Septuagint or Greek Testament, and was content with the very imperfect Itala, or the improved version of Jerome (the Vulgate). The Benedictine editors overestimate his knowledge of Greek. He himself frankly confesses that he knew very little of it. De Trinit. 1. iii Proœm. (“Graæcæ linguæ non sit nobis tantus habitus, ut talium rerum libris legendis et intelligendis ullo modo reperiamur idonei”), and Contra literas Petiliani (written in 400),1. ii. c. 38 (“Et ego quidem Græcæ linguæ perparum assecutus sum, et prope nihil”). On the philosophical learning of Augustin may be compared Nourrisson, l. c. ii. p. 92 sqq. Hebrew he did not understand at all. Hence, with all his extraordinary familiarity with the Latin Bible, he made many mistakes in exposition. He was rather a thinker than a scholar, and depended mainly on his own resources, which were always abundant.

Notes.—We note some of the most intelligent and appreciative estimates of Augustin. Erasmus (Ep. dedicat. ad Alfons. archiep. Tolet. 1529) says, with an ingenious play upon the name Aurelius Augustinus: “Quid habet orbis christianus hoc scriptore magis aureum vel augustius? ut ipsa vocabula nequaquam fortuito, sed numinis providentia videantur indita viro. Auro sapientiæ nihil pretiosius: fulgore eloquentiæ cum sapientia conjunctæ nihil mirabilius.…Non arbitror alium esse doctorem, in quem opulentus ille ac benignus Spiritus dotes suas omnes largius effuderit, quam in Augustinum.” The great philosopher Leibnitz (Præfat. ad Theodic. §34) calls him “virum sane magnum et ingenii stupendi,” and “vastissimo ingenio præditum.” Dr. Baur, without sympathy with his views, speaks enthusiastically of the man and his genius. Among other things he says (Vorlesungen über Dogmengeschichte, i. i. p. 61): “There is scarcely another theological author so fertile and withal so able as Augustin. His scholarship was not equal to his intellect; yet even that is sometimes set too low, when it is asserted that he had no acquaintance at all with the Greek language; for this is incorrect, though he had attained no great proficiency in Greek.” C. Bindemann (a Lutheran divine) begins his thorough monograph (vol. i. preface) with the well-deserved eulogium: “St. Augustin is one of the greatest personages in the church. He is second in importance to none of the teachers who have wrought most in the church since the apostolic times; and it can well be said that among the church fathers the first place is due to him, and in the time of the Reformation a Luther alone, for fulness and depth of thought and grandeur of character, may stand by his side. He is the summit of the development of the mediæval Western church; from him descended the mysticism, no less than the scholasticism, of the middle age; he was one of the strongest pillars of the Roman Catholicism, and from his works, next to the Holy Scriptures, especially the Epistles of Paul, the leader of the Reformation drew most of that conviction by which a new age was introduced.” Staudenmaier, a Roman Catholic theologian, counts Augustin among those minds in which an hundred others dwell (Scotus Erigena, i. p. 274). The Roman Catholic philosophers A. Günther and Th. Gangauf, put him on an equality with the greatest philosophers, and discern in him a providential personage endowed by the Spirit of God for the instruction of all ages. A striking characterization is that of the Old Catholic Dr. Huber (in his instructive work: Die Philosophie der Kirchenväter, Munich, 1859, p. 312 sq.): “Augustin is a unique phenomenon in Christian history. No one of the other fathers has left so luminous traces of his existence. Though we find among them many rich and powerful minds, yet we find in none the forces of personal character, 10mind, heart, and will, so largely developed and so harmoniously working. No one surpasses him in wealth of perceptions and dialectical sharpness of thoughts, in depth and fervour of religious sensibility, in greatness of aims and energy of action. He therefore also marks the culmination of the patristic age, and has been elevated by the acknowledgment of succeeding times as the first and the universal church father.—His whole character reminds us in many respects of Paul, with whom he has also in common the experience of being called from manifold errors to the service of the gospel, and like whom he could boast that he had laboured in it more abundantly than all the others. And as Paul among the Apostles pre-eminently determined the development of Christianity, and became, more than all the others, the expression of the Christian mind, to which men ever afterwards return, as often as in the life of the church that mind becomes turbid, to draw from him, as the purest fountain, a fresh understanding of the gospel doctrine,—so has Augustin turned the Christian nations since his time for the most part into his paths, and become pre-eminently their trainer and teacher, in the study of whom they always gain a renewal and deepening of their Christian consciousness. Not the middle age alone, but the Reformation also, was ruled by him, and whatever to this day boasts of the Christian spirit, is connected at least in part with Augustin.” Villemain, in his able and eloquent, “Tableau de l’éloquence Chrétienne au IV^e siècle” (Paris, 1849, p. 373), commences his sketch of Augustin as follows: “Nous arrivons a l’homme le plus êtonnant de l’Eglise latine, à celui qui portat le plus d’imagination dans la théologie, le plus d’éloquence et même sensibilité dans la scholastique; ce fut saint Augustin. Donnez-lui un autre siècle, placez-le dans meillêure civilisation; et jamais homme n’aura paru doué d’un génie plus vaste et plus facile. Métaphysique, histoire, antiquités, science des moers, connaissance des arts, Augustin avait tout embrassé. Il écrit sur la musique comme sur le libre arbitre; il explique le phénomène intellectual la de mémoire, comme il raisonne sur la décadence de l’empire romain. Son esprit subtil et vigoureux a souvent consumé dans des problèmes mystiques une force de sagacité qui suffirait aux plus sublimes conceptions.” Frédéric Ozanam, in his “La civilisation au cinquième siècle” (translated by A. C. Glyn, 1868, Vol. I. p. 272), counts Augustin among the three or four great metaphysicians of modern times, and says that his task was “to clear the two roads open to Christian philosophy and to inaugurate its two methods of mysticism and dogmatism.” Nourrisson, whose work on Augustin is clothed with the authority of the Institute of France, assigns to him the first rank among the masters of human thought, alongside of Plato and Leibnitz, Thomas Aquinas and Bossuet. “Si une critique toujours respectueuse, mais d’une inviolable sincérité, est une des formes les plus hautes de l’admiration, j’estime, au contraire, n’avoir fait qu’exalter ce grand coeur, ce psychologue consolant et ému, ce métaphysicien subtil et sublime, en un mot, cet attachant et poétique génie, dont la place reste marquée, au premier rang, parmi les maîtres de la pensée humaine, á côté de Platon et de Descartes, d’Aristote et de saint Thomas, de Leibnitz et de Bossuet.” (La philosophie de saint Augustin, Par. 1866, tom. i. p. vii.) Pressensé (in art. Aug., in Smith & Wace, Dict. of Christ. Biography, I. 222): “Aug. still claims the honour of having brought out in all its light the fundamental doctrine of Christianity; despite the errors of his system, he has opened to the church the path of every progress and of every reform, by stating with the utmost vigour the scheme of free salvation which he had learnt in the school of St. Paul.” Among English and American writers, Dr. Shedd, in the Introduction to his edition of the Confessions (1860), has furnished a truthful and forcible description of the mind and heart of St. Augustin. I add the striking judgment of the octogenarian historian Dr. Karl Hase (Kirschengeschichte auf der Grundlage akademischer Vorlesungen, Leipzig 1885, vol. I. 522): “The full significance of Augustin as an author can be measured only from the consideration of the fact that in the middle ages both scholasticism and mysticism lived of his riches, and that afterwards Luther and Calvin drew out of his fulness. We find in him both the sharp understanding which makes salvation depend on the clearly defined dogma of the church, and the loving absorption of the heart in God which scarcely needs any more the aid of the church. His writings reflect all kinds of Christian thoughts, which lie a thousand years apart and appear to be contradictions. How were they possible in so systematic a thinker? Just as much as they were possible in Christianity, of which he was a microcosmus. From the dogmatic abyss of his hardest and most illiberal doctrines arise such liberal sentences as these: ‘Him I shall not condemn in whom I find any thing of Christ;’ ‘Let us not forget that in the very enemies are concealed the future citizens.’”

CHAPTER IV.—The Writings of St. Augustin.

The numerous writings of Augustin, the composition of which extended through four and forty years, are a mine of Christian knowledge, and experience. They abound in lofty ideas, noble sentiments, devout effusions, clear statements of truth, strong arguments against error, and passages of fervid eloquence and undying beauty, but also in innumerable repetitions, fanciful opinions, and playful conjectures of his uncommonly fertile brain.²⁴²⁴    Ellies Dupin (Bibliothégue ecclésiastique, tom. iii. 1 partie, p. 818) and Nourrisson (l. c. tom. ii. p. 449) apply to Augustin the term magnus opinator, which Cicero used of himself. There is, however, this important difference that Augustin, along with his many opinions on speculative questions in philosophy and theology, had very positive convictions in all essential doctrines, while Cicero was a mere eclectic in philosophy.

11

His style is full of life and vigour and ingenious plays on words, but deficient in simplicity, purity and elegance, and by no means free from the vices of a degenerate rhetoric, wearisome prolixity, and from that vagabunda loquacitas, with which his adroit opponent, Julian of Eclanum, charged him. He would rather, as he said, be blamed by grammarians, than not understood by the people; and he bestowed little care upon his style, though he many a time rises in lofty poetic flight. He made no point of literary renown, but, impelled by love to God and to the church, he wrote from the fulness of his mind and heart.²⁵²⁵    He was not “intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity,” as a modern English statesman (Lord Beaconsfield) charged his equally distinguished rival (Mr. Gladstone) in Parliament. The writings before his conversion, a treatise on the Beautiful (De Pulchro et Apto), the orations and eulogies which he delivered as rhetorician at Carthage, Rome, and Milan, are lost. The professor of eloquence, the heathen philosopher, the Manichæan heretic, the sceptic and free thinker, are known to us only from his regrets and recantations in the Confessions and other works. His literary career for us commences in his pious retreat at Cassiciacum where he prepared himself for a public profession of his faith. He appears first, in the works composed at Cassiciacum, Rome, and near Tagaste, as a Christian philosopher, after his ordination to the priesthood as a theologian. Yet even in his theological works he everywhere manifests the metaphysical and speculative bent of his mind. He never abandoned or depreciated reason, he only subordinated it to faith and made it subservient to the defence of revealed truth. Faith is the pioneer of reason, and discovers the territory which reason explores.

The following is a classified view of his most important works.²⁶²⁶    In his Retractations, he himself reviews ninety-three of his works (embracing two hundred and thirty-two books, see ii. 67), in chronological order: in the first book those which he wrote while a layman and presbyter, in the second those which he wrote when a bishop. See also the extended chronological index in Schönemann’s Biblioth. historico-literaria Patrum Latinorum, vol. ii (Lips, 1794), p. 340 sqq. (reprinted in the supplemental volume, xii., of Migne’s ed. of the Opera, p. 24 sqq.); and other systematic and alphabetical lists in the eleventh volume of the Bened. ed (p. 494 sqq., ed. Venet.), and in Migne, tom. xi.

I. Autobiographical works. To these belong the Confessions and the Retractations; the former acknowledging his sins, the latter retracting his theoretical errors. In the one he subjects his life, in the other his writings, to close criticism; and these productions therefore furnish the best standard for judging of his entire labours.²⁷²⁷    For this reason the Benedictine editors have placed the Retractations and the Confessions at the head of his works.

The Confessions are the most profitable, at least the most edifying, product of his pen; indeed, we may say, the most edifying book in all the patristic literature. They were accordingly the most read even during his lifetime,²⁸²⁸    He himself says of them, Retract. 1. ii. c. 6: “Maltis fratribus eos [Confessionum libros tredecim] multum placuisse et, placere scio.” Comp. De donon perseverantiæ, c. 20: “Quid autem meorum opusculorum freguentius et deleciabilius innotescere potuit qam libri Confessionum mearum?” Comp. Ep.. 231 Dario comiti. and they have been the most frequently published since.²⁹²⁹    Schönnemann (in the supplemental volume of Migne’s ed. of Augustin, p. 134 sqq.) cites a multitude of separate editions of the Confessions in Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and German, from A.D. 1475 to 1776. Since that time several new editions have been added. One of the best Latin editions is that of Karl von Raumer (Stuttgart, 1856), who used to read the Confessions with his students at Erlangen once a week for many years. In his preface he draws a comparison between them and Rousseau’s Confessions and Hamann’s Gedanken über meinen Lebenslauf. English and German translations are noticed above in the Lit. Dr. Shedd (in his ed., Pref. p. xxvii) calls the Confessions the best commentary yet written upon the seventh and eighth chapters of Romans. “That quickening of the human spirit, which puts it again into vital and sensitive relations to the holy and eternal; that illumination of the mind, whereby it is enabled to perceive with clearness the real nature of truth and righteousness; that empowering of the will, to the conflict of victory—the entire process of restoring the Divine image in the soul of man—is delineated in this book, with a vividness and reality never exceeded by the uninspired mind.”…“It is the life of God in the soul of a strong man, rushing and rippling with the freedom of the life of nature. He who watches can almost see the growth; he who listens can hear the perpetual motion; and he who is in sympathy will be swept along.” A more sincere and more earnest book was never written. The historical part, to the tenth book, is one of the devotional classics of all creeds, and second in popularity only to the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis, and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Certainly no autobiography is superior to it in true humility, spiritual depth, and universal interest. Augustin records his own experience, as a heathen sensualist, a Manichæan heretic, an anxious inquirer, a sincere penitent, and a grateful convert. He finds a response in every human soul that struggles through the temptations of nature and the labyrinth of error to the knowledge of 12truth and the beauty of holiness, and after many sighs and tears finds rest and peace in the arms of a merciful Saviour. The style is not free from the faults of an artificial rhetoric, involved periods and far-fetched paronomasias; but these defects are more than atoned for by passages of unfading beauty, the devout spirit and psalm-like tone of the book. It is the incense of a sacred mysticism of the heart which rises to the throne on high. The wisdom of some parts of the Confessions may be doubted.³⁰³⁰    We mean his sexual sins. He kept a concubine for sixteen years, the mother of his only child, Adeodatus, and after her separation he formed for a short time a similar connection in Milan; but in both cases he was faithful. Conf. IV. 2 (unam habebam…servans tori fidem); VI. 15. Erasmus thought very leniently of this sin as contrasted with the conduct of the priests and abbots of his time. Augustin himself deeply repented of it, and devoted his life to celibacy. The world would never have known Augustin’s sins, if he had not told them; nor were they of such a nature as to destroy his respectability in the best heathen society of his age; but we must all the more admire his honesty and humility.

Rousseau’s “Confessions,” and Goethe’s “Truth and Fiction,” may be compared with Augustin’s Confessions as works of rare genius and of absorbing psychological interest, but they are written in a radically different spirit, and by attempting to exalt human nature in its unsanctified state, they tend as much to expose its vanity and weakness, as the work of the bishop of Hippo, being written with a single eye to the glory of God, raises man from the dust of repentance to a new and imperishable life of the Spirit.³¹³¹    Nourrisson (1. c. tom. i. p. 19) calls the Confessions “cet ouvrage unique, souvent imité, toujours parodié, où il s’accuse, se condamne et s’humilie, priére ardente, récit entrainant, metaphysique incomparable, histoire de tout un monde qui se refléte dans l’histoire d’ une ame.” Comp. also an article on the Confessions in “The Contemporary Review” for June, 1867, pp 133–160.

Augustin composed the Confessions about the year 397, ten years after his conversion. The first nine books contain, in the form of a continuos prayer and confession before God, a general sketch of his earlier life, of his conversion, and of his return to Africa in the thirty-fourth year of his age. The salient points in these books are the engaging history of his conversion in Milan, and the story of the last days of his noble mother in Ostia, spent as it were at the very gate of heaven and in full assurance of a blessed reunion at the throne of glory. The last three books and a part of the tenth are devoted to speculative philosophy; they treat, partly in tacit opposition to Manichæism, of the metaphysical questions of the possibility of knowing God, and the nature of time and space; and they give an interpretation of the Mosaic cosmogony in the style of the typical allegorical exegesis usual with the fathers, but foreign to our age; they are therefore of little value to the general reader, except as showing that even abstract metaphysical subjects may be devotionally treated.

The Retractations were produced in the evening of his life (427 and 428), when, mindful of the proverb: “In the multitude of words there wanteth not transgression,”³²³²    Prov. x. 19. This verse (ex multiloquio non effugies peccatum) the Semi-Pelagian Gennadius (De viris illustr. sub Aug.) applies against Augustin in excuse for his erroneous doctrines of freedom and predestination. and remembering that we must give account for every idle word, he judged himself,³³³³    Matt. xii. 36 . that he might not be judged.³⁴³⁴    1 Cor. xi. 31. Comp. his Prologus to the two books of Retractationes. He revised in chronological order the numerous works he had written before and during his episcopate, and retracted or corrected whatever in them seemed to his riper knowledge false or obscure, or not fully agreed with the orthodox catholic faith. Some of his changes were reactionary and no improvements, especially those on the freedom of the will, and on religious toleration. In all essential points, nevertheless, his theological system remained the same from his conversion to this time. The Retractations give beautiful evidence of his love of truth, his conscientiousness, and his humility.³⁵³⁵    J. Morell Mackenzie (in W Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. i. p. 422) happily calls the Retractations of Augustin “one of the noblest sacrifices ever laid upon the altar of truth by a majestic intellect acting in obedience to the purest conscientiousness.”

To this same class should be added the Letters of Augustin, of which the Benedictine editors, in their second volume, give two hundred and seventy (including letters to Augustin) in chronological order from A.D. 386 to A.D. 429. These letters treat, sometimes very minutely, 13of all the important questions of his time, and give us an insight of his cares, his official fidelity, his large heart, and his effort to become, like Paul, all things to all men.

When the questions of friends and pupils accumulated, he answered them in special works; and in this way he produced various collections of Quæstiones and Responsiones, dogmatical, exegetical, and miscellaneous (A.D. 390, 397, &c.).

II. Philosophical treatises, in dialogue; almost all composed in his earlier life; either during his residence on the country-seat Cassiciacum in the vicinity of Milan, where he spent half a year before his baptism in instructive and stimulating conversation, in a sort of academy or Christian Platonic banquet with Monnica, his son Adeodatus, his brother Navigius, his friend Alypius, and some cousins and pupils; or during his second residence in Rome; or soon after his return to Africa.³⁶³⁶    In tom. i. of the ed. Bened., immediately after the Retractationes and Confessiones, and at the close of the volume. On these philosophical writings, see Brucker: Historia critica philosophiæ, Lips. 1766, tom. iii. pp. 485–507: H Ritter: Geschichte der Philosphie, vol. vi. p. 153 sqq.; Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, I. 333–346 (Am. ed.): Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, I. 231–240; Bindemann, l. c. I. 282 sqq. Huber, l. c. I. 242 sqq.; Gangauf, l. c. p. 25 sqq., and Nouerisson, l. c. ch. i. and ii. Nourrisson makes the just remark (i. p. 53): “Si la philosophie est la recherché de la verité, jamais sans douse il ne s’est rencontre une ame plus philosophe que celle de saint Augustin. Car jamais ame n’a supporté avec plus d’ impatience les anxiétés du doute et n’a fait plus d’ efforts pour dissiper les fantomes de l’erreur.”

To this class belong the works; Contra Academicos libri très (386), in which he combats the skepticism and probabilism of the New Academy,—the doctrine that man can never reach the truth, but can at best attain only probability; De vita beata (386), in which he makes true blessedness to consist in the perfect knowledge of God; De ordine,—on the relation of evil to the divine order of the world³⁷³⁷    Or on the question: “Utrum omnia bona et mala divinæ providentie ordo contineat?” Comp. Retract. i. 3. (386); Soliloquia (387), communings with his own soul concerning God, the highest good, the knowledge of truth, and immortality; De immortalitate animæ (387), a continuation of the Soliloquies; De quantitate animæ (387), discussing sundry questions of the size, the origin, the incorporeity of the soul; De musica libri vi (387-389); De magistro (389), in which, in a dialogue with his son Adeodatus, a pious and promising, but precocious youth, who died soon after his return to Africa (389), he treats on the importance and virtue of the word of God, and on Christ as the infallible Master.³⁸³⁸    Augustin, in his Confessions (l. ix. c. 6), expresses himself in this touching way about this son of his illicit love: “We took with us [on returning from the country to Milan to receive the sacrament of baptism] also the boy Adeodatus, the son of my carnal sin. Thou hadst formed him well. He was but just fifteen years old, and he was superior in mind to many grave and learned men. I acknowledge Thy gifts, O Lord, my God, who createst all, and who canst reform our deformities: for I had no part in that boy but sin. And when we brought him up in Thy nurture, Thou, only Thou, didst prompt us to it; I acknowledge Thy gifts. There is my book entitled, De magistro: he speaks with me there. Thou knowest that all things there put into his mouth were in his mind when he was sixteen years of age. That maturity of mind was a terror to me; and who but Thou is the artificer of such wonders? Soon Thou didst take his life from the earth; and I think more quietly of him now, fearing no more for his boyhood, nor his youth, nor his whole life. We took him to ourselves as one of the same age in Thy grace, to be trained in Thy nurture; and we were baptised together; and all trouble about the past fled from us.” He refers to him also in De vita beata, § 6: “There was also with us, in age the youngest of all, but whose talents, if affection deceives me not, promise something great, my son Adeodatus.” In the same book (§ 18), he mentions an answer of his: “He is truly chaste who waits on God, and keeps himself to Him only.” To these may be added the later work, De anima et ejus origine (419). Other philosophical works on grammar, dialectics (or ars bene disputandi), rhetoric, geometry, and arithmetic, are lost.³⁹³⁹    The books on grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, and the ten Categories of Aristotle, in the Appendix to the first volume of the Bened. ed., are spurious. For the genuine works of Augustin on these subjects were written in a different form (the dialogue) and for a higher purpose, and were lost in his own day. Comp. Retract. i. c. 6. In spite of this, Prantl (Geschichte der Logik in Abendlande, pp. 665–674, cited by Huber, l. c. p. 240) has advocated the genuineness of the Principia dialecticæ, and Huber inclines to agree. Gangauf, l. c. p. 5, and Nourrisson, i. p. 37, consider them spurious.

These works exhibit as yet little that is specifically Christian and churchly; but they show a Platonism seized and consecrated by the spirit of Christianity, full of high thoughts, ideal views, and discriminating argument. They were designed to present the different stages of human thought by which he himself had reached the knowledge of the truth, and to serve others as steps to the sanctuary. They form an elementary introduction to his theology. He afterwards, in his Retractations, withdrew many things contained in them, like the Platonic view of the pre-14existence of the soul, and the Platonic idea that the acquisition of knowledge is a recollection or excavation of the knowledge hidden in the mind.⁴⁰⁴⁰    Ἡ μάθησις οὐκ ἄλλο τι ἢ ἀν€μνησις. On this Plato, in the Phædo, as is well known, rests his doctrine of pre-existence. Augustin was at first in favor of the idea, Solit. ii. 20, n. 35; afterwards he rejected it, Retract. i. 4, § 4; but after all he assumes in his anthropology a sort of unconscious, yet responsible, pre-existence of the whole human race in Adam as its organic head, and hence taught a universal fall in Adam’s fall. The philosopher in him afterwards yielded more and more to the theologian, and his views became more positive and empirical, though in some cases narrower also and more exclusive. Yet he could never cease to philosophise, and even his later works, especially De Trinitate, and De Civitate Dei, are full of profound speculations. Before his conversion he followed a particular system of philosophy, first the Manichæan, then the Platonic; after his conversion he embraced the Christian philosophy, which is based on the divine revelation of the Scriptures, and is the handmaid of theology and religion; but at the same time he prepared the way for the catholic ecclesiastical philosophy, which rests on the authority of the church, and became complete in the scholasticism of the middle age.

In the history of philosophy he deserves a place in the highest rank, and has done greater service to the science of sciences than any other father, Clement of Alexandria and Origen not excepted. He attacked and refuted the pagan philosophy as pantheistic or dualistic at heart; he shook the superstitions of astrology and magic; he expelled from philosophy the doctrine of emanation, and the idea that God is the soul of the world; he substantially advanced psychology; he solved the question of the origin and the nature of evil more nearly than any of his predecessors, and as nearly as most of his successors; he was the first to investigate thoroughly the relation of divine omnipotence and omniscience to human freedom, and to construct a theodicy; in short, he is properly the founder of a Christian philosophy, and not only divided with Aristotle the empire of the mediæval scholasticism, but furnished also living germs for new systems of philosophy, and will always be consulted in the speculative discussions of Christian doctrines.

The philosophical opinions of Augustin are ably and clearly summed up by Ueberweg as follows:⁴¹⁴¹    History of Philosophy, vol. i. 333 sq., translated by Pro. Geo. S. Morris.

“Against the skepticism of the Academics Augustin urges that man needs the knowledge of truth for his happiness, that it is not enough merely to inquire and to doubt, and he finds a foundation for all our knowledge, a foundation invulnerable against every doubt, in the consciousness we have of our sensations, feelings, our willing, and thinking, in short, of all our psychical processes. From the undeniable existence and possession by man of some truth, he concludes to the existence of God as the truth per se; but our conviction of the existence of the material world he regards as only an irresistible belief. Combating heathen religion and philosophy, Augustin defends the doctrines and institutions peculiar to Christianity, and maintains, in particular, against the Neo-Platoniste, whom he rates most highly among all the ancient philosophers, the Christian theses that salvation is to be found in Christ alone, that divine worship is due to no other being beside the triune God, since he created all things himself, and did not commission inferior beings, gods, demons, or angels to create the material world; that the soul with its body will rise again to eternal salvation or damnation, but will not return periodically to renewed life upon the earth; that the soul begins to exist at the same time with the body; that the world both had a beginning and is perishable, and that only God and the souls of angels and men are eternal.—Against the dualism of the Manichæans, who regarded good and evil as equally primitive, and represented a portion of the divine substance as having entered into the region of evil, in order to war against and conquer it, Augustin defends the monism of the good principle, or of the purely spiritual God, explaining evil as a mere negation or privation, and seeking to show from the finiteness of the things in the world, and from the differing degrees of perfection, that the evils in the world are necessary, and not in contradiction with the idea of creation; he also defends in opposition to Manichæism, and Gnosticism in general, the Catholic doctrine of the essential harmony between the Old and New Testaments. Against the Donatists, Augustin maintains the unity of the church. In opposition to Pelagius and the Pelagians, he asserts that divine grace is not conditioned on human worthiness, and maintains the doctrine of absolute predestination, or, that from the mass of men who, through the disobedience of Adam (in whom all mankind were present potentially), have sunk into corruption and sin, some are chosen by the free election of God to be monuments of his grace, and are brought to believe and be saved, while the greater number, as monuments of his justice, are left to eternal damnation.”

15

III. Apologetic works against Pagans and Jews. Among these the twenty-two books, De Civitate Dei, are still well worth reading. They form the deepest and richest apologetic work of antiquity; begun in 413, after the occupation of Rome by the Gothic king Alaric, finished in 426, and often separately published. They condense his entire theory of the world and of man, and are the first attempt at a comprehensive philosophy of universal history under the dualistic view of two antagonistic currents or organized forces, a kingdom of this world which is doomed to final destruction, and a kingdom of God which will last forever.⁴²⁴²    In the Bened. ed. tom. vii. Comp. Retract. ii. 43, and Ch. Hist. III. § 12. The City of God and the Confessions are the only writings of Augustin which Gibbon thought worth while to read (chap. xxxiii.). Huber (l. c. p. 315) says: “Augustin’s philosophy of history, as he presents it in his Civitas Dei, has remained to this hour the standard philosophy of history for the church orthodoxy, the bounds of which this orthodoxy, unable to perceive in the motions of the modern spirit the fresh morning air of a higher day of history, is scarcely able to transcend.” Nourrisson devotes a special
   Chapter to the consideration of the two cities of Augustin, the City of the World and the City of God (tom. ii. 43–88). Compare also the Introduction to Saisset’s Traduction de la Cité de Dieu, Par. 1855, and Reinken’s (old Cath. Bishop), Geschichtsphilosophie des heil. Aug. 1866. Engl. translation of the City of God by Dr. Marcus Dods, Edinburgh, 1872, 2 vols., and in the second vol. of this Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.

This work has controlled catholic historiography ever since, and received the official approval of Pope Leo XIII., who, in his famous Encyclical Immortale Dei (Nov. 1, 1885), incidentally alludes to it in these worlds: “Augustin, in his work, De Civitate Dei, set forth so clearly the efficacy of Christian wisdom and the way in which it is bound up with the well-being of civil society, that he seems not only to have pleaded the cause of the Christians at his own time, but to have triumphantly refuted the calumnies against Christianity for all time.”

From the Protestant point of view Augustin erred in identifying the kingdom of God with the visible Catholic Church, which is only a part of it.

IV. Religious-Theological works of a general nature (in part anti-Manichæan): De utilitate credendi, against the Gnostic exaltation of knowledge (392); De fide et symbolo, a discourse which, though only presbyter, he delivered on the Apostles’ Creed before the council at Hippo at the request of the bishops in 393; De doctrina Christiana iv libri (397; the fourth book added in 426), a compend of exegetical theology for instruction in the interpretation of the Scriptures according to the analogy of the faith; De catchizandis rudibus likewise for catechetical purposes (400); Enchiridon, or De fide, spe et caritate, a brief compend of the doctrine of faith and morals, which he wrote in 421, or later, at the request of Laurentius; hence also called Manuale ad Laurentium.⁴³⁴³    Separately edited by Krabinger, Tubingen, 1861.

V. Polemic-Theological works. These are the most copious sources of the history of Christian doctrine in the patristic age. The heresies collectively are reviewed in the book De hæresibus ad Quodvultdeum, written between 428 and 430 to a friend and deacon in Carthage, and give a survey of eighty-eight heresies, from the Simonians to the Pelagians.⁴⁴⁴⁴    This work is also incorporated in the Corpus hæreseoloicum of Fr. Oehler, tom. i. pp. 192–225. In the work De vera religione (390), Augustin proposed to show that the true religion is to be found not with the heretics and schismatics, but only in the catholic church of that time.

The other controversial works are directed against the particular heresies of Manichæism, Donatism, Arianism, Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism. Augustin, with all the firmness of his convictions, was free from personal antipathy, and used the pen of controversy in the genuine Christian spirit, fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. He understood Paul’s ἀληθεύειν ἐν ἀγάπῃ, and forms in this respect a pleasing contrast to Jerome, who had by nature no more fiery temperament than he, but was less able to control it. “Let those,” he very beautifully says to the Manichæans, “burn with hatred against you, who do not know how much pains it costs to find the truth, how hard it is to guard against error;—but I, who after so great and long wavering came to know the truth, must bear myself towards you with the same patience which my fellow-believers showed towards me while I was wandering in blind madness in your opinions.”⁴⁵⁴⁵    Contra Epist. Manichæi quam vocant fundamenti, 1. i. 2.

16

1. The anti-Manichæan works date mostly from his earlier life, and in time and matter follow immediately upon his philosophical writings.⁴⁶⁴⁶    The earliest anti-Manichæan writings (De libero arbitrio; De moribus eccl. cath. et de Moribus Manich.) are in tom. i. ed. Bened.; the latter in tom viii. In them he afterwards found most to retract, because he advocated the freedom of the will against the Manichæan fatalism. The most important are: De moribus ecclesiæ catholicæ, et de moribus Manichæorum, two books (written during his second residence in Rome, 388); De vera religione (390); Unde malum, et de libero arbitrio, usually simply De libero arbitrio, in three books, against the Manichæan doctrine of evil as a substance, and as having its seat in matter instead of free will (begun in 388, finished in 395); De Genesi contra Manichæos, a defence of the biblical doctrine of creation (389); De duabus animabus, against the psychological dualism of the Manichæans (392); Disputatio contra Fortunatum (a triumphant refutation of this Manichæan priest of Hippo in August, 392); Contra Epistolam Manichæi quam vocant fundamenti (397); Contra Faustum Manichæum, in thirty-three books (400-404); De natura boni (404), &c.

These works treat of the origin of evil; of free will; of the harmony of the Old and New Testaments, and of revelation and nature; of creation out of nothing, in opposition to dualism and hylozoism; of the supremacy of faith over knowledge; of the authority of the Scriptures and the Church; of the true and the false asceticism, and other disputed points; and they are the chief source of our knowledge of the Manichæan Gnosticism and of the arguments against it.

Having himself belonged for nine years to this sect, Augustin was the better fitted for the task of refuting it, as Paul was peculiarly prepared for the confutation of the Pharisaic Judaism. His doctrine of the nature of evil is particularly valuable. He has triumphantly demonstrated for all time, that evil is not a corporeal thing, nor in any way substantial, but a product of the free will of the creature, a perversion of substance in itself good, a corruption of the nature created by God.

2. Against the Priscillianists, a sect in Spain built on Manichæan principles, are directed the book Ad Paulum Orosium contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas (411);⁴⁷⁴⁷    Tom. viii. p. 611 sqq. the book Contra mendacium, addressed to Consentius (420); and in part the 190th Epistle (alias Ep. 157), to the Bishop Optatus, on the origin of the soul (418), and two other letters, in which he refutes erroneous views on the nature of the soul, the limitation of future punishment, and the lawfulness of fraud for supposed good purposes.

3. The anti-Donatistic works, composed between the years 393 and 420, argue against separatism, and contain Augustin’s doctrine of the church and church-discipline, and of the sacraments. To these belong: Psalmus contra partem Donati (A.D. 393), a polemic popular song without regular metre, intended to offset the songs of the Donatists; Contra epistolam Parmeniani, written in 400 against the Carthaginian bishop of the Donatists, the successor of Donatus; De baptismo contra Donastistas, in favor of the validity of heretical baptism (400); Contra literas Petiliani (about 400), against the view of Cyprian and the Donatists, that the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the personal worthiness and the ecclesiastical status of the officiating priest; Ad Catholicos Epistola contra Donatistas, or De unitate ecclesiæ (402); Contra Cresconium grammaticum Donastistam (406); Breviculus Collationis cum Donatistis, a short account of the three days’ religious conference with the Donatists (411); De correctione Donatistarum (417); Contra Gaudentium, Donat. Episcopum, the last anti-Donatistic work (420).⁴⁸⁴⁸    All these in tom. ix. Comp. Church Hist. III. §§69 and 70.

These works are the chief patristic authority of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church and against the sects. They are thoroughly Romanizing in spirit and aim, and least satisfactory to Protestant readers. Augustin defended in his later years even the principle of forcible 17coërcion and persecution against heretics and schismatics by a false exegesis of the words in the parable “Compel them to come in” (Luke xiv. 23). The result of persecution was that both Catholics and Donatists in North Africa were overwhelmed in ruin first by the barbarous Vandals, who were Arian heretics, and afterwards by the Mohammedan conquerors.

4. The anti-Arian works have to do with the deity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, and with the Holy Trinity. By far the most important of these are the fifteen books De Trinitate (400-416);—the most profound and discriminating production of the ancient church on the Trinity, in no respect inferior to the kindred works of Athanasius and the two Gregories, and for centuries final to the dogma.⁴⁹⁴⁹    Tom. viii. ed Bened. p. 749 sqq. Comp. Ch. Hist. III §131. The work was stolen from him by some impatient friends before revision, and before the completion of the twelfth book, so that he became much discouraged, and could only be moved to finish it by urgent entreaties. This may also be counted among the positive didactic works, for it is not directly controversial. The Collatio cum Maximino Ariano, an obscure babbler, belongs to the year 428.

5. The numerous anti-Pelagian works of Augustin are his most influential and most valuable, at least for Protestants. They were written between the years 412 and 429. In them Augustin, in his intellectual and spiritual prime, develops his system of anthropology and soteriology, and most nearly approaches the position of Evangelical Protestantism: On the Guilt and the Remission of Sins, and Infant Baptism (412); On the Spirit and the Letter (413); On Nature and Grace (415); On the Acts of Pelagius (417); On the Grace of Christ, and Original Sin (418); On Marriage and Concupiscence (419); On Grace and Free Will (426); On Discipline and Grace (427); Against Julian of Eclanum (two large works, written between 421 and 429, the second unfinished, and hence called Opus imperfectum); On the Predestination of the Saints (428); On the Gift of Perseverance (429); &c.⁵⁰⁵⁰    Opera, tom. x., in two parts, with an Appendix. The same in Migne. W. Bright, of Oxford, has published Select Anti-Pelagian Treatises of St. Aug., in Latin, 1880. On the Pelagian controversy comp. Ch. Hist. III. §§146-160.

These anti-Pelagian writings contain what is technically called the Augustinian system of theology, which was substantially adopted by the Lutheran Church, yet without the decree of reprobation, and in a more rigorous logical form by the Calvinistic Confessions. The system gives all glory to God, does full justice to the sovereignty of divine grace, effectually humbles and yet elevates and fortifies man, and furnishes the strongest stimulus to gratitude and the firmest foundation of comfort. It makes all bright and lovely in the circle of the elect. But it is gloomy and repulsive in its negative aspect towards the non-elect. It teaches a universal damnation and only a partial redemption, and confines the offer of salvation to the minority of the elect; it ignores the general benevolence of God to all his creatures; it weakens or perverts the passages which clearly teach that “God would have all men to be saved”; it suspends their eternal fate upon one single act of disobedience; it assumes an unconscious, and yet responsible pre-existence of Adam’s posterity and their participation in his sin and guilt; it reflects upon the wisdom of God in creating countless millions of beings with the eternal foreknowledge of their everlasting misery; and it does violence to the sense of individual responsibility for accepting or rejecting the gospel-offer of salvation. And yet this Augustinian system, especially in its severest Calvinistic form, has promoted civil and religious liberty, and trained the most virtuous, independent, and heroic types of Christians, as the Huguenots, the Puritans, the Covenanters, and the Pilgrim Fathers. It is still a mighty moral power, and will not lose its hold upon earnest characters until some great theological genius produces from the inexhaustible mine of the Scriptures a more satisfactory solution of the awful problem which the universal reign of sin and death presents to the thinking mind.

In Augustin the anti-Pelagian system was checked and moderated by his churchly and sacramental views, and we cannot understand him without keeping both in view. The same apparent contradiction we find in Luther, but he broke entirely with the sacerdotal system 18of Rome, and made the doctrine of justification by faith the chief article of his creed, which Augustin never could have done. Calvin was more logical than either, and went back beyond justification and Adam’s fall, yea, beyond time itself, to the eternal counsel of God which pre-ordains, directs and controls the whole history of mankind to a certain end, the triumph of his mercy and justice.

VI. Exegetical works. The best of these are: De Genesi ad literam (The Genesis word for word), in twelve books, an extended exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis, particularly the history of the creation literally interpreted, though with many mystical and allegorical interpretations also (written between 401 and 415);⁵¹⁵¹    Tom. iii. 117-324. Not to be confounded with the two other books on Genesis, in which he defends the biblical doctrine of creation against the Manichæans. In this exegetical work he aimed, as he says, Retract. ii. c. 24, to interpret Genesis “non secundum allegoricas significationes, sed secundum rerum gestarum proprietatem.” The work is more original and spirited than the Hexaëmeron of Basil or of Ambrose. Enarrationes in Psalmos (mostly sermons);⁵²⁵²    Tom. iv., the whole volume. The English translation of the Com. on the Psalms occupies six volumes of the Oxford Library of the Fathers. hundred and twenty-four Homilies on the Gospel of John (416 and 417);⁵³⁵³    Tom. iii. 289-824. Translated in Clark’s ed. of Augustin’s works. ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John (417); the Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount (393); the Harmony of the Gospels (De consensu evangelistarum, 400); the Epistle to the Galatians (394); and an unfinished commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.⁵⁴⁵⁴    All in tom. iii. Translated in part.

Augustin deals more in lively, profound, and edifying thoughts on the Scriptures than in proper grammatical and historical exposition, for which neither he nor his readers had the necessary linguistic knowledge, disposition, or taste. He grounded his theology less upon exegesis than upon his Christian and churchly mind saturated with Scriptural truths. He excels in spiritual insight, and is suggestive even when he misses the natural meaning.

VII. Ethical and Ascetic works. Among these belong three hundred and ninety-six Sermones (mostly very short) de Scripturis (on texts of Scripture), de tempore (festival sermons), de sanctis (in memory of apostles, martyrs, and saints), and de diversis (on various occasions), some of them dictated by Augustin, some taken down by hearers.⁵⁵⁵⁵    Tom. v. contains beside these a multitude (317) of doubtful and spurious sermons, likewise divided into four classes. To these must be added recently discovered sermons, edited from manuscripts in Florence, Monte Cassino, etc., by M. Denis (1792), O. F. Frangipane (1820), A. L. Caillau (Paris, 1836), and Angelo Mai (in the Nova Bibliotheca Patrum). Also various moral treatises: De continentia (395); De mendaico (395), against deception (not to be confounded with the similar work already mentioned Contra mendacium, against the fraud-theory of the Priscillianists, written in 420); De agone Christiano (396); De opere monachorum, against monastic idleness (400); De bono conjugali adv. Jovinianum (400); De virginitate (401); De fide et operibus (413); De adulterinis conjugiis, on 1 Cor. vii. 10 sqq. (419); De bono viduitatis (418); De patientia (418); De cura pro mortuis gerenda, to Paulinus of Nola (421); De utilitate jejunii; De diligendo Deo; Meditationes;⁵⁶⁵⁶    Most of them in tom. vi. ed. Bened. On the scripta deperdita, dubia et spuria of Augustin, see the index by Schönemann, l. c. p. 50 sqq., and in the supplemental volume of Migne’s edition, pp. 34-40. The so-called Meditations of Augustin (German translation by August Krohne, Stuttgart, 1854) are a later compilation by the abbot of Fescamp in France, at the close of the twelfth century, from the writings of Augustin, Gregory the Great, Anselm, and others. &c.

As we survey this enormous literary labor, augmented by many other treatises and letters now lost, and as we consider his episcopal labors, his many journeys, and his adjudications of controversies among the faithful, which often robbed him of whole days, we must be really astounded at the fidelity, exuberance, energy, and perseverance of this father of the church. Surely, such a life was worth the living.

19

CHAPTER V.—The Influence of St. Augustin upon Posterity, and his Relation to Catholicism and Protestantism.

In conclusion we must add some observations respecting the influence of Augustin on the Church and the world since his time, and his position with reference to the great antagonism of Catholicism and Protestantism. All the church fathers are, indeed, the common inheritance of both parties; but no other of them has produced so permanent effects on both, and no other stands in so high regard with both, as Augustin. Upon the Greek Church alone has he exercised little or no influence; for this Church stopped with the undeveloped synergistic anthropology of the previous age, and rejects most decidedly, as a Latin heresy, the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit (the Filioque) for which Augustin is chiefly responsible.⁵⁷⁵⁷    The church fathers of the first six centuries are certainly far more Catholic than Protestant, and laid the doctrinal foundation of the orthodox Greek and Roman churches. But it betrays a contracted, slavish, and mechanical view of history, when Roman Catholic divines claim the fathers as their exclusive property; forgetting that they taught many things which are as inconsistent with the papal as with the Protestant Creed, and that they knew nothing of certain dogmas which are essential to Romanism (such as the infallibility of the pope, the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, auricular confession, the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, etc.). “I recollect well,” says Dr. Newman, the former intellectual leader of Oxford Tractarianism (in his Letter to Dr. Pusey on his Eirenicon, 1866, p. 5), “what an outcast I seemed to myself, when I took down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholic communion, I kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints, who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the inanimate pages, ‘You are now mine, and I am yours, beyond any mistake.’” With the same right the Jews might lay exclusive claim to the writings of Moses and the prophets. The fathers were living men, representing the onward progress and conflicts of Christianity in their time, unfolding and defending great truths, but not unmixed with many errors and imperfections which subsequent times have corrected. Those are the true children of the fathers who, standing on the foundation of Christ and the apostles, and, kissing the New Testament rather than any human writings, follow them only as far as they followed Christ, and who carry forward their work in the onward march of evangelical catholic Christianity.

1. Augustin, in the first place, contributed much to the development of the doctrinal basis which Catholicism and Protestantism hold in common against such radical heresies of antiquity as Manichæism, Arianism, and Pelagianism. In all these great intellectual conflicts he was in general the champion of the cause of Christian truth against dangerous errors. Through his influence the canon of Holy Scripture (including, indeed, the Old Testament Apocrypha) was fixed in its present form by the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). He conquered the Manichæan dualism, hylozoism, and fatalism, and saved the biblical idea of God and of creation, and the biblical doctrine of the nature of sin and its origin in the free will of man. He developed the Nicene dogma of the Trinity, in opposition to tritheism on the one hand, and Sabellianism on the other, but also with the doubtful addition of the Filioque, and in opposition to the Greek, gave it the form in which it has ever since prevailed in the West. In this form the dogma received classical expression from his school in the falsely so called Athanasian Creed, which is not recognized by the Greek Church, and which better deserves the name of the Augustinian Creed.

In Christology, on the contrary, he added nothing new, and he died shortly before the great Christological conflicts opened, which reached their œcumenical settlement at the council of Chalcedon, twenty years after his death. Yet he anticipated Leo in giving currency in the West to the important formula: “Two natures in one person.”⁵⁸⁵⁸    He was summoned to the council of Ephesus, which condemned Nestorianism in 431, but died a year before it met. He prevailed upon the Gallic monk, Leporius, to retract Nestorianism. His Christology is in many points defective and obscure. Comp. Dorner’s History of Christology, ii. pp. 88-98 (Germ. ed.). Jerome did still less for this department of doctrine.

2. Augustin is also the principal theological creator of the Latin-Catholic system as distinct from the Greek Catholicism on the one hand, and from evangelical protestantism on the other. He ruled the entire theology of the middle age, and became the father of scholasticism in virtue of his dialectic mind, and the father of mysticism in virtue of his devout heart, without being responsible for the excesses of either system. For scholasticism thought to comprehend the divine with the understanding, and lost itself at last in empty dialectics; and mysticism 20endeavoured to grasp the divine with feeling, and easily strayed into misty sentimentalism; Augustin sought to apprehend the divine with the united power of mind and heart, of bold thought and humble faith.⁵⁹⁵⁹    Wigger’s (Pragmat. Darstellung des Augustinismus und Pelegianismus, i. p. 27) finds the most peculiar and remarkable point of Augustin’s character in his singular union of intellect and imagination, scholasticism and mysticism, in which neither can be said to predominate. So also Huber, l. c. p. 313. Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura, are his nearest of kin in this respect. Even now, since the Catholic Church has become a Roman Church, he enjoys greater consideration in it than Ambrose, Hilary, Jerome, or Gregory the Great. All this cannot possibly be explained without an interior affinity.⁶⁰⁶⁰    Nourrisson, the able expounder of the philosophy of Augustin, says (l. c. tom. i. p. iv): “Je ne crois pas, qu’excepté saint Paul, aucun homme ait contribué davantage, par sa parole comme par ses écrits, à organiser, à interpréter, à répandre le christianisme; et, après saint Paul, nul apparemment, non pas même le glorieux, l’invincible Athanase, n’a travaillé d’une manière aussi puissante à fonder l’unité catholique.”

His very conversion, in which, besides the Scriptures, the personal intercourse of the hierarchical Ambrose and the life of the ascetic Anthony had great influence, was a transition not from heathenism to Christianity (for he was already a Manichæan Christian), but from heresy to the historical, orthodox, episcopally organized church, as, for the time, the sole authorized vehicle of the apostolic Christianity in conflict with those sects and parties which more or less assailed the foundations of the Gospel. It was, indeed, a full and unconditional surrender of his mind and heart to God, but it was at the same time a submission of his private judgment to the authority of the church which led him to the faith of the gospel.⁶¹⁶¹    We recall his famous anti-Manichæan dictum: “Ego evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicæ ecclesiæ commoveret auctoritas.” The Protestant would reverse this maxim, and ground his faith in the church on his faith in Christ and in the gospel. So with the well-known maxim of Irenæus: “Ubi ecclesia, ibi Spiritus Dei, et ubi Spiritus Dei, ibi ecclesia.” According to the spirit of Protestantism it would be said conversely: “Where the Spirit of God is, there is the church, and where the church is, there is the Spirit of God.” In the same spirit he embraced the ascetic life, without which, according to the Catholic principle, no high religion is possible. He did not indeed enter a cloister, like Luther, whose conversion in Erfurt was likewise essentially catholic, but he lived in his house in the simplicity of a monk, and made and kept the vow of voluntary poverty and celibacy.⁶²⁶²    According to genuine Christian principles it would have been far more noble, if he had married the African woman with whom he had lived in illicit intercourse for thirteen years, who was always faithful to him, as he was to her, and had borne him his beloved and highly gifted Adeodatus; instead of casting her off, and, as he for a while intended, choosing another for the partner of his life, whose excellences were more numerous. The superiority of the evangelical Protestant morality over the Catholic asceticism is here palpable. But with the prevailing spirit of his age he would hardly have enjoyed so great regard, nor accomplished so much good if he had been married. Celibacy was the bridge from the heathen degradation of marriage to the evangelical Christian exaltation and sanctification of the family life.

He adopted Cyprian’s doctrine of the church, and completed it in the conflict with Donatism by transferring the predicates of unity, holiness, universality, exclusiveness, and maternity, directly to the actual church of the time, which, with a firm episcopal organization, an unbroken succession, and the Apostles’ Creed, triumphantly withstood the eighty or the hundred opposing sects in the heretical catalogue of the day, and had its visible centre in Rome. In this church he had found rescue from the shipwreck of his life, the home of true Christianity, firm ground for his thinking, satisfaction for his heart, and a commensurate field for the wide range of his powers.⁶³⁶³    On Augustin’s doctrine of the church, see Ch. Hist. III. §71, and especially the thorough account by R. Rothe: Anfänge der christl. Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, vol. i. (1837), pp. 679-711. “Augustin,” says he, “decidely adopted Cyprian’s conception [of the church] in all essential points. And once adopting it, he penetrated it in its whole depth with his wonderfully powerful and exuberant soul, and, by means of his own clear, logical mind, gave it the perfect and rigorous system which perhaps it still lacked” (p. 679 sqq.). “Augustin’s conception of the doctrine of the church was about standard for succeeding times” (p. 685). See also an able article of Prof. Reuter, of Göttingen, on Augustin’s views concerning episcopacy, tradition, infallibility, in Brieger’s “Zeitschrift für Hist. Theol.” for 1885 (Bk. VIII. pp. 126-187). The predicate of infallibility alone he does not plainly bring forward; he assumes a progressive correction of earlier councils by later; and in the Pelagian controversy he asserts the same independence towards pope Zosimus, which Cyprian before him had shown towards pope Stephen in the controversy on heretical baptism, with the advantage of having the right on his side, so that Zosimus found himself compelled to yield to the African church. But after 21the condemnation of the Pelagian errors by the Roman see (418), he declared that “the case is finished, if only the error were also finished.”⁶⁴⁶⁴    Hence the famous word: “Roma locuta est, causa finita est,” which is often quoted as an argument for the modern Vatican dogma of papal infallibility. But it is not found in this form, though we may admit that it is an epigrammatic condensation of sentences of Augustin. The nearest approach to it is in his Sermo CXXXI. cap. 10, §10 (Tom. VII. 645): “Iam enim de hac causa duo concilia missa sunt ad sedem apostolicam (Rome), inde etiam rescripta venerunt. Causa finita est, utinam aliquando error finiatur.” Comp. Reuter, l. c. p. 157.

He was the first to give a clear and fixed definition of the sacrament, as a visible sign of invisible grace, resting on divine appointment; but he knows nothing of the number seven; this was a much later enactment. In the doctrine of baptism he is entirely Catholic, though in logical contradiction with his dogma of predestination; he maintained the necessity of baptism for salvation on the ground of John ii. 5 and Mark xvi. 16, and derived from it the horrible dogma of the eternal damnation of all unbaptized infants, though he reduced their condition to a mere absence of bliss, without actual suffering.⁶⁵⁶⁵    Respecting Augustin’s doctrine of baptism, see the thorough discussion in W. Wall’s History of Infant Baptism, vol. i. p. 173 sqq. (Oxford ed. of 1862). His view of the slight condemnation of all unbaptized children contains the germ of the scholastic fancy of the limbus infantum and the pæna damni, as distinct from the lower regions of hell and the pæna sensus. In the doctrine of the holy communion he stands, like his predecessors, Tertullian and Cyprian, nearer to the Calvinistic than any other theory of a spiritual presence and fruition of Christ’s body and blood. He certainly can not be quoted in favor of transubstantiation. He was the chief authority of Ratramnus and Berengar in their opposition to this dogma.

He contributed to promote, at least in his later writings, the Catholic faith of miracles,⁶⁶⁶⁶    In his former writings he expressed a truly philosophical view concerning miracles (De vera relig. c. 25, §47; c. 50, §98; De utilit. credendi, c. 16, §34; De peccat. meritis et remiss. l. ii. c. 32, §52, and De civit. Dei, xxii. c. 8); but in his Retract. l. i. c. 14, §5, he corrects or modifies a former remark in his book De utilit. credendi, stating that he did not mean to deny the continuance of miracles altogether, but only such great miracles as occurred at the time of Christ (“quia non tanta nec omnia, non quia nulla fiunt”). See Ch. Hist. III. §§87 and 88, and the instructive monograph of the younger Nitzsch: Augustinus’ Lehre vom Wunder, Berlin, 1865 (97 pp.). and the worship of Mary;⁶⁷⁶⁷    See Ch. Hist. III. §§81 and 82. though he exempts the Virgin only from actual sin, not from original, and, with all his reverence for her, never calls her “mother of God.”⁶⁸⁶⁸    Comp. Tract. in Evang. Joannis, viii. c. 9, where he says: “Cur ergo ait matri filius; Quid mihi et tibi est, mulier? nondum venit hora mea (John ii. 4). Dominus noster Jesus Christus et Deus erat et homo: secundum quod Deus erat, matrem non habebat; secundum quod homo erat, habebat. Mater ergo [Maria] erat carnis, mater humanitatis, mater infirmitatis quam suscepit propter nos.” This strict separation of the Godhead from the manhood of Jesus in his birth from the Virgin would have exposed Augustin in the East to the suspicion of Nestorianism. But he died a year before the council of Ephesus, at which Nestorius was condemned.

At first an advocate of religious liberty and of purely spiritual methods of opposing error, he afterwards asserted the fatal principle of forcible coërcion, and lent the great weight of his authority to the system of civil persecution, at the bloody fruits of which in the middle age he himself would have shuddered; for he was always at heart a man of love and gentleness, and personally acted on the glorious principle: “Nothing conquers but truth, and the victory of truth is love.”⁶⁹⁶⁹    See Ch. Hist. III. §27, p. 144 sq. He changed his view partly from his experience that the Donatists, in his own diocese, were converted to the catholic unity “timore legum imperialium,” and were afterwards perfectly good Catholics. He adduces also a misinterpretation of Luke xiv. 23, and Prov. ix. 9: “Da sapienti occasionem et sapientior erit.” Ep. 93, ad Vincentium Rogatistam, §17 (tom. ii. p. 237 sq. ed. Bened.). But he expressly discouraged the infliction of death on heretics, and adjured the proconsul Donatus, Ep. 100, by Jesus Christ, not to repay the Donatists in kind. “Corrigi eos cupimus, non necari.”

Thus even truly great and good men have unintentionally, through mistaken zeal, become the authors of incalculable mischief.

3. But, on the other hand, Augustin is, of all the fathers, nearest to evangelical Protestantism, and may be called, in respect of his doctrine of sin and grace, the first forerunner of the Reformation. The Lutheran and Reformed churches have ever conceded to him, without scruple, the cognomen of Saint, and claimed him as one of the most enlightened witnesses of the truth and most striking examples of the marvellous power of divine grace in the transformation of a sinner. It is worthy of mark, that his Pauline doctrines, which are most nearly 22akin to Protestantism, are the later and more mature parts of his system, and that just these found great acceptance with the laity. The Pelagian controversy, in which he developed his anthropology, marks the culmination of his theological and ecclesiastical career, and his latest writings were directed against the Pelagian Julian and the Semi-Pelagians in Gaul, who were brought to his notice by two friendly laymen, Prosper and Hilary. These anti-Pelagian works have wrought mightily, it is most true, upon the Catholic church, and have held in check the Pelagianizing tendencies of the hierarchical and monastic system, but they have never passed into its blood and marrow. They waited for a favourable future, and nourished in silence an opposition to the prevailing system.

In the middle age the better sects, which attempted to simplify, purify, and spiritualize the reigning Christianity by return to the Holy Scriptures, and the Reformers before the Reformation, such as Wiclif, Hus, Wessel, resorted most, after the apostle Paul, to the bishop of Hippo as the representative of the doctrine of free grace.

The Reformers were led by his writings into a deeper understanding of Paul, and so prepared for their great vocation. No church teacher did so much to mould Luther and Calvin; none furnished them so powerful weapons against the dominant Pelagianism and formalism; none is so often quoted by them with esteem and love.⁷⁰⁷⁰    Luther pronounced upon the church fathers (with whom, however, excepting Augustin, he was but slightly acquainted) very condemnatory judgments, even upon Basil, Chrysostom, and Jerome (for Jerome he had a downright antipathy, on account of his advocacy of fasts, virginity, and monkery); he was at times dissatisfied even with Augustin, because he after all did not find in him his sola fide, his articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ, and says of him: “Augustin often erred; he cannot be trusted. Though he was good and holy, yet he, as well as other fathers, was wanting in the true faith.” But this cursory utterance is overborne by numerous commendations; and all such judgments of Luther must be taken cum grano salis. He calls Augustin the most pious, grave, and sincere of the fathers, and the patron of divines, who taught a pure doctrine and submitted it in Christian humility to the Holy Scriptures, etc., and he thinks, if he had lived in the sixteenth century, he would have been a Protestant (si hoc seculo viveret, nobiscum sentiret), while Jerome would have gone with Rome. Compare his singular but striking judgments on the fathers in Lutheri Colloquia, ed. H. E. Bindseil, 1863, tom. iii. 149, and many other places. Gangauf, a Roman Catholic (a pupil of the philosopher Günther), concedes (l. c. p. 28, note 13) that Luther and Calvin built their doctrinal system mainly on Augustin, but, as he correctly thinks, with only partial right. Nourrisson, likewise a Roman Catholic, derives Protestantism from a corrupted (!) Augustinianism, and very superficially makes Lutheranism and Calvinism essentially to consist in the denial of the freedom of the will, which was only one of the questions of the Reformation. “On ne saurait le méconnaître, de l’Augustinianisme corrompu, mais enfin de l’Augustinianisme procède le Protestantisme. Car, sans parler de Wiclif et de Huss, qui, nourris de saint Augustin, soutiennent, avec le réalisme platonicien, la doctrine de la prédestination: Luther et Calvin ne font guère autre chose, dans leurs principaux ouvrages, que cultiver des semences d’Augustinianisme” (l. c. ii. p. 176). But the Reformation is far more, of course, than a repristination of an old controversy; it is a new creation, and marks the epoch of modern Christianity which is different both from the mediæval and from ancient or patristic Christianity.

All the Reformers in the outset, Melanchthon and Zwingle among them, adopted his denial of free will and his doctrine of predestination, and sometimes even went beyond him into the abyss of supralapsarianism, to cut out the last roots of human merit and boasting. In this point Augustin holds the same relation to the Catholic church, as Luther to the Lutheran; that is, he is a heretic of unimpeachable authority, who is more admired than censured even in his extravagances; yet his doctrine of predestination was indirectly condemned by the pope in Jansenism, as Luther’s view was rejected as Calvinism by the Formula of Concord.⁷¹⁷¹    It is well known that Luther, as late as 1526, in his work, De servo arbitrio, against Erasmus, which he never retracted, proceeded upon the most rigorous notion of the divine omnipotence, wholly denied the freedom of will, declared it a mere lie (merum mendacium), pronounced the calls of the Scriptures to repentance a divine irony, and based eternal salvation and eternal perdition upon the secret will of God; in all this he almost exceeded Calvin. See particulars in the books on doctrine-history; the inaugural dissertation of Jul. Müller: Lutheri de prædestinatione et libero arbitrio doctrina, Gött. 1832; and a historical treatise on predestination by Carl Beck in the “Studien und Kritiken” for 1847. We add, as a curiosity, the opinion of Gibbon (ch. xxxiii.), who, however, had a very limited and superficial knowledge of Augustin: “The rigid system of Christianity which he framed or restored, has been entertained, with public applause, and secret reluctance, by the Latin church. The church of Rome has canonized Augustin, and reprobated Calvin. Yet as the real difference between them is invisible even to a theological microscope, the Molinists are oppressed by the authority of the saint, and the Jansenists are disgraced by their resemblance to the heretic. In the mean while the Protestant Arminians stand aloof, and deride the mutual perplexity of the disputants. Perhaps a reasoner, still more independent, may smile in his turn when he peruses an Arminian commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.” Nourrisson (ii. 179), from his Roman stand-point, likewise makes Lutheranism to consist “essentiellement dans la question du libre arbitre.” But the principle of Lutheranism, and of Protestantism generally, is the supremacy of the Holy Scriptures as a rule of faith, and salvation by free grace through faith in Christ. For Jansenism was nothing but a revival of Augustinianism in the bosom of the Roman Catholic church.⁷²⁷²    On the mighty influence of Augustin in the seventeenth century in France, especially on the noble Jansenists, see the works on Jansenism, and also Nourrisson, l. c. tom. ii. pp. 186-276.

23The excess of Augustin and the Reformers in this direction is due to the earnestness and energy of their sense of sin and grace. The Pelagian looseness could never beget a reformer. It was only the unshaken conviction of man’s own inability, of unconditional dependence on God, and of the almighty power of his grace to give us strength for every good work, which could do this. He who would give others the conviction that he has a divine vocation for the church and for mankind, must himself be penetrated with the faith of an eternal, unalterable decree of God, and must cling to it in the darkest hours.

In great men, and only in great men, great opposites and apparently antagonistic truths live together. Small minds cannot hold them. The catholic, churchly, sacramental, and sacerdotal system stands in conflict with the evangelical Protestant Christianity of subjective, personal experience. The doctrine of universal baptismal regeneration, in particular, which presupposes a universal call (at least within the church), can on principles of logic hardly be united with the doctrine of an absolute predestination, which limits the decree of redemption to a portion of the baptized. Augustin supposes, on the one hand, that every baptized person, through the inward operation of the Holy Ghost, which accompanies the outward act of the sacrament, receives the forgiveness of sins, and is translated from the state of nature into the state of grace, and thus, qua baptizatus, is also a child of God and an heir of eternal life; and yet, on the other hand, he makes all these benefits dependent on the absolute will of God, who saves only a certain number out of the “mass of perdition,” and preserves these to the end. Regeneration and election, with him, do not, as with Calvin, coincide. The former may exist without the latter, but the latter cannot exist without the former. Augustin assumes that many are actually born into the kingdom of grace only to perish again; Calvin holds that in the case of the non-elect baptism is an unmeaning ceremony; the one putting the delusion in the inward effect, the other in the outward form. The sacramental, churchly system throws the main stress upon the baptismal regeneration, to the injury of the eternal election; the Calvinistic or Puritan system sacrifices the virtue of the sacrament to the election; the Lutheran and high Anglican systems seek a middle ground, without being able to give a satisfactory theological solution of the problem. The Anglican Church, however allows the two opposite views, and sanctions the one in the baptismal service of the Book of Common Prayer, the other in her Thirty-nine Articles, and other standards, as interpreted by the low church or evangelical party in a moderately Calvinistic sense.

It was an evident ordering of God, that Augustin’s theology, like the Latin Bible of Jerome, appeared just in the transitional period of history, in which the old civilization was passing away before the flood of barbarism, and a new order of things, under the guidance of the Christian religion, was in preparation. The church, with her strong, imposing organization and her firm system of doctrine, must save Christianity amidst the chaotic turmoil of the great migration, and must become a training-school for the barbarian nations of the middle age.⁷³⁷³    Guizot, the Protestant historian and statesman, very correctly says in his Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (Deuxième lecon, p. 45 sq. ed. Bruxelles, 1850): “S’il n’eût pas été une église, je ne sais ce qui en serait avenu au milieu de la chute de l’empire romain.…Si le christianisme n’eût été comme dans les premiers temps, qu’une croyance, un sentiment, une conviction individuelle, on peut croire qu’il aurait succombé au milieu de la dissolution de l’empire et de l’invasion des barbares. Il a succombé plus tard, en Asie et dans tous le nord de l’Afrique, sous une invasion de même nature, sous l’invasion des barbares musulmans; il a succombé alors, quoiqu’il fût à l’êtat d’institution, d’église constituée. A bien plus forte raison le même fait aurait pu arriver au moment de la chute de l’empire romain. Il n’y avait alors aucun des moyens par lesquels aujourd’hui les influences morales s’établissent ou résistent indépendamment des institutions, aucun des moyens par lesquels une pure vérité, une pure idée acquiert un grand empire sur les esprits, gouverne les actions, dêtermine des événemens. Rien de semblable n’existait au IV^e siècle, pour donner aux idées, aux sentiments personels, une pareille autorité. Il est clair qu’il fallait une société fortement organisée, fortement gouvernée, pour lutter contre un pareil désastre, pour sortir victorieuse d’un tel ouragan. Je ne crois pas trop dire en affirmant qu’à la fin du IV^e et au commencement du V^e siècle, c’est l’église chrétienne qui a sauvé le christianisme; c’est l’église avec ses institutions, ses magistrats, son pouvoir, qui s’est défendue vigoureusement contre la dissolution intérieure de l’empire, contre la barbarie, qui a conquis les barbares, qui est devenue le lien, le moyen, le principe dé civilisation entre le monde romain et le monde barbare.”

In this process of training, next to the Holy Scriptures, the scholarship of Jerome and the theology and fertile ideas of Augustin were the most important intellectual agents.

24Augustin was held in so universal esteem that he could exert influence in all directions, and even in his excesses gave no offence. He was sufficiently catholic for the principle of church authority, and yet at the same time so free and evangelical that he modified its hierarchical and sacramental character, reacted against its tendencies to outward, mechanical ritualism, and kept alive a deep consciousness of sin and grace, and a spirit of fervent and truly Christian piety, until that spirit grew strong enough to break the shell of hierarchical tutelage, and enter a new stage of it development. No other father could have acted more beneficently on the Catholicism of the middle age, and more successfully provided for the evangelical Reformation than St. Augustin, the worthy successor of Paul, and the precursor of Luther and Calvin.

He had lived at the time of the Reformation, he would in all probability have taken the lead of the evangelical movement against the prevailing Pelagianism of the Roman church, though he would not have gone so far as Luther or Calvin. For we must not forget that, notwithstanding their strong affinity, there is an important difference between Catholicism and Romanism or Popery. They sustain a similar relation to each other as the Judaism of the Old Testament dispensation, which looked to, and prepared the way for, Christianity, and the Judaism after the crucifixion and after the destruction of Jerusalem, which is antagonistic to Christianity. Catholicism covers the entire ancient and mediæval history of the church, and includes the Pauline, Augustinian, or evangelical tendencies which increased with the corruptions of the papacy and the growing sense of the necessity of a “reformation in capite et membris.” Romanism proper dates from the council of Trent, which gave it symbolical expression and anathematized the doctrines of the Reformation. Catholicism is the strength of Romanism, Romanism is the weakness of Catholicism. Catholicism produced Jansenism, Popery condemned it. Popery never forgets and never learns anything, and can allow no change in doctrine (except by way of addition), without sacrificing its fundamental principle of infallibility, and thus committing suicide. But Catholicism may ultimately burst the chains of Popery which have so long kept it confined, and may assume new life and vigour.

Such a personage as Augustin, still holding a mediating place between the two great divisions of Christendom, revered alike by both, and of equal influence with both, is furthermore a welcome pledge of the elevating prospect of a future reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism in a high unity, conserving all the truths, losing all the errors, forgiving all the sins, forgetting all the enmities of both. After all, the contradiction between authority and freedom, the objective and the subjective, the churchly and the personal, the organic and the individual, the sacramental and the experimental in religion, is not absolute, but relative and temporary, and arises not so much from the nature of things, as from the deficiencies of man’s knowledge and piety in this world. These elements admit of an ultimate harmony in the perfect state of the church, corresponding to the union of the divine and human natures, which transcends the limits of finite thought and logical comprehension, and is yet completely realized in the person of Christ. They are in fact united in the theological system of St. Paul, who had the highest view of the church, as the mystical “body of Christ,” and “the pillar and ground of the truth,” and who was at the same time the great champion of evangelical freedom, individual responsibility, and personal union of the believer with his Saviour. We believe in and hope for one holy catholic apostolic church, one communion of saints, one flock, one Shepherd. The more the different churches become truly Christian, the nearer they draw to Christ, and the more they labor for His kingdom which rises above them all, the nearer will they come to one another. For Christ is the common head and vital centre of all believers, and the divine harmony of all discordant human sects and creeds. In Christ, says Pascal, one of the greatest and noblest disciples of Augustin, In Christ all contradictions are solved.

25

Chief Events in the Life of St. Augustin.

(as Given, Nearly, in the Benedictine Edition).

354.            Augustin born at Tagaste, Nov. 13; his parents, Patricius and Monnica; shortly afterwards enrolled among the Catechumens.

370.  Returns home from studying Rhetoric at Madaura, after an idle childhood, and from idleness falls into dissipation and sin.

371.            Patricius dies; Augustin supported at Carthage by his mother, and his friend Romanianus; forms an illicit connection.

372.  Birth of his son Adeodatus.

373.             Cicero’s Hortensius awakens in him a strong desire for true wisdom.

374.  He falls into the Manichæan heresy, and seduces several of his acquaintances into it. His mother’s earnest prayers for him; she is assured of his recovery.

376.            Teaches Grammar at Tagaste; but soon returns to Carthage to teach Rhetoric—gains a prize.

379.  Is recovered from study of Astrology—writes his books De pulchro et apto.

382.            Discovers the Manichæans to be in error, but falls into scepticism. Goes to Rome to teach Rhetoric.

385.            Removes to Milan; his errors gradually removed through the teaching of Ambrose, but he is held back by the flesh; becomes again a Catechumen.

386.  Studies St. Paul; converted through a voice from heaven; gives up his profession; writes against the Academics; prepares for Baptism.

387.  Is baptized by Bishop Ambrose, with his son Adeodatus. Death of his mother, Monnica, in her fifty-sixth year, at Ostia.

388.  Aug. revisits Rome, and then returns to Africa. Adeodatus, full of promise, dies.

389.  Aug. against his will ordained Presbyter at Hippo by Valerius, its Bishop.

392.  Writes against the Manichæans.

394.  Writes against the Donatists.

395.            Ordained Assistant Bishop to Valerius, toward the end of the year.

396.  Death of Bishop Valerius. Augustin elected his successor.

397.  Aug. writes the Confessions, and the De Tinitate against the Arians.

398.  Is present at the fourth Council of Carthage.

402.  Refutes the Epistle of Petilianus, a Donatist.

404.  Applies to Cæcilianus for protection against the savageness of the Donatists.

408.  Writes De urbis Romæ obsidione.

411.  Takes a prominent part in a conference between the Catholic Bishops and the Donatists.

413.  Begins the composition of his great work De Civitate Dei, completed in 426.

417.  Writes De gestis Palæstinæ synodi circa Pelagium.

420.  Writes against the Priscillianists.

424.  Writes against the Semipelagians.

426.            Appoints Heraclius his successor.

428.  Writes the Retractations.

429.            Answers the Epistles of Prosper and Hilary.

430.  Dies Aug. 28, in the third month of the siege of Hippo by the Vandals.

27

St. Aurelius Augustin

Bishop of Hippo

The Confessions of St. Augustin

In Thirteen Books

Translated and Annotated by

J.G. Pilkington, M.A.,

Vicar of St. Mark’s, West Hackney; And Sometime Clerical Secretary of theBishop of London’s Fund.

“Thou has formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”—Confessions, i. 1.

“The joy of the solemn service of Thy house constraineth to tears, when it is read of Thy younger son [Luke xv. 24] ‘that he was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’”—Ibid. viii. 6.

29

Translator’s Preface

————————————

“If St. Augustin,” says Nourrisson⁷⁴⁷⁴    Philosophie de St. Augustin, Preface., “had left nothing but his Confessions and the City of God, one could readily understand the respectful sympathy that surrounds his memory. How, indeed, could one fail to admire in the City of God the flight of genius, and in the Confessions, what is better still, the effusions of a great soul?” It may be safely predicted, that while the mind of man yearns for knowledge, and his heart seeks rest, the Confessions will retain that foremost place in the world’s literature which it has secured by its sublime outpourings of devotion and profound philosophical spirit. There is in the book a wonderful combination of childlike piety and intellectual power. Desjardins’ idea,⁷⁵⁷⁵    Essai sur les Conf. de St. Aug. p. 5. that, while in Augustin’s other works we see the philosopher or the controversialist, here we see the man, is only to be accepted as a comparative statement of Augustin’s attitude in the Confessions; for philosophy and piety are in many of his reflections as it were molten into one homogeneous whole. In his highest intellectual flights we find the breathings of faith and love, and, amid the profoundest expressions of penitential sorrow, gleams of his metaphysical genius appear.

It may, indeed, be from the man’s showing himself so little, as distinguished from the philosopher, that some readers are a little disappointed in the book. They have expected to meet with a copiousness of biographic details, and have found, commingled with such as are given, long disquisitions on Manichæanism, Time, Creation, and Memory. To avoid such disappointment we must ascertain the author’s design. The book is emphatically not an autobiography. There is in it an outline of the author’s life up to his mother’s death; but only so much of detail is given as may subserve his main purpose. That purpose is clearly explained in the fourth section of his Tenth Book. It was that the impenitent on reading it might not say, “I cannot,” and “sleep in despair,” but rather that, looking to that God who had raised the writer from his low estate of pride and sin to be a pillar of the Church, he might take courage, and “awake in the sweetness of His grace, by which he that is weak is made strong;” and that those no longer in sin might rejoice and praise God as they heard of the past lusts of him who was now freed from them.⁷⁶⁷⁶    Confessions, x. sec. 4. This, his design of encouraging penitence and stimulating praise, is referred to in his Retractations,⁷⁷⁷⁷    See the passage quoted immediately after this Preface. and in his Letter to Darius.⁷⁸⁷⁸    Ep. ccxxxi. sec. 6.

These two main ideas are embodied in the very meaning of the title of the book, the word confession having, as Augustin constantly urges, two meanings. In his exposition of the Psalms we read: “Confession is understood in two senses, of our sins, and of God’s praise. Confession of our sins is well known, so well known to all the people, that whenever they hear the name of confession in the lessons, whether it is said in praise or of sin, they beat their breasts.”⁷⁹⁷⁹    Enarr. in Ps. cxli. sec. 19: see also in Ps. cxvii. sec. 1, xxix. sec. 19, xciv. sec. 4, and xxix. sec. 19. Again: “Confession of sin all know, but confession of praise few attend to.”⁸⁰⁸⁰    Enarr. in Ps. cxxxvii. sec. 2. “The former but showeth the wound to the physician, the latter giveth thanks for health.”⁸¹⁸¹    Enarr. in Ps. cx. sec. 2. He would therefore have his hearers make the sacrifice of praise their ideal, since, in the City of God, even in the New Jerusalem, there will be no longer confession of sin, but there will be confession of praise.⁸²⁸²    In Ps. xliv. sec. 33, xcix, sec. 16. It is not surprising, that with this view of confession he should hinge on the incidents of his life such considerations as tend to elevate the mind and heart of the reader. When, for example, he speaks of his youthful sins,⁸³⁸³    Book ii. secs. 6-18. he diverges into a disquisition on the motives to sin; when his friend dies,⁸⁴⁸⁴    Book iv. secs. 11-15 he moralizes on death; and—to give one example of a reverse process—his profound psychological review of memory⁸⁵⁸⁵    Book x. secs. 41, 42. recalls his former sin (which at times haunts him in his dreams), and leads up to devout reflections on God’s power to cleanse from sin. This undertone of penitence and praise which pervades the Confessions in all its episodes, like the golden threads which run through the texture of an Eastern garment, presents one of its peculiar charms.

It would not be right to overlook a charge that has been brought against the book by Lord Byron. He says, “Augustin in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy his transgressions.” Nothing could be more reckless or 30further from the truth than this charge. There is here no dwelling on his sin, or painting it so as to satisfy a prurient imagination. As we have already remarked, Augustin’s manner is not to go into detail further than to find a position from which to “edify” the reader, and he treats this episode in his life with his characteristic delicacy and reticence. His sin was dead; and he had carried it to its burial with tears of repentance. And when, ten years after his baptism, he sets himself, at the request of some, to a consideration of what he then was at the moment of making his confessions,⁸⁶⁸⁶    Book x. sec. 4. he refers hardly at all to this sin of his youth; and such allusions as he does make are of the most casual kind. Instead of enlarging upon it, he treats it as past, and only speaks of temptation and sin as they are common to all men. Many of the French writers on the Confessions⁸⁷⁸⁷    In addition to those referred to, there is one at the beginning of vol. ii. of Saint-Marc Girardin’s Essais de Litérature et de Morale, devoted to this subject. It has some good points in it, but has much of that sentimentality so often found in French criticisms. institute a comparison in this matter between the confessions of Augustin and those of Rousseau. Pressensé⁸⁸⁸⁸    Le Christianisme au Quatrième Siècle, p. 269. draws attention to the delicacy and reserve which characterise the one, and the arrogant defiance of God and man manifested in the other. The confessions of the one he speaks of as “un grand acte de repentir et d’amour;” and eloquently says, “In it he seems, like the Magdalen, to have spread his box of perfumes at the foot of the Saviour; from his stricken heart there exhales the incense most agreeable to God—the homage of true penitence.” The other he truly describes as uttering “a cry of triumph in the very midst of his sin, and robing his shame in a royal purple.” Well may Desjardins⁸⁹⁸⁹    Essai sur les Conf., etc. p. 12. express surprise at a book of such foulness coming from a genius so great; and perhaps his solution of the enigma is not far from the truth, when he attributes it to an overweening vanity and egotism.⁹⁰⁹⁰    He concludes: “La folie de son orgueil, voilá le mot de l’ênigme, ou l’ênigme n’en a pas.”—Ibid. p. 13.

It is right to point out, in connection with this part of our subject, that in regard to some at least of Augustin’s self-accusations,⁹¹⁹¹    Compare Confessions, ii. sec. 2, and iii. sec. 1, with iv. sec. 2. there may be a little of that pious exaggeration of his sinfulness which, as Lord Macaulay points out in his essays on Bunyan,⁹²⁹²    In vol. i. of his Crit. and Hist. Essays, and also in his Miscellaneous Writings. frequently characterises deep penitence. But however this may be, justice requires us to remember, in considering his transgression, that from his very childhood he had been surrounded by a condition of civilisation presenting manifold temptations. Carthage, where he spent a large part of his life, had become, since its restoration and colonization under Augustus Cæsar, an “exceeding great city,” in wealth and importance next to Rome.⁹³⁹³    Herodian Hist. vii. 6. “African Paganism,” says Pressensé,⁹⁴⁹⁴    Le Christianisme, etc. as above, p. 274. “was half Asiatic; the ancient worship of nature, the adoration of Astarte, had full licence in the city of Carthage; Dido had become a mythological being, whom this dissolute city had made its protecting divinity, and it is easy to recognise in her the great goddess of Phœnicia under a new name.” The luxury of the period is described by Jerome and Tertullian, when they denounce the custom of painting the face and tiring the head, and the prodigality that would give 25,000 golden crowns for a veil, immense revenues for a pair of ear-rings, and the value of a forest or an island for a head-dress.⁹⁵⁹⁵    Quoted by Nourrisson, Philosophie, etc. ii. 436. And Jerome, in one of his epistles, gives an illustration of the Church’s relation to the Pagan world at that time, when he represents an old priest of Jupiter with his grand-daughter, a catechumen, on his knee, who responds to his caresses by singing canticles.⁹⁶⁹⁶    Ibid. ii. 434, 435. It was a time when we can imagine one of Augustin’s parents going to the Colosseum, and enjoying the lasciviousness of its displays, and its gladiatorial shows, with their contempt of human life; while the other carefully shunned such scenes, as being under the ban of the teachers of the Church.⁹⁷⁹⁷    See Confessions, iii. sec. 2, note, and vi. sec. 13, note. It was an age in which there was action and reaction between religion and philosophy; but in which the power of Christianity was so great in its influences on Paganism, that some received the Christian Scriptures only to embody in their phraseology the ideas of heathenism. Of this last point Manichæanism presents an illustration. Now all these influences left their mark on Augustin. In his youth he plunged deep into the pleasures of his day; and we know how he endeavoured to find in Manichæanism a solution of those speculations which haunted his subtle and inquiring mind. Augustin at this time, then, is not to be taken as a type of what Christianity produced. He is to a great extent the outgrowth of the Pagan influences of the time. Considerations such as these may enable us to judge of his early sin more justly than if we measured it by our own privileges and opportunities.

The style of Augustin is sometimes criticised as not having the refinement of Virgil, Horace, or Cicero. But it should be remembered that he wrote in a time of national decay; and further, as Desjardins has remarked in the introduction to his essay, he had no time “to cut his phrases.” From the period of his conversion to that of his death, he was constantly engaged in controversy with this or that heresy; and if he did not write with classical accuracy, he so inspired the language with his genius, and moulded it by his fire,⁹⁸⁹⁸    See Poujoulat, Lettres de St. Augustin, Introd. p. 12, who compares the language of the time to Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, and say Augustin inspired it with life. that it appears almost to pulsate with the throbbings of his brain. He seems likewise to have despised mere elegance, for in his Confessions,⁹⁹⁹⁹    Confessions, v. sec. 10. when 31speaking of the style of Faustus, he says, “What profit to me was the elegance of my cup-bearer, since he offered me not the more precious draught for which I thirsted?” In this connection the remarks of Collenges¹⁰⁰¹⁰⁰    The Intercourses of Divine Love betwixt Christ and His Church, Preface (1683). are worthy of note. He says, when anticipating objections that might be made to his own style: “It was the last of my study; my opinion always was what Augustin calls diligens negligentia was the best diligence as to that; while I was yet a very young man I had learned out of him that it was no solecism in a preacher to use ossum for os, for (saith he) an iron key is better than one made of gold if it will better open the door, for that is all the use of the key. I had learned out of Hierom that a gaudry of phrases and words in a pulpit is but signum insipientiæ. The words of a preacher, saith he, ought pungere, non palpare, to prick the heart, not to smooth and coax. The work of an orator is too precarious for a minister of the gospel. Gregory observed that our Saviour had not styled us the sugar but the salt of the earth, and Augustin observeth, that though Cyprian in one epistle showed much of a florid orator, to show he could do it, yet he never would do so any more, to show he would not.”

There are several features in the Confessions deserving of remark, as being of special interest to the philosopher, the historian or the divine.

1. Chiefest amongst these is the intense desire for knowledge and the love of truth which characterised Augustin. This was noticeable before his conversion in his hungering after such knowledge as Manichæanism and the philosophy of the time could afford.¹⁰¹¹⁰¹    See Confessions, iv. sec. 1, note. It is none the less observable in that better time, when, in his quiet retreat at Cassiciacum, he sought to strengthen the foundations of his faith, and resolved to give himself up to the acquisition of divine knowledge.¹⁰²¹⁰²    Ibid. ix. sec. 7, note, and compare x. sec. 55, note. It was seen, too, in the many conflicts in which he was engaged with Donatists, Manichæans, Arians, and Pelagians, and in his earnest study of the deep things of God. This love of knowledge is perhaps conveyed in the beautiful legend quoted by Nourisson,¹⁰³¹⁰³    Philosophie, etc. as above, i. 320. of the monk wrapped in spirit, who expressed astonishment at not seeing Augustin among the elect in heaven. “He is higher up,” he was answered, “he is standing before the Holy Trinity disputing thereon for all eternity.”

While from the time of his conversion we find him holding on to the fundamental doctrines of the faith with the tenacity of one who had experienced the hollowness of the teachings of philosophy,¹⁰⁴¹⁰⁴    See Confessions, xiii. sec. 33, note. this passion for truth led him to handle most freely subjects of speculation in things non-essential.¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁵    Ibid. xi. sec. 3, note 4. But whether viewed as a controversialist, a student of Scripture, or a bishop of the Church of God, he ever manifests those qualities of mind and heart that gained for him not only the affection of the Church, but the esteem of his unorthodox opponents. To quote Guizot’s discriminating words, there was in him “ce mélange de passion et de douccur, d’autorite et de sympathie, d’ctendue d’esprit et de rigueur logique, qui lui donnait un si rare pouvoir.”¹⁰⁶¹⁰⁶    Histoire de la Civilisation en France, I. 203 (1829). Guizot is speaking of Augustin’s attitude in the Pelagian controversy.

2. It is to this eager desire for truth in his many-sided mind that we owe those trains of thought that read like forecasts of modern opinion. We have called attention to some such anticipations of modern thought as they recur in the notes throughout the book; but the speculations on Memory, Time, and Creation, which occupy so large a space in Books Ten and Eleven, deserve more particular notice. The French essayists have entered very fully into these questions. M. Saisset, in his admirable introduction to the De Civitate Dei,¹⁰⁷¹⁰⁷    A portion of this introduction will be found translated in Appendix ii. of M. Saisset’s Essay on Religious Philosophy (Clark). reviews Augustin’s theories as to the mysterious problems connected with the idea of Creation. He says, that in his subtle analysis of Time, and in his attempt at reconciling “the eternity of creative action with the dependence of things created,…he has touched with a bold and delicate hand one of the deepest mysteries of the human mind, and that to all his glorious titles he has added another, that of an ingenious psychologist and an eminent metaphysician.” Desjardins likewise commends the depth of Augustin’s speculations as to Time,¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁸    Essai, etc. as before, p. 129. and maintains that no one’s teaching as to Creation has shown more clearness, boldness, and vigor—avoiding the perils of dualism on the one hand, and atheism on the other.¹⁰⁹¹⁰⁹    Essai, etc. p. 130. In his remarks on Augustin’s disquisitions on the phenomena of Memory, his praise is of a more qualified character. He compares his theories with those of Malebranche, and, while recognising the practical and animated character of his descriptions, thinks him obscure in his delineation of the manner in which absent realities reproduce themselves on the memory.¹¹⁰¹¹⁰    Ibid. pp. 120-123. Nourrisson’s criticism of Augustin’s views on Memory may well be compared with that of Desjardins. He speaks of the powerful originality of Augustin—who is ingenious as well as new—and says some of his disquisitions are “the most admirable which have inspired psychological observation.” And further, one does not meet in all the books of St. Augustin any philosophical theories which have greater depth than that on Memory.”—Philosophie, etc. as above, I. 133.

We have had occasion in the notes to refer to the Unseen Universe. The authors of this powerful “Apologia” for Christianity propose it chiefly as an antidote to the materialistic disbelief in the immortality of the soul amongst scientific men, which has resulted in this age from the recent advance in physical science; just as in the last century English deism had its rise in a similar influence. It is curious, in connection with this part of our subject, to note 32that in leading up to the conclusion at which he arrives, M. Saisset quotes a passage from the City of God,¹¹¹¹¹¹    Book xii. chap. 15. which contains an adumbration of the theory of the above work in regard to the eternity of the invisible universe.¹¹²¹¹²    This position is accepted by Leibnitz in his Essais de Théodicée. See also M. Saisset, as above, ii. 196-8 (Essay by the translator). Verily, the saying of the wise man is true: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”¹¹³¹¹³    Eccles. i. 9.

3. We have already, in a previous paragraph, briefly adverted to the influence Christianity and Paganism had one on the other. The history of Christianity has been a steady advance on Paganism and Pagan philosophy; but it can hardly be denied that in this advance there has been an absorption—and in some periods in no small degree—of some of their elements. As these matters have been examined in the notes, we need not do more than refer the reader to the Index of Subjects for the evidence to be obtained in this respect from the Confessions on such matters as Baptism, False Miracles, and Prayers for the Dead.

4. There is one feature in the Confessions which we should not like to pass unnoticed. A reference to the Retractations¹¹⁴¹¹⁴    Quoted immediately after this preface. will show that Augustin highly appreciated the spiritual use to which the book might be put in the edification of the brethren. We believe that it will prove most useful in this way; and spiritual benefit will accrue in proportion to the steadiness of its use. We would venture to suggest that Book X., from section 37 to the end, may be profitably used as a manual of self-examination. We have pointed out in a note, that in his comment on Ps. 8 he makes our Lord’s three temptations to be types of all the temptations to which man can be subjected; and makes them correspond in their order, as given by St. Matthew, to “the Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eyes, and the Pride of Life,” mentioned by St. John.¹¹⁵¹¹⁵    1 John ii. 16. Under each of these heads we have, in this part of the Confessions, a most severe examination of conscience; and the impression is deepened by his allegorically likening the three divisions of temptation to the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air.¹¹⁶¹¹⁶    See Confessions, v. sec. 4, note, and x. sec. 41, note. We have already remarked, in adverting to allegorical interpretation,¹¹⁷¹¹⁷    See ibid. vi. sec. 5, note. that where “the strict use of the history is not disregarded,” to use Augustin’s expression, allegorizing, by way of spiritual meditation, may be profitable. Those who employ it with this idea will find their interpretations greatly aided, and made more systematic, by realizing Augustin’s methods here and in the last two books of the Confessions,—as when he makes the sea to represent the wicked world, and the fruitful earth the Church.¹¹⁸¹¹⁸    See Confessions, xiii. sec. 20, note 3, and sec. 21, note 1.

It only remains to call attention to the principles on which this translation and its annotations have been made. The text of the Benedictine edition has been followed; but the head-lines of the chapters are taken from the edition of Bruder, as being the more definite and full. After carefully translating the whole of the book, it has been compared, line by line, with the translation of Watts¹¹⁹¹¹⁹    “St. Augustin’s Confessions translated, and with some marginal notes illustrated by William Watts, Rector of St. Alban’s, Wood St. (1631).” (one of the most nervous translations of the seventeenth century), and that of Dr. Pusey, which is confessedly founded upon that of Watts. Reference has also been made, in the case of obscure passages, to the French translation of Du Bois, and the English translation of the first Ten Books alluded to in the note on Bk. ix. ch. 12. The references to Scripture are in the words of the Authorized Version wherever the sense will bear it; and whenever noteworthy variations from our version occur, they are indicated by references to the old Italic version, or to the Vulgate. In some cases, where Augustin has clearly referred to the LXX. in order to amend his version thereby, such variations are indicated.¹²⁰¹²⁰    For whatever our idea may be as to the extent of his knowledge of Greek, it is beyond dispute that he frequently had recourse to the Greek of the Old and New Testament with this view. See Nourrisson, Philosophie, etc. ii. p. 96. The annotations are, for the most part, such as have been derived from the translator’s own reading. Two exceptions, however, must be made. Out of upwards of four hundred notes, some forty are taken from the annotations in Pusey and Watts, but in every case these have been indicated by the initials E. B. P. or W. W. Dr. Pusey’s annotations (which will be found chiefly in the earlier part of this work) consist almost entirely of quotations from other works of Augustin. These annotations are very copious, and Dr. Pusey explains that he resorted to this method “partly because this plan of illustrating St. Augustin out of himself had been already adopted by M. Du Bois in his Latin edition…and it seemed a pity not to use valuable materials ready collected to one’s hand. The far greater part of these illustrations are taken from that edition.” It seemed the most proper course, in using such notes of Du Bois as appeared suitable for this edition, to take them from Dr. Pusey’s edition, and, as above stated, to indicate their source by his initials. A Textual Index has been added, for the first time, to this edition, and both it and the Index of Subjects have been prepared with the greatest possible care.

J. G. P.

St. Mark’s Vicarage, West Hackney, 1876.

33

The Opinion of St. Augustin

Concerning His

Confessions, as Embodied in His Retractations, II. 6

————————————

1. “The Thirteen Books of my Confessions whether they refer to my evil or good, praise the just and good God, and stimulate the heart and mind of man to approach unto Him. And, as far as pertaineth unto me, they wrought this in me when they were written, and this they work when they are read. What some think of them they may have seen, but that they have given much pleasure, and do give pleasure, to many brethren I know. From the First to the Tenth they have been written of myself; in the remaining three, of the Sacred Scriptures, from the text, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,’ even to the rest of the Sabbath (Gen. i. 1, ii. 2).”

2. “In the Fourth Book, when I acknowledged the distress of my mind at the death of a friend, saying, that our soul, though one, had been in some manner made out of two; and therefore, I say, perchance was I afraid to die lest he should die wholly whom I had so much loved (chap. vi.);—this seems to me as if it were a light declamation rather than a grave confession, although this folly may in some sort be tempered by that ‘perchance’ which follows. And in the Thirteenth Book (chap. xxxii.) what I said, viz.: that the ‘firmament was made between the spiritual upper waters, and the corporeal lower waters,’ was said without due consideration; but the thing is very obscure.”

[In Ep. ad Darium, Ep. ccxxxi. c. 6, written a.d. 429, Augustin says: “Accept, my son, the books containing my Confessions which you desired to have. In these behold me that you may not praise me more than I deserve; there believe what is said of me, not by others, but by myself; there mark me, and see what I have been in myself, by myself; and if anything in me please you, join me in praising Him to whom, and not to myself, I desired praise to be given. For ‘He hath made us, and not we ourselves’ (Ps. l. 3). Indeed, we had destroyed ourselves, but He who made us has made us anew (qui fecit, refecit). When, however, you find me in these books, pray for me that I may not fail, but be perfected (ne deficiam, sed perficiar). Pray, my son, pray. I feel what I say; I know what I ask.”—P. S.]

[De Dono Perseverantiæ, c. 20 (53): “Which of my smaller works could be more widely known or give greater pleasure than my Confessions? And although I published them before the Pelagian heresy had come into existence, certainly in them I said to my God, and said it frequently, ‘Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou willest’ (Conf. x. 19, 31, 37). Which words of mine, Pelagius at Rome, when they were mentioned in his presence by a certain brother and fellow-bishop of mine, could not bear.…Moreover in those same books…I showed that I was granted to the faithful and daily tears of my mother, that I should not perish. There certainly I declared that God by His grace converted the will of men to the true faith, not only when they had been turned away from it, but even when they were opposed to it.”—P. S.]

————————————

45

Book I.

————————————

Commencing with the invocation of God, Augustin relates in detail the beginning of his life, his infancy and boyhood, up to his fifteenth year; at which age he acknowledges that he was more inclined to all youthful pleasures and vices than to the study of letters.

————————————

Chapter I.—He Proclaims the Greatness of God, Whom He Desires to Seek and Invoke, Being Awakened by Him.

1. Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised; great is Thy power, and of Thy wisdom there is no end.¹²¹¹²¹    Ps. cxlv. 3, and cxlvii. 5. And man, being a part of Thy creation, desires to praise Thee, man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that Thou “resistest the proud,”¹²²¹²²   Jas. iv. 6, and 1 Pet. v. 5.—yet man, this part of Thy creation, desires to praise Thee.¹²³¹²³   Augustin begins with praise, and the whole book vibrates with praise. He says elsewhere (in Ps. cxlix.), that “as a new song fits not well an old man’s lips, he should sing a new song who is a new creature and is living a new life;” and so from the time of his new birth, the “new song” of praise went up from him, and that “not of the lip only,” but (ibid. cxlviii.) conscientia lingua vita. Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.¹²⁴¹²⁴   And the rest which the Christian has here is but an earnest of the more perfect rest hereafter, when, as Augustin says (De Gen. ad. Lit.. xii. 26), “all virtue will be to love what one sees, and the highest felicity to have what one loves.” [Watts, followed by Pusey, and Shedd, missed the paronomasia of the Latin: “cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in Te,” by translating: “our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.” It is the finest sentence in the whole book, and furnishes one of the best arguments for Christianity as the only religion which leads to that rest in God.—P. S.] Lord, teach me to know and understand which of these should be first, to call on Thee, or to praise Thee; and likewise to know Thee, or to call upon Thee. But who is there that calls upon Thee without knowing Thee? For he that knows Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art. Or perhaps we call on Thee that we may know Thee. “But how shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? or how shall they believe without a preacher?”¹²⁵¹²⁵    Rom. x. 14. And those who seek the Lord shall praise Him.¹²⁶¹²⁶   Ps. xxii. 26. For those who seek shall find Him,¹²⁷¹²⁷   Matt. vii. 7. and those who find Him shall praise Him. Let me seek Thee, Lord, in calling on Thee, and call on Thee in believing in Thee; for Thou hast been preached unto us. O Lord, my faith calls on Thee,—that faith which Thou hast imparted to me, which Thou hast breathed into me through the incarnation of Thy Son, through the ministry of Thy preacher.¹²⁸¹²⁸    That is, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who was instrumental in his conversion (vi. sec. 1; viii. sec. 28, etc.). “Before conversion,” as Leighton observes on I Pet. ii. 1, 2, “wit or eloquence may draw a man to the word, and possibly prove a happy bait to catch him (as St. Augustin reports of his hearing St. Ambrose), but, once born again, then it is the milk itself that he desires for itself.”

Chapter II.—That the God Whom We Invoke is in Us, and We in Him.

2. And how shall I call upon my God—my God and my Lord? For when I call on Him I ask Him to come into me. And what place is there in me into which my God can come—into which God can come, even He who made heaven and earth? Is there anything in me, O Lord my God, that can contain Thee? Do indeed the very heaven and the earth, which Thou hast made, and in which Thou hast made me, 46contain Thee? Or, as nothing could exist without Thee, doth whatever exists contain Thee? Why, then, do I ask Thee to come into me, since I indeed exist, and could not exist if Thou wert not in me? Because I am not yet in hell, though Thou art even there; for “if I go down into hell Thou art there.”¹²⁹¹²⁹   Ps. cxxxix. 8. I could not therefore exist, could not exist at all, O my God, unless Thou wert in me. Or should I not rather say, that I could not exist unless I were in Thee from whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things?¹³⁰¹³⁰    Rom. xi. 36. Even so, Lord; even so. Where do I call Thee to, since Thou art in me, or whence canst Thou come into me? For where outside heaven and earth can I go that from thence my God may come into me who has said, I fill heaven and earth”?¹³¹¹³¹    Jer. xxiii. 24.

Chapter III.—Everywhere God Wholly Filleth All Things, But Neither Heaven Nor Earth Containeth Him.

3. Since, then, Thou fillest heaven and earth, do they contain Thee? Or, as they contain Thee not, dost Thou fill them, and yet there remains something over? And where dost Thou pour forth that which remaineth of Thee when the heaven and earth are filled? Or, indeed, is there no need that Thou who containest all things shouldest be contained of any, since those things which Thou fillest Thou fillest by containing them? For the vessels which Thou fillest do not sustain Thee, since should they even be broken Thou wilt not be poured forth. And when Thou art poured forth on us,¹³²¹³²    Acts ii. 18. Thou art not cast down, but we are uplifted; nor art Thou dissipated, but we are drawn together. But, as Thou fillest all things, dost Thou fill them with Thy whole self, or, as even all things cannot altogether contain Thee, do they contain a part, and do all at once contain the same part? Or has each its own proper part—the greater more, the smaller less? Is, then, one part of Thee greater, another less? Or is it that Thou art wholly everywhere whilst nothing altogether contains Thee?¹³³¹³³    In this section, and constantly throughout the Confessions, he adverts to the materialistic views concerning God held by the Manichæans. See also sec. 10; iii. sec. 12; iv. sec. 31, etc. etc.

Chapter IV.—The Majesty of God is Supreme, and His Virtues Inexplicable.

4. What, then, art Thou, O my God—what, I ask, but the Lord God? For who is Lord but the Lord? or who is God save our God?¹³⁴¹³⁴    Ps. xviii. 31. Most high, most excellent, most potent, most omnipotent; most piteous and most just; most hidden and most near; most beauteous and most strong, stable, yet contained of none; unchangeable, yet changing all things; never new, never old; making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud and they know it not; always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing; sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet possessing all things. Thou lovest, and burnest not; art jealous, yet free from care; repentest, and hast no sorrow; art angry, yet serene; changest Thy ways, leaving unchanged Thy plans; recoverest what Thou findest, having yet never lost; art never in want, whilst Thou rejoicest in gain; never covetous, though requiring usury.¹³⁵¹³⁵    Matt. xxv. 27. That Thou mayest owe, more than enough is given to Thee;¹³⁶¹³⁶    Supererogatur tibi, ut debeas. yet who hath anything that is not Thine? Thou payest debts while owing nothing; and when Thou forgivest debts, losest nothing. Yet, O my God, my life, my holy joy, what is this that I have said? And what saith any man when He speaks of Thee? Yet woe to them that keep silence, seeing that even they who say most are as the dumb.¹³⁷¹³⁷    “As it is impossible for mortal, imperfect, and perishable man to comprehend the immortal, perfect and eternal, we cannot expect that he should be able to express in praise the fulness of God’s attributes. The Talmud relates of a rabbi, who did not consider the terms, ‘the great, mighty, and fearful God,’ which occur in the daily prayer, as being sufficient, but added some more attributes—‘What!’ exclaimed another rabbi who was present, ‘imaginest thou to be able to exhaust the praise of God? Thy praise is blasphemy. Thou hadst better be quiet.’ Hence the Psalmist’s exclamation, after finding that the praises of God were inexhaustible: הלהת הּימוד ךל, ‘Silence is praise to Thee.’”—Breslau.

Chapter V.—He Seeks Rest in God, and Pardon of His Sins.

5. Oh! how shall I find rest in Thee? Who will send Thee into my heart to inebriate it, so that I may forget my woes, and embrace Thee my only good? What art Thou to me? Have compassion on me, that I may speak. What am I to Thee that Thou demandest my love, and unless I give it Thee art angry, and threatenest me with great sorrows? Is it, then, a light sorrow not to love Thee? Alas! alas! tell me of Thy compassion, O Lord my God, what Thou art to me. “Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.”¹³⁸¹³⁸    Ps. xxxv. 3. So speak that I may hear. Behold, Lord, the ears of my heart are before Thee; open Thou them, and “say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.” When I hear, may I run and lay hold on Thee. Hide not Thy face from me. Let me die, lest I die, if only I may see Thy face.¹³⁹¹³⁹    Moriar ne moriar, ut eam videam. See Ex. xxxiii. 20.

6. Cramped is the dwelling of my soul; do Thou expand it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is in ruins, restore Thou it. There is that about it which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and 47know it, but who will cleanse it? or to whom shall I cry but to Thee? Cleanse me from my secret sins,¹⁴⁰¹⁴⁰    Ps. xix. 12, 13. “Be it that sin may never see the light, that it may be like a child born and buried in the womb; yet as that child is a man, a true man, there closeted in that hidden frame of nature, so sin is truly sin, though it never gets out beyond the womb which did conceive and enliven it.”—Sedgwick O Lord, and keep Thy servant from those of other men. I believe, and therefore do I speak;¹⁴¹¹⁴¹    Ps. cxvi. 10. Lord, Thou knowest. Have I not confessed my transgressions unto Thee, O my God; and Thou hast put away the iniquity of my heart?¹⁴²¹⁴²    Ps. xxxii. 5. I do not contend in judgment with Thee,¹⁴³¹⁴³    Job ix. 3. who art the Truth; and I would not deceive myself, lest my iniquity lie against itself.¹⁴⁴¹⁴⁴    Ps xxvi. 12, Vulg. “The danger of ignorance is not less than its guilt. For of all evils a secret evil is most to be deprecated, of all enemies a concealed enemy is the worst. Better the precipice than the pitfall; better the tortures of curable disease than the painlessness of mortification; and so, whatever your soul’s guilt and danger, better to be aware of it. However alarming, however distressing self-knowledge may be, better that than the tremendous evils of self-ignorance.”—Caird. I do not, therefore, contend in judgment with Thee, for “if Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”¹⁴⁵¹⁴⁵    Ps. cxxx. 3.

Chapter VI.—He Describes His Infancy, and Lauds the Protection and Eternal Providence of God.

7. Still suffer me to speak before Thy mercy—me, “dust and ashes.”¹⁴⁶¹⁴⁶    Gen. xviii. 27. Suffer me to speak, for, behold, it is Thy mercy I address, and not derisive man. Yet perhaps even Thou deridest me; but when Thou art turned to me Thou wilt have compassion on me.¹⁴⁷¹⁴⁷    Jer. xii. 15. For what do I wish to say, O Lord my God, but that I know not whence I came hither into this—shall I call it dying life or living death? Yet, as I have heard from my parents, from whose substance Thou didst form me,—for I myself cannot remember it,—Thy merciful comforts sustained me. Thus it was that the comforts of a woman’s milk entertained me; for neither my mother nor my nurses filled their own breasts, but Thou by them didst give me the nourishment of infancy according to Thy ordinance and that bounty of Thine which underlieth all things. For Thou didst cause me not to want more than Thou gavest, and those who nourished me willingly to give me what Thou gavest them. For they, by an instinctive affection, were anxious to give me what Thou hadst abundantly supplied. It was, in truth, good for them that my good should come from them, though, indeed, it was not from them, but by them; for from Thee, O God, are all good things, and from my God is all my safety.¹⁴⁸¹⁴⁸    Prov. xxi. 31. This is what I have since discovered, as Thou hast declared Thyself to me by the blessings both within me and without me which Thou hast bestowed upon me. For at that time I knew how to suck, to be satisfied when comfortable, and to cry when in pain—nothing beyond.

8. Afterwards I began to laugh,—at first in sleep, then when waking. For this I have heard mentioned of myself, and I believe it (though I cannot remember it), for we see the same in other infants. And now little by little I realized where I was, and wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I could not; for my wants were within me, while they were without, and could not by any faculty of theirs enter into my soul. So I cast about limbs and voice, making the few and feeble signs I could, like, though indeed not much like, unto what I wished; and when I was not satisfied—either not being understood, or because it would have been injurious to me—I grew indignant that my elders were not subject unto me, and that those on whom I had no claim did not wait on me, and avenged myself on them by tears. That infants are such I have been able to learn by watching them; and they, though unknowing, have better shown me that I was such an one than my nurses who knew it.

9. And, behold, my infancy died long ago, and I live. But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest, and in whom nothing dies (since before the world was, and indeed before all that can be called “before,” Thou existest, and art the God and Lord of all Thy creatures; and with Thee fixedly abide the causes of all unstable things, the unchanging sources of all things changeable, and the eternal reasons of all things unreasoning and temporal), tell me, Thy suppliant, O God; tell, O merciful One, Thy miserable servant¹⁴⁹¹⁴⁹    “Mercy,” says Binning, “hath but its name from misery, and is no other thing than to lay another’s misery to heart.”—tell me whether my infancy succeeded another age of mine which had at that time perished. Was it that which I passed in my mother’s womb? For of that something has been made known to me, and I have myself seen women with child. And what, O God, my joy, preceded that life? Was I, indeed, anywhere, or anybody? For no one can tell me these things, neither father nor mother, nor the experience of others, nor my own memory. Dost Thou laugh at me for asking such things, and command me to praise and confess Thee for what I know?

10. I give thanks to Thee, Lord of heaven and earth, giving praise to Thee for that my first being and infancy, of which I have no memory; for Thou hast granted to man that from others he should come to conclusions as to himself, and that he should believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women. Even then I had life and being; and 48as my infancy closed I was already seeking for signs by which my feelings might be made known to others. Whence could such a creature come but from Thee, O Lord? Or shall any man be skilful enough to fashion himself? Or is there any other vein by which being and life runs into us save this, that “Thou, O Lord, hast made us,”¹⁵⁰¹⁵⁰    Ps. c. 3. with whom being and life are one, because Thou Thyself art being and life in the highest? Thou art the highest, “Thou changest not,”¹⁵¹¹⁵¹    Mal. iii. 6. neither in Thee doth this present day come to an end, though it doth end in Thee, since in Thee all such things are; for they would have no way of passing away unless Thou sustainedst them. And since “Thy years shall have no end,”¹⁵²¹⁵²    Ps. cii. 27. Thy years are an ever present day. And how many of ours and our fathers’ days have passed through this Thy day, and received from it their measure and fashion of being, and others yet to come shall so receive and pass away! “But Thou art the same;”¹⁵³¹⁵³    Ibid. and all the things of to-morrow and the days yet to come, and all of yesterday and the days that are past, Thou wilt do to-day, Thou hast done to-day. What is it to me if any understand not? Let him still rejoice and say, “What is this?”¹⁵⁴¹⁵⁴    Ex. xvi. 15. This is one of the alternative translations put against “it is manna” in the margin of the authorized version. It is the literal significance of the Hebrew, and is so translated in most of the old English versions. Augustin indicates thereby the attitude of faith. Many things we are called on to believe (to use the illustration of Locke) which are above reason, but none that are contrary to reason. We are but as children in relation to God, and may therefore only expect to know “parts of His ways.” Even in the difficulties of Scripture he sees the goodness of God. “God,” he says, “has in Scripture clothed His mysteries with clouds, that man’s love of truth might be inflamed by the difficulty of finding them out. For if they were only such as were readily understood, truth would not be eagerly sought, nor would it give pleasure when found.”—De Ver. Relig. c. 17. Let him rejoice even so, and rather love to discover in failing to discover, than in discovering not to discover Thee.

Chapter VII.—He Shows by Example that Even Infancy is Prone to Sin.

11. Hearken, O God! Alas for the sins of men! Man saith this, and Thou dost compassionate him; for Thou didst create him, but didst not create the sin that is in him. Who bringeth to my remembrance the sin of my infancy? For before Thee none is free from sin, not even the infant which has lived but a day upon the earth. Who bringeth this to my remembrance? Doth not each little one, in whom I behold that which I do not remember of myself? In what, then, did I sin? Is it that I cried for the breast? If I should now so cry,—not indeed for the breast, but for the food suitable to my years,—I should be most justly laughed at and rebuked. What I then did deserved rebuke; but as I could not understand those who rebuked me, neither custom nor reason suffered me to be rebuked. For as we grow we root out and cast from us such habits. I have not seen any one who is wise, when “purging”¹⁵⁵¹⁵⁵    John xv. 2. anything cast away the good. Or was it good, even for a time, to strive to get by crying that which, if given, would be hurtful—to be bitterly indignant that those who were free and its elders, and those to whom it owed its being, besides many others wiser than it, who would not give way to the nod of its good pleasure, were not subject unto it—to endeavour to harm, by struggling as much as it could, because those commands were not obeyed which only could have been obeyed to its hurt? Then, in the weakness of the infant’s limbs, and not in its will, lies its innocency. I myself have seen and known an infant to be jealous though it could not speak. It became pale, and cast bitter looks on its foster-brother. Who is ignorant of this? Mothers and nurses tell us that they appease these things by I know not what remedies; and may this be taken for innocence, that when the fountain of milk is flowing fresh and abundant, one who has need should not be allowed to share it, though needing that nourishment to sustain life? Yet we look leniently on these things, not because they are not faults, nor because the faults are small, but because they will vanish as age increases. For although you may allow these things now, you could not bear them with equanimity if found in an older person.

12. Thou, therefore, O Lord my God, who gavest life to the infant, and a frame which, as we see, Thou hast endowed with senses, compacted with limbs, beautified with form, and, for its general good and safety, hast introduced all vital energies—Thou commandest me to praise Thee for these things, “to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praise unto Thy name, O Most High;”¹⁵⁶¹⁵⁶    Ps. xcii. 1. for Thou art a God omnipotent and good, though Thou hadst done nought but these things, which none other can do but Thou, who alone madest all things, O Thou most fair, who madest all things fair, and orderest all according to Thy law. This period, then, of my life, O Lord, of which I have no remembrance, which I believe on the word of others, and which I guess from other infants, it chagrins me—true though the guess be—to reckon in this life of mine which I lead in this world; inasmuch as, in the darkness of my forgetfulness, it is like to that which I passed in my mother’s womb. But if “I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive 49me,”¹⁵⁷¹⁵⁷    Ps. li. 5. where, I pray thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I, Thy servant, innocent? But behold, I pass by that time, for what have I to do with that, the memories of which I cannot recall?

Chapter VIII.—That When a Boy He Learned to Speak, Not by Any Set Method, But from the Acts and Words of His Parents.

13. Did I not, then, growing out of the state of infancy, come to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me, and succeed to infancy? Nor did my infancy depart (for whither went it?); and yet it did no longer abide, for I was no longer an infant that could not speak, but a chattering boy. I remember this, and I afterwards observed how I first learned to speak, for my elders did not teach me words in any set method, as they did letters afterwards; but myself, when I was unable to say all I wished and to whomsoever I desired, by means of the whimperings and broken utterances and various motions of my limbs, which I used to enforce my wishes, repeated the sounds in my memory by the mind, O my God, which Thou gavest me. When they called anything by name, and moved the body towards it while they spoke, I saw and gathered that the thing they wished to point out was called by the name they then uttered; and that they did mean this was made plain by the motion of the body, even by the natural language of all nations expressed by the countenance, glance of the eye, movement of other members, and by the sound of the voice indicating the affections of the mind, as it seeks, possesses, rejects, or avoids. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in duly placed sentences, I gradually gathered what things they were the signs of; and having formed my mouth to the utterance of these signs, I thereby expressed my will.¹⁵⁸¹⁵⁸    See some interesting remarks on this subject in Whately’s Logic, Int. sec. 5. Thus I exchanged with those about me the signs by which we express our wishes, and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending the while on the authority of parents, and the beck of elders.

Chapter IX.—Concerning the Hatred of Learning, the Love of Play, and the Fear of Being Whipped Noticeable in Boys: and of the Folly of Our Elders and Masters.

14. O my God! what miseries and mockeries did I then experience, when obedience to my teachers was set before me as proper to my boyhood, that I might flourish in this world, and distinguish myself in the science of speech, which should get me honour amongst men, and deceitful riches! After that I was put to school to get learning, of which I (worthless as I was) knew not what use there was; and yet, if slow to learn, I was flogged! For this was deemed praiseworthy by our forefathers; and many before us, passing the same course, had appointed beforehand for us these troublesome ways by which we were compelled to pass, multiplying labour and sorrow upon the sons of Adam. But we found, O Lord, men praying to Thee, and we learned from them to conceive of Thee, according to our ability, to be some Great One, who was able (though not visible to our senses) to hear and help us. For as a boy I began to pray to Thee, my “help” and my “refuge,”¹⁵⁹¹⁵⁹    Ps. ix. 9, and xlvi. 1, and xlviii. 3. and in invoking Thee broke the bands of my tongue, and entreated Thee though little, with no little earnestness, that I might not be beaten at school. And when Thou heardedst me not, giving me not over to folly thereby,¹⁶⁰¹⁶⁰    Ps. xxii. 2, Vulg. my elders, yea, and my own parents too, who wished me no ill, laughed at my stripes, my then great and grievous ill.

15. Is there any one, Lord, with so high a spirit, cleaving to Thee with so strong an affection—for even a kind of obtuseness may do that much—but is there, I say, any one who, by cleaving devoutly to Thee, is endowed with so great a courage that he can esteem lightly those racks and hooks, and varied tortures of the same sort, against which, throughout the whole world, men supplicate Thee with great fear, deriding those who most bitterly fear them, just as our parents derided the torments with which our masters punished us when we were boys? For we were no less afraid of our pains, nor did we pray less to Thee to avoid them; and yet we sinned, in writing, or reading, or reflecting upon our lessons less than was required of us. For we wanted not, O Lord, memory or capacity, of which, by Thy will, we possessed enough for our age,—but we delighted only in play; and we were punished for this by those who were doing the same things themselves. But the idleness of our elders they call business, whilst boys who do the like are punished by those same elders, and yet neither boys nor men find any pity. For will any one of good sense approve of my being whipped because, as a boy, I played ball, and so was hindered from learning quickly those lessons by means of which, as a man, I should play more unbecomingly? And did he by whom I was beaten do other than this, who, when he was overcome in any little controversy with a co-tutor, was more tormented by anger and envy than I when beaten by a playfellow in a match at ball?50

Chapter X.—Through a Love of Ball-Playing and Shows, He Neglects His Studies and the Injunctions of His Parents.

16. And yet I erred, O Lord God, the Creator and Disposer of all things in Nature,—but of sin the Disposer only,—I erred, O Lord my God, in doing contrary to the wishes of my parents and of those masters; for this learning which they (no matter for what motive) wished me to acquire, I might have put to good account afterwards. For I disobeyed them not because I had chosen a better way, but from a fondness for play, loving the honour of victory in the matches, and to have my ears tickled with lying fables, in order that they might itch the more furiously—the same curiosity beaming more and more in my eyes for the shows and sports of my elders. Yet those who give these entertainments are held in such high repute, that almost all desire the same for their children, whom they are still willing should be beaten, if so be these same games keep them from the studies by which they desire them to arrive at being the givers of them. Look down upon these things, O Lord, with compassion, and deliver us who now call upon Thee; deliver those also who do not call upon Thee, that they may call upon Thee, and that Thou mayest deliver them.

Chapter XI.—Seized by Disease, His Mother Being Troubled, He Earnestly Demands Baptism, Which on Recovery is Postponed—His Father Not as Yet Believing in Christ.

17. Even as a boy I had heard of eternal life promised to us through the humility of the Lord our God condescending to our pride, and I was signed with the sign of the cross, and was seasoned with His salt¹⁶¹¹⁶¹    “A rite in the Western churches, on admission as a catechumen, previous to baptism, denoting the purity and uncorruptedness and discretion required of Christians. See S. Aug. De Catechiz. rudib. c. 26; Concil. Carth. 3, can. 5; and Liturgies in Assem. Cod. Liturg. t. i.”—E. B. P. See also vi. 1, note, below. even from the womb of my mother, who greatly trusted in Thee. Thou sawest, O Lord, how at one time, while yet a boy, being suddenly seized with pains in the stomach, and being at the point of death—Thou sawest, O my God, for even then Thou wast my keeper, with what emotion of mind and with what faith I solicited from the piety of my mother, and of Thy Church, the mother of us all, the baptism of Thy Christ, my Lord and my God. On which, the mother of my flesh being much troubled,—since she, with a heart pure in Thy faith, travailed in birth¹⁶²¹⁶²    Gal. iv. 19. more lovingly for my eternal salvation,—would, had I not quickly recovered, have without delay provided for my initiation and washing by Thy life-giving sacraments, confessing Thee, O Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins. So my cleansing was deferred, as if I must needs, should I live, be further polluted; because, indeed, the guilt contracted by sin would, after baptism, be greater and more perilous.¹⁶³¹⁶³    Baptism was in those days frequently (and for similar reasons to the above) postponed till the hour of death approached. The doctors of the Church endeavoured to discourage this, and persons baptized on a sick-bed (“clinically”) were, if they recovered, looked on with suspicion. The Emperor Constantine was not baptized till the close of his life, and he is censured by Dr. Newman (Arians iii. sec. 1) for presuming to speak of questions which divided the Arians and the Orthodox as “unimportant,” while he himself was both unbaptized and uninstructed. On the postponing of baptism with a view to unrestrained enjoyment of the world, and on the severity of the early Church towards sins committed after baptism, see Kaye’s Tertullian, pp. 234–241. Thus I at that time believed with my mother and the whole house, except my father; yet he did not overcome the influence of my mother’s piety in me so as to prevent my believing in Christ, as he had not yet believed in Him. For she was desirous that Thou, O my God, shouldst be my Father rather than he; and in this Thou didst aid her to overcome her husband, to whom, though the better of the two, she yielded obedience, because in this she yielded obedience to Thee, who dost so command.

18. I beseech Thee, my God, I would gladly know, if it be Thy will, to what end my baptism was then deferred? Was it for my good that the reins were slackened, as it were, upon me for me to sin? Or were they not slackened? If not, whence comes it that it is still dinned into our ears on all sides, “Let him alone, let him act as he likes, for he is not yet baptized”? But as regards bodily health, no one exclaims, “Let him be more seriously wounded, for he is not yet cured!” How much better, then, had it been for me to have been cured at once; and then, by my own and my friends’ diligence, my soul’s restored health had been kept safe in Thy keeping, who gavest it! Better, in truth. But how numerous and great waves of temptation appeared to hang over me after my childhood! These were foreseen by my mother; and she preferred that the unformed clay should be exposed to them rather than the image itself.

Chapter XII.—Being Compelled, He Gave His Attention to Learning; But Fully Acknowledges that This Was the Work of God.

19. But in this my childhood (which was far less dreaded for me than youth) I had no love of learning, and hated to be forced to it, yet was I forced to it notwithstanding; and this was well done towards me, but I did not well, for I would not have learned had I not been compelled. For no man doth well against his will, even if that which he doth be well. Neither did they who forced me do well, but 51the good that was done to me came from Thee, my God. For they considered not in what way I should employ what they forced me to learn, unless to satisfy the inordinate desires of a rich beggary and a shameful glory. But Thou, by whom the very hairs of our heads are numbered,¹⁶⁴¹⁶⁴    Matt. x. 30. didst use for my good the error of all who pressed me to learn; and my own error in willing not to learn, didst Thou make use of for my punishment—of which I, being so small a boy and so great a sinner, was not unworthy. Thus by the instrumentality of those who did not well didst Thou well for me; and by my own sin didst Thou justly punish me. For it is even as Thou hast appointed, that every inordinate affection should bring its own punishment.¹⁶⁵¹⁶⁵    See note, v. sec. 2, below.

Chapter XIII.—He Delighted in Latin Studies and the Empty Fables of the Poets, But Hated the Elements of Literature and the Greek Language.

20. But what was the cause of my dislike of Greek literature, which I studied from my boyhood, I cannot even now understand. For the Latin I loved exceedingly—not what our first masters, but what the grammarians teach; for those primary lessons of reading, writing, and ciphering, I considered no less of a burden and a punishment than Greek. Yet whence was this unless from the sin and vanity of this life? for I was “but flesh, a wind that passeth away and cometh not again.”¹⁶⁶¹⁶⁶    Ps. lxxviii. 39, and Jas. iv. 14. For those primary lessons were better, assuredly, because more certain; seeing that by their agency I acquired, and still retain, the power of reading what I find written, and writing myself what I will; whilst in the others I was compelled to learn about the wanderings of a certain Æneas, oblivious of my own, and to weep for Biab dead, because she slew herself for love; while at the same time I brooked with dry eyes my wretched self dying far from Thee, in the midst of those things, O God, my life.

21. For what can be more wretched than the wretch who pities not himself shedding tears over the death of Dido for love of Æneas, but shedding no tears over his own death in not loving Thee, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inner mouth of my soul, and the power that weddest my mind with my innermost thoughts? I did not love Thee, and committed fornication against Thee; and those around me thus sinning cried, “Well done! Well done!” For the friendship of this world is fornication against Thee;¹⁶⁷¹⁶⁷    Jas. iv. 4. and “Well done! Well done!” is cried until one feels ashamed not to be such a man. And for this I shed no tears, though I wept for Dido, who sought death at the sword’s point,¹⁶⁸¹⁶⁸    Æneìd, vi. 457. myself the while seeking the lowest of Thy creatures—having forsaken Thee—earth tending to the earth; and if forbidden to read these things, how grieved would I feel that I was not permitted to read what grieved me. This sort of madness is considered a more honourable and more fruitful learning than that by which I learned to read and write.

22. But now, O my God, cry unto my soul; and let Thy Truth say unto me, “It is not so; it is not so; better much was that first teaching.” For behold, I would rather forget the wanderings of Æneas, and all such things, than how to write and read. But it is true that over the entrance of the grammar school there hangs a vail;¹⁶⁹¹⁶⁹    “The ‘vail’ was an emblem of honour, used in places of worship, and subsequently in courts of law, emperors’ palaces, and even private house. See Du Fresne and Hoffman sub v. That between the vestibule, or proscholium, and the school itself, besides being a mark of dignity, may, as St. Augustin perhaps implies, have been intended to denote the hidden mysteries taught therein, and that the mass of mankind were not fit hearers of truth.”—E. B. P. but this is not so much a sign of the majesty of the mystery, as of a covering for error. Let not them exclaim against me of whom I am no longer in fear, whilst I confess to Thee, my God, that which my soul desires, and acquiesce in reprehending my evil ways, that I may love Thy good ways. Neither let those cry out against me who buy or sell grammar-learning. For if I ask them whether it be true, as the poet says, that Æneas once came to Carthage, the unlearned will reply that they do not know, the learned will deny it to be true. But if I ask with what letters the name Æneas is written, all who have learnt this will answer truly, in accordance with the conventional understanding men have arrived at as to these signs. Again, if I should ask which, if forgotten, would cause the greatest inconvenience in our life, reading and writing, or these poetical fictions, who does not see what every one would answer who had not entirely forgotten himself? I erred, then, when as a boy I preferred those vain studies to those more profitable ones, or rather loved the one and hated the other. “One and one are two, two and two are four,” this was then in truth a hateful song to me; while the wooden horse full of armed men, and the burning of Troy, and the “spectral image” of Creusa¹⁷⁰¹⁷⁰    Æneìd, ii. 772. were a most pleasant spectacle of vanity.

Chapter XIV.—Why He Despised Greek Literature, and Easily Learned Latin.

23. But why, then, did I dislike Greek learn52ing which was full of like tales?¹⁷¹¹⁷¹    Exaggerated statements have been made as to Augustin’s deficiency in the knowledge of Greek. In this place it is clear that he simply alludes to a repugnance to learn a foreign language that has often been seen in boys since his day. It would seem equally clear from Bk. vii. sec. 13 (see also De Trin. iii. sec. 1), that when he could get a translation of a Greek book, he preferred it to one in the original language. Perhaps in this, again, he is not altogether singular. It is difficult to decide the exact extent of his knowledge, but those familiar with his writings can scarcely fail to be satisfied that he had a sufficient acquaintance with the language to correct his Italic version by the Greek Testament and the LXX., and that he was quite alive to the importance of such knowledge in an interpreter of Scripture. See also Con. Faust, xi. 2–4; and De Doctr. Christ. ii. 11–15. For Homer also was skilled in inventing similar stories, and is most sweetly vain, yet was he disagreeable to me as a boy. I believe Virgil, indeed, would be the same to Grecian children, if compelled to learn him, as I was Homer. The difficulty, in truth, the difficulty of learning a foreign language mingled as it were with gall all the sweetness of those fabulous Grecian stories. For not a single word of it did I understand, and to make me do so, they vehemently urged me with cruel threatenings and punishments. There was a time also when (as an infant) I knew no Latin; but this I acquired without any fear or tormenting, by merely taking notice, amid the blandishments of my nurses, the jests of those who smiled on me, and the sportiveness of those who toyed with me. I learnt all this, indeed, without being urged by any pressure of punishment, for my own heart urged me to bring forth its own conceptions, which I could not do unless by learning words, not of those who taught me, but of those who talked to me; into whose ears, also, I brought forth whatever I discerned. From this it is sufficiently clear that a free curiosity hath more influence in our learning these things than a necessity full of fear. But this last restrains the overflowings of that freedom, through Thy laws, O God,—Thy laws, from the ferule of the schoolmaster to the trials of the martyr, being effective to mingle for us a salutary bitter, calling us back to Thyself from the pernicious delights which allure us from Thee.

Chapter XV.—He Entreats God, that Whatever Useful Things He Learned as a Boy May Be Dedicated to Him.

24. Hear my prayer, O Lord; let not my soul faint under Thy discipline, nor let me faint in confessing unto Thee Thy mercies, whereby Thou hast saved me from all my most mischievous ways, that Thou mightest become sweet to me beyond all the seductions which I used to follow; and that I may love Thee entirely, and grasp Thy hand with my whole heart, and that Thou mayest deliver me from every temptation, even unto the end. For lo, O Lord, my King and my God, for Thy service be whatever useful thing I learnt as a boy—for Thy service what I speak, and write, and count. For when I learned vain things, Thou didst grant me Thy discipline; and my sin in taking delight in those vanities, Thou hast forgiven me. I learned, indeed, in them many useful words; but these may be learned in things not vain, and that is the safe way for youths to walk in.

Chapter XVI.—He Disapproves of the Mode of Educating Youth, and He Points Out Why Wickedness is Attributed to the Gods by the Poets.

25. But woe unto thee, thou stream of human custom! Who shall stay thy course? How long shall it be before thou art dried up? How long wilt thou carry down the sons of Eve into that huge and formidable ocean, which even they who are embarked on the cross (lignum) can scarce pass over?¹⁷²¹⁷²    So in Tract. II. on John, he has: “The sea has to be crossed, and dost thou despise the wood?” explaining it to mean the cross of Christ. And again: “Thou art not at all able to walk in the sea, be carried by a ship—be carried by the wood—believe on the Crucified,” etc. Do I not read in thee of Jove the thunderer and adulterer? And the two verily he could not be; but it was that, while the fictitious thunder served as a cloak, he might have warrant to imitate real adultery. Yet which of our gowned masters can lend a temperate ear to a man of his school who cries out and says: “These were Homer’s fictions; he transfers things human to the gods. I could have wished him to transfer divine things to us.”¹⁷³¹⁷³    Cic. Tusc. i. 26. But it would have been more true had he said: “These are, indeed, his fictions, but he attributed divine attributes to sinful men, that crimes might not be accounted crimes, and that whosoever committed any might appear to imitate the celestial gods and not abandoned men.”

26. And yet, thou stream of hell, into thee are cast the sons of men, with rewards for learning these things; and much is made of it when this is going on in the forum in the sight of laws which grant a salary over and above the rewards. And thou beatest against thy rocks and roarest, saying, “Hence words are learnt; hence eloquence is to be attained, most necessary to persuade people to your way of thinking, and to unfold your opinions.” So, in truth, we should never have understood these words, “golden shower,” “bosom,” “intrigue,” “highest heavens,” and other words written in the same place, unless Terence had introduced a good-for-nothing youth upon the stage, setting up Jove as his example of lewdness:—

“Viewing a picture, where the tale was drawn,

Of Jove’s descending in a golden shower

To Danaë’s bosom . . . with a woman to intrigue.”

And see how he excites himself to lust, as if by celestial authority, when he says:—

53“Great Jove,

Who shakes the highest heavens with his thunder,

And I, poor mortal man, not do the same!

I did it, and with all my heart I did it.”¹⁷⁴¹⁷⁴    Terence, Eunuch. Act 3, scene 6 (Colman).

Not one whit more easily are the words learnt for this vileness, but by their means is the vileness perpetrated with more confidence. I do not blame the words, they being, as it were, choice and precious vessels, but the wine of error which was drunk in them to us by inebriated teachers; and unless we drank, we were beaten, without liberty of appeal to any sober judge. And yet, O my God,—in whose presence I can now with security recall this,—did I, unhappy one, learn these things willingly, and with delight, and for this was I called a boy of good promise.¹⁷⁵¹⁷⁵    Until very recently, the Eunuchus was recited at “the play” of at least one of our public schools. See De Civ. Dei, ii. secs. 7, 8, where Augustin again alludes to this matter.

Chapter XVII.—He Continues on the Unhappy Method of Training Youth in Literary Subjects.

27. Bear with me, my God, while I speak a little of those talents Thou hast bestowed upon me, and on what follies I wasted them. For a lesson sufficiently disquieting to my soul was given me, in hope of praise, and fear of shame or stripes, to speak the words of Juno, as she raged and sorrowed that she could not

“Latium bar

From all approaches of the Dardan king,”¹⁷⁶¹⁷⁶    Æneìd, i. 36–75 (Kennedy).

which I had heard Juno never uttered. Yet were we compelled to stray in the footsteps of these poetic fictions, and to turn that into prose which the poet had said in verse. And his speaking was most applauded in whom, according to the reputation of the persons delineated, the passions of anger and sorrow were most strikingly reproduced, and clothed in the most suitable language. But what is it to me, O my true Life, my God, that my declaiming was applauded above that of many who were my contemporaries and fellow-students? Behold, is not all this smoke and wind? Was there nothing else, too, on which I could exercise my wit and tongue? Thy praise, Lord, Thy praises might have supported the tendrils of my heart by Thy Scriptures; so had it not been dragged away by these empty trifles, a shameful prey of¹⁷⁷¹⁷⁷    See note on v. 4, below. the fowls of the air. For there is more than one way in which men sacrifice to the fallen angels.

Chapter XVIII.—Men Desire to Observe the Rules of Learning, But Neglect the Eternal Rules of Everlasting Safety.

28. But what matter of surprise is it that I was thus carried towards vanity, and went forth from Thee, O my God, when men were proposed to me to imitate, who, should they in relating any acts of theirs—not in themselves evil—be guilty of a barbarism or solecism, when censured for it became confounded; but when they made a full and ornate oration, in well-chosen words, concerning their own licentiousness, and were applauded for it, they boasted? Thou seest this, O Lord, and keepest silence, “long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth,”¹⁷⁸¹⁷⁸    Ps. lxxxvi. 15. as Thou art. Wilt Thou keep silence for ever? And even now Thou drawest out of this vast deep the soul that seeketh Thee and thirsteth after Thy delights, whose “heart said unto Thee,” I have sought Thy face, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek.”¹⁷⁹¹⁷⁹    Ps. xxvii. 8. For I was far from Thy face, through my darkened¹⁸⁰¹⁸⁰    Rom. i. 21. affections. For it is not by our feet, nor by change of place, that we either turn from Thee or return to Thee. Or, indeed, did that younger son look out for horses, or chariots, or ships, or fly away with visible wings, or journey by the motion of his limbs, that he might, in a far country, prodigally waste all that Thou gavest him when he set out? A kind Father when Thou gavest, and kinder still when he returned destitute!¹⁸¹¹⁸¹    Luke xv. 11–32. So, then, in wanton, that is to say, in darkened affections, lies distance from Thy face.

29. Behold, O Lord God, and behold patiently, as Thou art wont to do, how diligently the sons of men observe the conventional rules of letters and syllables, received from those who spoke prior to them, and yet neglect the eternal rules of everlasting salvation received from Thee, insomuch that he who practises or teaches the hereditary rules of pronunciation, if, contrary to grammatical usage, he should say, without aspirating the first letter, a uman being, will offend men more than if, in opposition to Thy commandments, he, a human being, were to hate a human being. As if, indeed, any man should feel that an enemy could be more destructive to him than that hatred with which he is excited against him, or that he could destroy more utterly him whom he persecutes than he destroys his own soul by his enmity. And of a truth, there is no science of letters more innate than the writing of conscience—that he is doing unto another what he himself would not suffer. How mysterious art Thou, who in silence “dwellest on high,”¹⁸²¹⁸²    Isa. xxxiii. 5. Thou God, the only great, who by an unwearied law dealest out the punishment of blindness to illicit desires! When a man seeking for the reputation of eloquence stands before a human judge while 54a thronging multitude surrounds him, inveighs against his enemy with the most fierce hatred, he takes most vigilant heed that his tongue slips not into grammatical error, but takes no heed lest through the fury of his spirit he cut off a man from his fellow-men.¹⁸³¹⁸³    Literally, “takes care not by a slip of the tongue to say inter hominibus, but takes no care lest hominem auferat ex hominibus.”

30. These were the customs in the midst of which I, unhappy boy, was cast, and on that arena it was that I was more fearful of perpetrating a barbarism than, having done so, of envying those who had not. These things I declare and confess unto Thee, my God, for which I was applauded by them whom I then thought it my whole duty to please, for I did not perceive the gulf of infamy wherein I was cast away from Thine eyes.¹⁸⁴¹⁸⁴    Ps. xxxi. 22. For in Thine eyes what was more infamous than I was already, displeasing even those like myself, deceiving with innumerable lies both tutor, and masters, and parents, from love of play, a desire to see frivolous spectacles, and a stage-stuck restlessness, to imitate them? Pilferings I committed from my parents’ cellar and table, either enslaved by gluttony, or that I might have something to give to boys who sold me their play, who, though they sold it, liked it as well as I In this play, likewise, I often sought dishonest victories, I myself being conquered by the vain desire of pre-eminence. And what could I so little endure, or, if I detected it, censured I so violently, as the very things I did to others, and, when myself detected I was censured, preferred rather to quarrel than to yield? Is this the innocence of childhood? Nay, Lord, nay, Lord; I entreat Thy mercy, O my God. For these same sins, as we grow older, are transferred from governors and masters, from nuts, and balls, and sparrows, to magistrates and kings, to gold, and lands, and slaves, just as the rod is succeeded by more severe chastisements. It was, then, the stature of childhood that Thou, O our King, didst approve of as an emblem of humility when Thou saidst: “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”¹⁸⁵¹⁸⁵    Matt. xix. 14. See i. sec. 11, note 3, above.

31. But yet, O Lord, to Thee, most excellent and most good, Thou Architect and Governor of the universe, thanks had been due unto Thee, our God, even hadst Thou willed that I should not survive my boyhood. For I existed even then; I lived, and felt, and was solicitous about my own well-being,—a trace of that most mysterious unity¹⁸⁶¹⁸⁶    “To be is no other than to be one. In as far, therefore, as anything attains unity, in so far it ‘is.’ For unity worketh congruity and harmony, whereby things composite are in so far as they are; for things uncompounded are in themselves, because they are one; but things compounded imitate unity by the harmony of their parts, and, so far as they attain to unity, they are. Wherefore order and rule secure being, disorder tends to not being.”—Aug. De Morib. Manich. c. 6. from whence I had my being; I kept watch by my inner sense over the wholeness of my senses, and in these insignificant pursuits, and also in my thoughts on things insignificant, I learnt to take pleasure in truth. I was averse to being deceived, I had a vigorous memory, was provided with the power of speech, was softened by friendship, shunned sorrow, meanness, ignorance. In such a being what was not wonderful and praiseworthy? But all these are gifts of my God; I did not give them to myself; and they are good, and all these constitute myself. Good, then, is He that made me, and He is my God; and before Him will I rejoice exceedingly for every good gift which, as a boy, I had. For in this lay my sin, that not in Him, but in His creatures—myself and the rest—I sought for pleasures, honours, and truths, falling thereby into sorrows, troubles, and errors. Thanks be to Thee, my joy, my pride, my confidence, my God—thanks be to Thee for Thy gifts; but preserve Thou them to me. For thus wilt Thou preserve me; and those things which Thou hast given me shall be developed and perfected, and I myself shall be with Thee, for from Thee is my being.

————————————

55

Book II.

————————————

He advances to puberty, and indeed to the early part of the sixteenth year of his age, in which, having abandoned his studies, he indulged in lustful pleasures, and, with his companions, committed theft.

————————————

Chapter I.—He Deplores the Wickedness of His Youth.

1. I Will now call to mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul, not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love do I it, recalling, in the very bitterness of my remembrance, my most vicious ways, that Thou mayest grow sweet to me,—Thou sweetness without deception! Thou sweetness happy and assured!—and re-collecting myself out of that my dissipation, in which I was torn to pieces, while, turned away from Thee the One, I lost myself among many vanities. For I even longed in my youth formerly to be satisfied with worldly things, and I dared to grow wild again with various and shadowy loves; my form consumed away,¹⁸⁷¹⁸⁷    Ps. xxxix. 11. and I became corrupt in Thine eyes, pleasing myself, and eager to please in the eyes of men.

Chapter II.—Stricken with Exceeding Grief, He Remembers the Dissolute Passions in Which, in His Sixteenth Year, He Used to Indulge.

2. But what was it that I delighted in save to love and to be beloved? But I held it not in moderation, mind to mind, the bright path of friendship, but out of the dark concupiscence of the flesh and the effervescence of youth exhalations came forth which obscured and overcast my heart, so that I was unable to discern pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged away my unstable youth into the rough places of unchaste desires, and plunged me into a gulf of infamy. Thy anger had overshadowed me, and I knew it not. I was become deaf by the rattling of the chains of my mortality, the punishment for my soul’s pride; and I wandered farther from Thee, and Thou didst “suffer”¹⁸⁸¹⁸⁸    Matt. xvii. 17. me; and I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and boiled over in my fornications, and Thou didst hold Thy peace, O Thou my tardy joy! Thou then didst hold Thy peace, and I wandered still farther from Thee, into more and more barren seed-plots of sorrows, with proud dejection and restless lassitude.

3. Oh for one to have regulated my disorder, and turned to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and fixed a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the conjugal shore, if so be they could not be tranquillized and satisfied within the object of a family, as Thy law appoints, O Lord,—who thus formest the offspring of our death, being able also with a tender hand to blunt the thorns which were excluded from Thy paradise! For Thy omnipotency is not far from us even when we are far from Thee, else in truth ought I more vigilantly to have given heed to the voice from the clouds: “Nevertheless, such shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you;”¹⁸⁹¹⁸⁹    1 Cor. vii. 28. and, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman;”¹⁹⁰¹⁹⁰    1 Cor. vii. 1. and, “He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.”¹⁹¹¹⁹¹    1 Cor. vii. 32, 33. I should, therefore, have listened more attentively to these words, and, being severed “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,”¹⁹²¹⁹²    Matt. xix. 12. I would with greater happiness have expected Thy embraces.

4. But I, poor fool, seethed as does the sea, and, forsaking Thee, followed the violent course of my own stream, and exceeded all Thy limitations; nor did I escape Thy scourges.¹⁹³¹⁹³    Isa. x. 26. For what mortal can do so? But Thou wert always by me, mercifully angry, and dashing with the bitterest vexations all my illicit pleasures, in order that I might seek pleasures free from vexation. But where I could meet with such except in Thee, O Lord, I could not find,—except in Thee, who teachest by sorrow,¹⁹⁴¹⁹⁴    Deut. xxxii. 39. and 56woundest us to heal us, and killest us that we may not die from Thee.¹⁹⁵¹⁹⁵    Ps. xciii. 20, Vulg. “Lit. ‘Formest trouble in or as a precept.’ Thou makest to us a precept out of trouble, so that trouble itself shall be a precept to us, i.e. hast willed so to discipline and instruct those Thy sons, that they should not be without fear, lest they should love something else, and forget Thee, their true good.”—S. Aug. ad loc.—E. B. P. Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust—to the which human shamelessness granteth full freedom, although forbidden by Thy laws—held complete sway over me, and I resigned myself entirely to it? Those about me meanwhile took no care to save me from ruin by marriage, their sole care being that I should learn to make a powerful speech, and become a persuasive orator.

Chapter III.—Concerning His Father, a Freeman of Thagaste, the Assister of His Son’s Studies, and on the Admonitions of His Mother on the Preservation of Chastity.

5. And for that year my studies were intermitted, while after my return from Madaura¹⁹⁶¹⁹⁶    “Formerly an episcopal city: now a small village. At this time the inhabitants were heathen. St. Augustin calls them ‘his fathers,’ in a letter persuading them to embrace the gospel.—Ep. 232.”—E. B. P. (a neighbouring city, whither I had begun to go in order to learn grammar and rhetoric), the expenses for a further residence at Carthage were provided for me; and that was rather by the determination than the means of my father, who was but a poor freeman of Thagaste. To whom do I narrate this? Not unto Thee, my God; but before Thee unto my own kind, even to that small part of the human race who may chance to light upon these my writings. And to what end? That I and all who read the same may reflect out of what depths we are to cry unto Thee.¹⁹⁷¹⁹⁷    Ps. cxxx. 1. For what cometh nearer to Thine ears than a confessing heart and a life of faith? For who did not extol and praise my father, in that he went even beyond his means to supply his son with all the necessaries for a far journey for the sake of his studies? For many far richer citizens did not the like for their children. But yet this same father did not trouble himself how I grew towards Thee, nor how chaste I was, so long as I was skilful in speaking—however barren I was to Thy tilling, O God, who art the sole true and good Lord of my heart, which is Thy field.

6. But while, in that sixteenth year of my age, I resided with my parents, having holiday from school for a time (this idleness being imposed upon me by my parents’ necessitous circumstances), the thorns of lust grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to pluck them out. Moreover when my father, seeing me at the baths, perceived that I was becoming a man, and was stirred with a restless youthfulness, he, as if from this anticipating future descendants, joyfully told it to my mother; rejoicing in that intoxication wherein the world so often forgets Thee, its Creator, and falls in love with Thy creature instead of Thee, from the invisible wine of its own perversity turning and bowing down to the most infamous things. But in my mother’s breast Thou hadst even now begun Thy temple, and the commencement of Thy holy habitation, whereas my father was only a catechumen as yet, and that but recently. She then started up with a pious fear and trembling; and, although I had not yet been baptized,¹⁹⁸¹⁹⁸    Nondum fideli, not having rehearsed the articles of the Christian faith at baptism. See i. sec. 17, note, above; and below, sec. 1, note. she feared those crooked ways in which they walk who turn their back to Thee, and not their face.¹⁹⁹¹⁹⁹    Jer. ii. 27.

7. Woe is me! and dare I affirm that Thou heldest Thy peace, O my God, while I strayed farther from Thee? Didst Thou then hold Thy peace to me? And whose words were they but Thine which by my mother, Thy faithful handmaid, Thou pouredst into my ears, none of which sank into my heart to make me do it? For she desired, and I remember privately warned me, with great solicitude, “not to commit fornication; but above all things never to defile another man’s wife.” These appeared to me but womanish counsels, which I should blush to obey. But they were Thine, and I knew it not, and I thought that Thou heldest Thy peace, and that it was she who spoke, through whom Thou heldest not Thy peace to me, and in her person wast despised by me, her son, “the son of Thy handmaid, Thy servant.”²⁰⁰²⁰⁰    Ps. cxvi. 16. But this I knew not; and rushed on headlong with such blindness, that amongst my equals I was ashamed to be less shameless, when I heard them pluming themselves upon their disgraceful acts, yea, and glorying all the more in proportion to the greatness of their baseness; and I took pleasure in doing it, not for the pleasure’s sake only, but for the praise. What is worthy of dispraise but vice? But I made myself out worse than I was, in order that I might not be dispraised; and when in anything I had not sinned as the abandoned ones, I would affirm that I had done what I had not, that I might not appear abject for being more innocent, or of less esteem for being more chaste.

8. Behold with what companions I walked the streets of Babylon, in whose filth I was rolled, as if in cinnamon and precious ointments. And that I might cleave the more tena57ciously to its very centre, my invisible enemy trod me down, and seduced me, I being easily seduced. Nor did the mother of my flesh, although she herself had ere this fled “out of the midst of Babylon,”²⁰¹²⁰¹    Jer. li. 6.—progressing, however, but slowly in the skirts of it,—in counselling me to chastity, so bear in mind what she had been told about me by her husband as to restrain in the limits of conjugal affection (if it could not be cut away to the quick) what she knew to be destructive in the present and dangerous in the future. But she took no heed of this, for she was afraid lest a wife should prove a hindrance and a clog to my hopes. Not those hopes of the future world, which my mother had in Thee; but the hope of learning, which both my parents were too anxious that I should acquire,—he, because he had little or no thought of Thee, and but vain thoughts for me—she, because she calculated that those usual courses of learning would not only be no drawback, but rather a furtherance towards my attaining Thee. For thus I conjecture, recalling as well as I can the dispositions of my parents. The reins, meantime, were slackened towards me beyond the restraint of due severity, that I might play, yea, even to dissoluteness, in whatsoever I fancied. And in all there was a mist, shutting out from my sight the brightness of Thy truth, O my God; and my iniquity displayed itself as from very “fatness.”²⁰²²⁰²    Ps. lxxiii. 7.

Chapter IV.—He Commits Theft with His Companions, Not Urged on by Poverty, But from a Certain Distaste of Well-Doing.

9. Theft is punished by Thy law, O Lord, and by the law written in men’s hearts, which iniquity itself cannot blot out. For what thief will suffer a thief? Even a rich thief will not suffer him who is driven to it by want. Yet had I a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled neither by hunger, nor poverty through a distaste for well-doing, and a lustiness of iniquity. For I pilfered that of which I had already sufficient, and much better. Nor did I desire to enjoy what I pilfered, but the theft and sin itself. There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its colour nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night (having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the streets until then), and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted. Behold my heart, O my God; behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon when in the bottomless pit. Behold, now, let my heart tell Thee what it was seeking there, that I should be gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself. Base soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction—not seeking aught through the shame but the shame itself!

Chapter V.—Concerning the Motives to Sin, Which are Not in the Love of Evil, But in the Desire of Obtaining the Property of Others.

10. There is a desirableness in all beautiful bodies, and in gold, and silver, and all things; and in bodily contact sympathy is powerful, and each other sense hath his proper adaptation of body. Worldly honour hath also its glory, and the power of command, and of overcoming; whence proceeds also the desire for revenge. And yet to acquire all these, we must not depart from Thee, O Lord, nor deviate from Thy law. The life which we live here hath also its peculiar attractiveness, through a certain measure of comeliness of its own, and harmony with all things here below. The friendships of men also are endeared by a sweet bond, in the oneness of many souls. On account of all these, and such as these, is sin committed; while through an inordinate preference for these goods of a lower kind, the better and higher are neglected,—even Thou, our Lord God, Thy truth, and Thy law. For these meaner things have their delights, but not like unto my God, who hath created all things; for in Him doth the righteous delight, and He is the sweetness of the upright in heart.²⁰³²⁰³    Ps. lxiv. 10.

11. When, therefore, we inquire why a crime was committed, we do not believe it, unless it appear that there might have been the wish to obtain some of those which we designated meaner things, or else a fear of losing them. For truly they are beautiful and comely, although in comparison with those higher and celestial goods they be abject and contemptible. A man hath murdered another; what was his motive? He desired his wife or his estate; or would steal to support himself; or he was afraid of losing something of the kind by him; or, being injured, he was burning to be revenged. Would he commit murder without a motive, taking delight simply in the act of murder? Who would credit it? For as for that savage and brutal man, of whom it is declared that he was gratuitously wicked and cruel, there is yet 58a motive assigned. “Lest through idleness,” he says, “hand or heart should grow inactive.”²⁰⁴²⁰⁴    Sallust, De Bello Catil. c. 9. And to what purpose? Why, even that, having once got possession of the city through that practice of wickedness, he might attain unto honours, empire, and wealth, and be exempt from the fear of the laws, and his difficult circumstances from the needs of his family, and the consciousness of his own wickedness. So it seems that even Catiline himself loved not his own villanies, but something else, which gave him the motive for committing them.

Chapter VI.—Why He Delighted in that Theft, When All Things Which Under the Appearance of Good Invite to Vice are True and Perfect in God Alone.

12. What was it, then, that I, miserable one, so doted on in thee, thou theft of mine, thou deed of darkness, in that sixteenth year of my age? Beautiful thou wert not, since thou wert theft. But art thou anything, that so I may argue the case with thee? Those pears that we stole were fair to the sight, because they were Thy creation, Thou fairest²⁰⁵²⁰⁵    Ps. xlv. 2. of all, Creator of all, Thou good God—God, the highest good, and my true good. Those pears truly were pleasant to the sight; but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had abundance of better, but those I plucked simply that I might steal. For, having plucked them, I threw them away, my sole gratification in them being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy. For if any of these pears entered my mouth, the sweetener of it was my sin in eating it. And now, O Lord my God, I ask what it was in that theft of mine that caused me such delight; and behold it hath no beauty in it—not such, I mean, as exists in justice and wisdom; nor such as is in the mind, memory, senses, and animal life of man; nor yet such as is the glory and beauty of the stars in their courses; or the earth, or the sea, teeming with incipient life, to replace, as it is born, that which decayeth; nor, indeed, that false and shadowy beauty which pertaineth to deceptive vices.

13. For thus doth pride imitate high estate, whereas Thou alone art God, high above all. And what does ambition seek but honours and renown, whereas Thou alone art to be honoured above all, and renowned for evermore? The cruelty of the powerful wishes to be feared; but who is to be feared but God only,²⁰⁶²⁰⁶    Ps. lxxvi. 7. out of whose power what can be forced away or withdrawn—when, or where, or whither, or by whom? The enticements of the wanton would fain be deemed love; and yet is naught more enticing than Thy charity, nor is aught loved more healthfully than that, Thy truth, bright and beautiful above all. Curiosity affects a desire for knowledge, whereas it is Thou who supremely knowest all things. Yea, ignorance and foolishness themselves are concealed under the names of ingenuousness and harmlessness, because nothing can be found more ingenuous than Thou; and what is more harmless, since it is a sinner’s own works by which he is harmed?²⁰⁷²⁰⁷    Ps. vii. 15. And sloth seems to long for rest; but what sure rest is there besides the Lord? Luxury would fain be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fulness and unfailing plenteousness of unfading joys. Prodigality presents a shadow of liberality; but Thou art the most lavish giver of all good. Covetousness desires to possess much; and Thou art the Possessor of all things. Envy contends for excellence; but what so excellent as Thou? Anger seeks revenge; who avenges more justly than Thou? Fear starts at unwonted and sudden chances which threaten things beloved, and is wary for their security; but what can happen that is unwonted or sudden to Thee? or who can deprive Thee of what Thou lovest? or where is there unshaken security save with Thee? Grief languishes for things lost in which desire had delighted itself, even because it would have nothing taken from it, as nothing can be from Thee.

14. Thus doth the soul commit fornication when she turns away from Thee, and seeks without Thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to Thee. Thus all pervertedly imitate Thee who separate themselves far from Thee²⁰⁸²⁰⁸    Ps. vii. 15. and raise themselves up against Thee. But even by thus imitating Thee they acknowledge Thee to be the Creator of all nature, and so that there is no place whither they can altogether retire from Thee.²⁰⁹²⁰⁹    Ps. cxxxix. 7, 8. What, then, was it that I loved in that theft? And wherein did I, even corruptedly and pervertedly, imitate my Lord? Did I wish, if only by artifice, to act contrary to Thy law, because by power I could not, so that, being a captive, I might imitate an imperfect liberty by doing with impunity things which I was not allowed to do, in obscured likeness of Thy omnipotency?²¹⁰²¹⁰    “For even souls, in their very sins, strive after nothing else but some kind of likeness of God, in a proud and preposterous, and, so to say, slavish liberty. So neither could our first parents have been persuaded to sin unless it had been said, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’”—Aug. De Trin. xi. 5. Behold this servant of Thine, fleeing from his Lord, and following a shadow!²¹¹²¹¹    Jonah i. and iv. O rottenness! O monstrosity of life and profundity of death! 59Could I like that which was unlawful only because it was unlawful?

Chapter VII.—He Gives Thanks to God for the Remission of His Sins, and Reminds Every One that the Supreme God May Have Preserved Us from Greater Sins.

15. “What shall I render unto the Lord,”²¹²²¹²    Ps. cxvi. 12. that whilst my memory recalls these things my soul is not appalled at them? I will love Thee, O Lord, and thank Thee, and confess unto Thy name,²¹³²¹³    Rev. iii. 5. because Thou hast put away from me these so wicked and nefarious acts of mine. To Thy grace I attribute it, and to Thy mercy, that Thou hast melted away my sin as it were ice. To Thy grace also I attribute whatsoever of evil I have not committed; for what might I not have committed, loving as I did the sin for the sin’s sake? Yea, all I confess to have been pardoned me, both those which I committed by my own perverseness, and those which, by Thy guidance, I committed not. Where is he who, reflecting upon his own infirmity, dares to ascribe his chastity and innocency to his own strength, so that he should love Thee the less, as if he had been in less need of Thy mercy, whereby Thou dost forgive the transgressions of those that turn to Thee? For whosoever, called by Thee, obeyed Thy voice, and shunned those things which he reads me recalling and confessing of myself, let him not despise me, who, being sick, was healed by that same Physician²¹⁴²¹⁴    Luke iv. 23. by whose aid it was that he was not sick, or rather was less sick. And for this let him love Thee as much, yea, all the more, since by whom he sees me to have been restored from so great a feebleness of sin, by Him he sees himself from a like feebleness to have been preserved.

Chapter VIII.—In His Theft He Loved the Company of His Fellow-Sinners.

16. “What fruit had I then,”²¹⁵²¹⁵    Rom. vi. 21. wretched one, in those things which, when I remember them, cause me shame—above all in that theft, which I loved only for the theft’s sake? And as the theft itself was nothing, all the more wretched was I who loved it. Yet by myself alone I would not have done it—I recall what my heart was—alone I could not have done it. I loved, then, in it the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it. I did not, therefore, love the theft alone—yea, rather, it was that alone that I loved, for the companionship was nothing. What is the fact? Who is it that can teach me, but He who illuminateth mine heart and searcheth out the dark corners thereof? What is it that hath come into my mind to inquire about, to discuss, and to reflect upon? For had I at that time loved the pears I stole, and wished to enjoy them, I might have done so alone, if I could have been satisfied with the mere commission of the theft by which my pleasure was secured; nor needed I have provoked that itching of my own passions, by the encouragement of accomplices. But as my enjoyment was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself, which the company of my fellow-sinners produced.

Chapter IX.—It Was a Pleasure to Him Also to Laugh When Seriously Deceiving Others.

17. By what feelings, then, was I animated? For it was in truth too shameful; and woe was me who had it. But still what was it? “Who can understand his errors?”²¹⁶²¹⁶    Ps. xix. 12. We laughed, because our hearts were tickled at the thought of deceiving those who little imagined what we were doing, and would have vehemently disapproved of it. Yet, again, why did I so rejoice in this, that I did it not alone? Is it that no one readily laughs alone? No one does so readily; but yet sometimes, when men are alone by themselves, nobody being by, a fit of laughter overcomes them when anything very droll presents itself to their senses or mind. Yet alone I would not have done it—alone I could not at all have done it. Behold, my God, the lively recollection of my soul is laid bare before Thee—alone I had not committed that theft, wherein what I stole pleased me not, but rather the act of stealing; nor to have done it alone would I have liked so well, neither would I have done it. O Friendship too unfriendly! thou mysterious seducer of the soul, thou greediness to do mischief out of mirth and wantonness, thou craving for others’ loss, without desire for my own profit or revenge; but when they say, “Let us go, let us do it,” we are ashamed not to be shameless.

Chapter X.—With God There is True Rest and Life Unchanging.

18. Who can unravel that twisted and tangled knottiness? It is foul. I hate to reflect on it. I hate to look on it. But thee do I long for, O righteousness and innocency, fair and comely to all virtuous eyes, and of a satisfaction that never palls! With thee is perfect rest, and life unchanging. He who enters into thee enters into the joy of his Lord,²¹⁷²¹⁷    Matt. xxv. 21. and shall have no fear, and shall do excellently in the most Excellent. I sank away from Thee, O my God, and I wandered too far from Thee, my stay, in my youth, and became to myself an unfruitful land.

————————————

60

Book III.

————————————

Of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth years of his age, passed at Carthage, when, having completed his course of studies, he is caught in the snares of a licentious passion, and falls into the errors of the Manichæans.

————————————

Chapter I.—Deluded by an Insane Love, He, Though Foul and Dishonourable, Desires to Be Thought Elegant and Urbane.

1. To Carthage I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves bubbled up all around me. I loved not as yet, yet I loved to love; and with a hidden want, I abhorred myself that I wanted not. I searched about for something to love, in love with loving, and hating security, and a way not beset with snares. For within me I had a dearth of that inward food, Thyself, my God, though that dearth caused me no hunger; but I remained without all desire for incorruptible food, not because I was already filled thereby, but the more empty I was the more I loathed it. For this reason my soul was far from well, and, full of ulcers, it miserably cast itself forth, craving to be excited by contact with objects of sense. Yet, had these no soul, they would not surely inspire love. To love and to be loved was sweet to me, and all the more when I succeeded in enjoying the person I loved. I befouled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I dimmed its lustre with the hell of lustfulness; and yet, foul and dishonourable as I was, I craved, through an excess of vanity, to be thought elegant and urbane. I fell precipitately, then, into the love in which I longed to be ensnared. My God, my mercy, with how much bitterness didst Thou, out of Thy infinite goodness, besprinkle for me that sweetness! For I was both beloved, and secretly arrived at the bond of enjoying; and was joyfully bound with troublesome ties, that I might be scourged with the burning iron rods of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and strife.

Chapter II.—In Public Spectacles He is Moved by an Empty Compassion. He is Attacked by a Troublesome Spiritual Disease.

2. Stage-plays also drew me away, full of representations of my miseries and of fuel to my fire.²¹⁸²¹⁸    The early Fathers strongly reprobated stage-plays, and those who went to them were excluded from baptism. This is not to be wondered at, when we learn that “even the laws of Rome prohibited actors from being enrolled as citizens” (De Civ. Dei, ii. 14), and that they were accounted infamous (Tertullian, De Spectac. sec. xxii.). See also Tertullian, De Pudicitia, c. vii. Why does man like to be made sad when viewing doleful and tragical scenes, which yet he himself would by no means suffer? And yet he wishes, as a spectator, to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched insanity? For a man is more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections. Howsoever, when he suffers in his own person, it is the custom to style it “misery” but when he compassionates others, then it is styled “mercy.”²¹⁹²¹⁹    See i. 9, note, above. But what kind of mercy is it that arises from fictitious and scenic passions? The hearer is not expected to relieve, but merely invited to grieve; and the more he grieves, the more he applauds the actor of these fictions. And if the misfortunes of the characters (whether of olden times or merely imaginary) be so represented as not to touch the feelings of the spectator, he goes away disgusted and censorious; but if his feelings be touched, he sits it out attentively, and sheds tears of joy.

3. Are sorrows, then, also loved? Surely all men desire to rejoice? Or, as man wishes to be miserable, is he, nevertheless, glad to be merciful, which, because it cannot exist without passion, for this cause alone are passions loved? This also is from that vein of friendship. But whither does it go? Whither does it flow? Wherefore runs it into that torrent of pitch,²²⁰²²⁰    An allusion, probably, as Watts suggests, to the sea of Sodom, which, according to Tacitus (Hist. book v.), throws up bitumen “at stated seasons of the year.” Tacitus likewise alludes to its pestiferous odour, and to its being deadly to birds and fish. See also Gen. xiv. 3, 10. seething forth those huge tides of loathsome lusts into which it is changed and transformed, being of its own will cast away and corrupted from its celestial clearness? Shall, then, mercy be repudiated? By no means. Let us, therefore, love sorrows sometimes. But beware of uncleanness, O my soul, under the protection of my God, the God of our fathers, who is to be praised and exalted above all for ever,²²¹²²¹    Song of the Three Holy Children, verse 3. beware of uncleanness. For I have not now ceased to have compassion; but then in the theatres I sympathized with lovers when they sinfully enjoyed one another, although this was 61done fictitiously in the play. And when they lost one another, I grieved with them, as if pitying them, and yet had delight in both. But now-a-days I feel much more pity for him that delighteth in his wickedness, than for him who is counted as enduring hardships by failing to obtain some pernicious pleasure, and the loss of some miserable felicity. This, surely, is the truer mercy, but grief hath no delight in it. For though he that condoles with the unhappy be approved for his office of charity, yet would he who had real compassion rather there were nothing for him to grieve about. For if goodwill be ill-willed (which it cannot), then can he who is truly and sincerely commiserating wish that there should be some unhappy ones, that he might commiserate them. Some grief may then be justified, none loved. For thus dost Thou, O Lord God, who lovest souls far more purely than do we, and art more incorruptibly compassionate, although Thou art wounded by no sorrow. “And who is sufficient for these things?”²²²²²²    2 Cor. ii. 16.

4. But I, wretched one, then loved to grieve, and sought out what to grieve at, as when, in another man’s misery, though reigned and counterfeited, that delivery of the actor best pleased me, and attracted me the most powerfully, which moved me to tears. What marvel was it that an unhappy sheep, straying from Thy flock, and impatient of Thy care, I became infected with a foul disease? And hence came my love of griefs—not such as should probe me too deeply, for I loved not to suffer such things as I loved to look upon, but such as, when hearing their fictions, should lightly affect the surface; upon which, like as with empoisoned nails, followed burning, swelling, putrefaction, and horrible corruption. Such was my life! But was it life, O my God?

Chapter III.—Not Even When at Church Does He Suppress His Desires. In the School of Rhetoric He Abhors the Acts of the Subverters.

5. And Thy faithful mercy hovered over me afar. Upon what unseemly iniquities did I wear myself out, following a sacrilegious curiosity, that, having deserted Thee, it might drag me into the treacherous abyss, and to the beguiling obedience of devils, unto whom I immolated my wicked deeds, and in all which Thou didst scourge me! I dared, even while Thy solemn rites were being celebrated within the walls of Thy church, to desire, and to plan a business sufficient to procure me the fruits of death; for which Thou chastisedst me with grievous punishments, but nothing in comparison with my fault, O Thou my greatest mercy, my God, my refuge from those terrible hurts, among which I wandered with presumptuous neck, receding farther from Thee, loving my own ways, and not Thine—loving a vagrant liberty.

6. Those studies, also, which were accounted honourable, were directed towards the courts of law; to excel in which, the more crafty I was, the more I should be praised. Such is the blindness of men, that they even glory in their blindness. And now I was head in the School of Rhetoric, whereat I rejoiced proudly, and became inflated with arrogance, though more sedate, O Lord, as Thou knowest, and altogether removed from the subvertings of those “subverters”²²³²²³    Eversores. “These for their boldness were like our ‘Roarers,’ and for their jeering like the worser sort of those that would be called ‘The Wits.’”—W. W. “This appears to have been a name which a pestilent and savage set of persons gave themselves, licentious alike in speech and action. Augustin names them again, De Vera Relig. c. 40; Ep. 185 ad Bonifac. c. 4; and below, v. c. 12; whence they seemed to have consisted mainly of Carthaginian students, whose savage life is mentioned again, ib. c. 8.”—E. B. P. (for this stupid and diabolical name was held to be the very brand of gallantry) amongst whom I lived, with an impudent shamefacedness that I was not even as they were. And with them I was, and at times I was delighted with their friendship whose acts I ever abhorred, that is, their “subverting,” wherewith they insolently attacked the modesty of strangers, which they disturbed by uncalled for jeers, gratifying thereby their mischievous mirth. Nothing can more nearly resemble the actions of devils than these. By what name, therefore, could they be more truly called than “subverters”?—being themselves subverted first, and altogether perverted—being secretly mocked at and seduced by the deceiving spirits, in what they themselves delight to jeer at and deceive others.

Chapter IV.—In the Nineteenth Year of His Age (His Father Having Died Two Years Before) He is Led by the “Hortensius” Of Cicero to “Philosophy,” To God, and a Better Mode of Thinking.

7. Among such as these, at that unstable period of my life, I studied books of eloquence, wherein I was eager to be eminent from a damnable and inflated purpose, even a delight in human vanity. In the ordinary course of study, I lighted upon a certain book of Cicero, whose language, though not his heart, almost all admire. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called Hortensius. This book, in truth, changed my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord, and made me have other hopes and desires. Worthless suddenly became every vain hope to me; and, with an incredible warmth of heart, I 62yearned for an immortality of wisdom,²²⁴²²⁴    Up to the time of Cicero the Romans employed the term sapientia for φιλοσοφία (Monboddo’s Ancient Metaphys. i. 5). It is interesting to watch the effect of the philosophy in which they had been trained on the writings of some of the Fathers. Even Justin Martyr, the first after the “Apostolic,” has traces of this influence. See the account of his search for “wisdom,” and conversion, in his Dialogue with Trypho, ii. and iii. and began now to arise²²⁵²²⁵    Luke xv. 18. that I might return to Thee. Not, then, to improve my language—which I appeared to be purchasing with my mother’s means, in that my nineteenth year, my father having died two years before—not to improve my language did I have recourse to that book; nor did it persuade me by its style, but its matter.

8. How ardent was I then, my God, how ardent to fly from earthly things to Thee! Nor did I know how Thou wouldst deal with me. For with Thee is wisdom. In Greek the love of wisdom is called “philosophy,”²²⁶²²⁶    See above, note 1. with which that book inflamed me. There be some who seduce through philosophy, under a great, and alluring, and honourable name colouring and adorning their own errors. And almost all who in that and former times were such, are in that book censured and pointed out. There is also disclosed that most salutary admonition of Thy Spirit, by Thy good and pious servant: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ: for in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”²²⁷²²⁷    Col. ii. 8, 9. And since at that time (as Thou, O Light of my heart, knowest) the words of the apostle were unknown to me, I was delighted with that exhortation, in so far only as I was thereby stimulated, and enkindled, and inflamed to love, seek, obtain, hold, and embrace, not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it were; and this alone checked me thus ardent, that the name of Christ was not in it. For this name, according to Thy mercy, O Lord, this name of my Saviour Thy Son, had my tender heart piously drunk in, deeply treasured even with my mother’s milk; and whatsoever was without that name, though never so erudite, polished, and truthful, took not complete hold of me.

Chapter V.—He Rejects the Sacred Scriptures as Too Simple, and as Not to Be Compared with the Dignity of Tully.

9. I resolved, therefore, to direct my mind to the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. And behold, I perceive something not comprehended by the proud, not disclosed to children, but lowly as you approach, sublime as you advance, and veiled in mysteries; and I was not of the number of those who could enter into it, or bend my neck to follow its steps. For not as when now I speak did I feel when I tuned towards those Scriptures,²²⁸²²⁸    In connection with the opinion Augustin formed of the Scriptures before and after his conversion, it is interesting to recall Fénélon’s glowing description of the literary merit of the Bible. The whole passage might well be quoted did space permit:—“L’Ecriture surpasse en naïveté, en vivacité, en grandeur, tous les écrivains de Rome et de la Grèce. Jamais Homère même n’a approché de la sublimité de Moïse dans ses cantiques.…Jamais nulle ode Grecque ou Latine n’a pu atteindre à la hauteur des Psaumes.…Jamais Homerè ni aucun autre poëte n’a égalé Isaïe peignant la majesté de Dieu.…Tantôt ce prophète à toute la douceur et toute la tendresse d’une églogue, dans les riantes peintures qu’il fait de la paix, tantôt il s’élève jusqu’ à laisser tout au-dessous de lui. Mais qu’y a-t-il, dans l’antiquité profane, de comparable au tendre Jérémie, déplorant les maux de son peuple; ou à Nahum, voyant de loin, en esprit, tomber la superbe Ninive sous les efforts d’une armée innombrable? On croit voir cette armée, ou croit entendre le bruit des armes et des chariots; tout est dépeint d’une manière vive qui saisit l’imagination; il laisse Homère loin derrière lui.…Enfin, il y a autant de différence entre les poëtes profanes et les prophètes, qu’il y en a entre le véritable enthousiasme et le faux.”—Sur l’ Eloq. de la Chaire, Dial. iii. but they appeared to me to be unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Tully; for my inflated pride shunned their style, nor could the sharpness of my wit pierce their inner meaning.²²⁹²²⁹    That is probably the “spiritual” meaning on which Ambrose (vi. 6, below) laid so much emphasis. How different is the attitude of mind indicated in xi. 3 from the spiritual pride which beset him at this period of his life! When converted he became as a little child, and ever looked to God as a Father, from whom he must receive both light and strength. He speaks, on Ps. cxlvi., of the Scriptures, which were plain to “the little ones,” being obscured to the mocking spirit of the Manichæans. See also below, iii. 14, note. Yet, truly, were they such as would develope in little ones; but I scorned to be a little one, and, swollen with pride, I looked upon myself as a great one.

Chapter VI.—Deceived by His Own Fault, He Falls into the Errors of the Manichæans, Who Gloried in the True Knowledge of God and in a Thorough Examination of Things.

10. Therefore I fell among men proudly raving, very carnal, and voluble, in whose mouths were the snares of the devil—the birdlime being composed of a mixture of the syllables of Thy name, and of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.²³⁰²³⁰    So, in Book xxii. sec. 13 of his reply to Faustus, he charges them with “professing to believe the New Testament in order to entrap the unwary;” and again, in sec. 15, he says: “ They claim the impious liberty of holding and teaching, that whatever they deem favourable to their heresy was said by Christ and the apostles; while they have the profane boldness to say, that whatever in the same writings is unfavourable to them is a spurious interpolation.” They professed to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, but affirmed (ibid. xx. 6) “that the Father dwells in a secret light, the power of the Son in the sun, and His wisdom in the moon, and the Holy Spirit in the air.” It was this employment of the phraseology of Scripture to convey doctrines utterly unscriptural that rendered their teaching such a snare to the unwary. See also below, v. 12, note. These names departed not out of their mouths, but so far forth as the sound only and the clatter of the tongue, for the heart was empty of truth. Still they cried, “Truth, Truth,” and spoke much about it to me, “yet was it not in them;”²³¹²³¹    1 John ii. 4. but they spake falsely not of Thee only—who, verily, art the Truth—but also of these elements of this world, Thy 63creatures. And I, in truth, should have passed by philosophers, even when speaking truth concerning them, for love of Thee, my Father, supremely good, beauty of all things beautiful. O Truth, Truth! how inwardly even then did the marrow of my soul pant after Thee, when they frequently, and in a multiplicity of ways, and in numerous and huge books, sounded out Thy name to me, though it was but a voice!²³²²³²    There was something peculiarly enthralling to an ardent mind like Augustin’s in the Manichæan system. That system was kindred in many ways to modern Rationalism. Reason was exalted at the expense of faith. Nothing was received on mere authority, and the disciple’s inner consciousness was the touchstone of truth. The result of this is well pointed out by Augustin (Con. Faust, xxxii. sec. 19): “Your design, clearly, is to deprive Scripture of all authority, and to make every man’s mind the judge what passage of Scripture he is to approve of, and what to disapprove of. This is not to be subject to Scripture in matters of faith, but to make Scripture subject to you. Instead of making the high authority of Scripture the reason of approval, every man makes his approval the reason for thinking a passage correct.” Compare also Con. Faust, xi. sec. 2, and xxxii. sec. 16. And these were the dishes in which to me, hungering for Thee, they, instead of Thee, served up the sun and moon, Thy beauteous works—but yet Thy works, not Thyself, nay, nor Thy first works. For before these corporeal works are Thy spiritual ones, celestial and shining though they be. But I hungered and thirsted not even after those first works of Thine, but after Thee Thyself, the Truth, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning;”²³³²³³    Jas. i. 17. yet they still served up to me in those dishes glowing phantasies, than which better were it to love this very sun (which, at least, is true to our sight), than those illusions which deceive the mind through the eye. And yet, because I supposed them to be Thee, I fed upon them; not with avidity, for Thou didst not taste to my mouth as Thou art, for Thou wast not these empty fictions; neither was I nourished by them, but the rather exhausted. Food in our sleep appears like our food awake; yet the sleepers are not nourished by it, for they are asleep. But those things were not in any way like unto Thee as Thou hast now spoken unto me, in that those were corporeal phantasies, false bodies, than which these true bodies, whether celestial or terrestrial, which we perceive with our fleshly sight, are much more certain. These things the very beasts and birds perceive as well as we, and they are more certain than when we imagine them. And again, we do with more certainty imagine them, than by them conceive of other greater and infinite bodies which have no existence. With such empty husks was I then fed, and was not fed. But Thou, my Love, in looking for whom I fail²³⁴²³⁴    Ps. lxix. 3. that I may be strong, art neither those bodies that we see, although in heaven, nor art Thou those which we see not there; for Thou hast created them, nor dost Thou reckon them amongst Thy greatest works. How far, then, art Thou from those phantasies of mine, phantasies of bodies which are not at all, than which the images of those bodies which are, are more certain, and still more certain the bodies themselves, which yet Thou art not; nay, nor yet the soul, which is the life of the bodies. Better, then, and more certain is the life of bodies than the bodies themselves. But Thou art the life of souls, the life of lives, having life in Thyself; and Thou changest not, O Life of my soul.

11. Where, then, wert Thou then to me, and how far from me? Far, indeed, was I wandering away from Thee, being even shut out from the very husks of the swine, whom with husks I fed.²³⁵²³⁵    Luke xv. 16; and see below, vi. sec. 3, note. For how much better, then, are the fables of the grammarians and poets than these snares! For verses, and poems, and Medea flying, are more profitable truly than these men’s five elements, variously painted, to answer to the five caves of darkness,²³⁶²³⁶    See below, xii. sec. 6, note. none of which exist, and which slay the believer. For verses and poems I can turn into²³⁷²³⁷    “Of this passage St. Augustin is probably speaking when he says, ‘Praises bestowed on bread in simplicity of heart, let him (Petilian) defame, if he will, by the ludicrous title of poisoning and corrupting frenzy.’ Augustin meant in mockery, that by verses he could get his bread; his calumniator seems to have twisted the word to signify a love-potion.—Con. Lit. Petiliani, iii. 16.”—E. B. P. true food, but the “Medea flying,” though I sang, I maintained it not; though I heard it sung, I believed it not; but those things I did believe. Woe, woe, by what steps was I dragged down “to the depths of hell!”²³⁸²³⁸    Prov. ix. 18.—toiling and turmoiling through want of Truth, when I sought after Thee, my God,—to Thee I confess it, who hadst mercy on me when I had not yet confessed,—sought after Thee not according to the understanding of the mind, in which Thou desiredst that I should excel the beasts, but according to the sense of the flesh! Thou wert more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest. I came upon that bold woman, who “is simple, and knoweth nothing,”²³⁹²³⁹    Prov. ix. 13. the enigma of Solomon, sitting “at the door of the house on a seat,” and saying, “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”²⁴⁰²⁴⁰    Prov. ix. 14, 17. This woman seduced me, because she found my soul beyond its portals, dwelling in the eye of my flesh, and thinking on such food as through it I had devoured.

Chapter VII.—He Attacks the Doctrine of the Manichæans Concerning Evil, God, and the Righteousness of the Patriarchs.

12. For I was ignorant as to that which really is, and was, as it were, violently moved to give 64my support to foolish deceivers, when they asked me, “Whence is evil?”²⁴¹²⁴¹    The strange mixture of the pensive philosophy of Persia with Gnosticism and Christianity, propounded by Manichæus, attempted to solve this question, which was “the great object of heretical inquiry” (Mansel’s Gnostics, lec. i.). It was Augustin’s desire for knowledge concerning it that united him to this sect, and which also led him to forsake it, when he found therein nothing but empty fables (De Lib. Arb. i. sec. 4). Manichæus taught that evil and good were primeval, and had independent existences. Augustin, on the other hand, maintains that it was not possible for evil so to exist (De Civ. Dei, xi. sec. 22) but, as he here states, evil is “a privation of good.” The evil will has a causa deficiens, but not a causa efficiens (ibid. xii. 6), as is exemplified in the fall of the angels.—and, “Is God limited by a bodily shape, and has He hairs and nails?”—and, “Are they to be esteemed righteous who had many wives at once and did kill men, and sacrificed living creatures?”²⁴²²⁴²    1 Kings xviii. 40. At which things I, in my ignorance, was much disturbed, and, retreating from the truth, I appeared to myself to be going towards it; because as yet I knew not that evil was naught but a privation of good, until in the end it ceases altogether to be; which how should I see, the sight of whose eyes saw no further than bodies, and of my mind no further than a phantasm? And I knew not God to be a Spirit,²⁴³²⁴³    John iv. 24. not one who hath parts extended in length and breadth, nor whose being was bulk; for every bulk is less in a part than in the whole, and, if it be infinite, it must be less in such part as is limited by a certain space than in its infinity; and cannot be wholly everywhere, as Spirit, as God is. And what that should be in us, by which we were like unto God, and might rightly in Scripture be said to be after “the image of God,”²⁴⁴²⁴⁴    Gen. i. 27; see vi. sec. 4, note. I was entirely ignorant.

13. Nor had I knowledge of that true inner righteousness, which doth not judge according to custom, but out of the most perfect law of God Almighty, by which the manners of places and times were adapted to those places and times—being itself the while the same always and everywhere, not one thing in one place, and another in another; according to which Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, and David, and all those commended by the mouth of God were righteous,²⁴⁵²⁴⁵    Heb. xi. 8–40. but were judged unrighteous by foolish men, judging out of man’s judgment,²⁴⁶²⁴⁶    1 Cor. iv. 3. and gauging by the petty standard of their own manners the manners of the whole human race. Like as if in an armoury, one knowing not what were adapted to the several members should put greaves on his head, or boot himself with a helmet, and then complain because they would not fit. Or as if, on some day when in the afternoon business was forbidden, one were to fume at not being allowed to sell as it was lawful to him in the forenoon. Or when in some house he sees a servant take something in his hand which the butler is not permitted to touch, or something done behind a stable which would be prohibited in the dining-room, and should be indignant that in one house, and one family, the same thing is not distributed everywhere to all. Such are they who cannot endure to hear something to have been lawful for righteous men in former times which is not so now; or that God, for certain temporal reasons, commanded them one thing, and these another, but both obeying the same righteousness; though they see, in one man, one day, and one house, different things to be fit for different members, and a thing which was formerly lawful after a time unlawful—that permitted or commanded in one corner, which done in another is justly prohibited and punished. Is justice, then, various and changeable? Nay, but the times over which she presides are not all alike, because they are times.²⁴⁷²⁴⁷    The law of the development of revelation implied in the above passage is one to which Augustin frequently resorts in confutation of objections such as those to which he refers in the previous and following sections. It may likewise be effectively used when similar objections are raised by modern sceptics. In the Rabbinical books there is a tradition of the wanderings of the children of Israel, that not only did their clothes not wax old (Deut. xxix. 5) during those forty years, but that they grew with their growth. The written word is as it were the swaddling-clothes of the holy child Jesus; and as the revelation concerning Him—the Word Incarnate—grew, did the written word grow. God spoke in sundry parts [πολυέμρως] and in divers manners unto the fathers by the prophets (Heb. i. 1); but when the “fulness of the time was come” (Gal. iv. 4), He completed the revelation in His Son. Our Lord indicates this principle when He speaks of divorce in Matt. xix. 8. “Moses,” he says, “because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives; but from the beginning it was not so.” (See Con. Faust. xix. 26, 29.) When objections, then, as to obsolete ritual usages, or the sins committed by Old Testament worthies are urged, the answer is plain: the ritual has become obsolete, because only intended for the infancy of revelation, and the sins, while recorded in, are not approved by Scripture, and those who committed them will be judged according to the measure of revelation they received. See also De Ver. Relig. xvii.; in Ps. lxxiii. 1, liv. 22; Con. Faust. xxii. 25; Trench, Hulsean Lecs. iv., v. (1845); and Candlish’s Reason and Revelation, pp. 58–75. But men, whose days upon the earth are few,²⁴⁸²⁴⁸    Job xiv. 1. because by their own perception they cannot harmonize the causes of former ages and other nations, of which they had no experience, with these of which they have experience, though in one and the same body, day, or family, they can readily see what is suitable for each member, season, part, and person—to the one they take exception, to the other they submit.

14. These things I then knew not, nor observed. They met my eyes on every side, and I saw them not. I composed poems, in which it was not permitted me to place every foot everywhere, but in one metre one way, and in another, nor even in any one verse the same foot in all places. Yet the art itself by which I composed had not different principles for these different cases, but comprised all in one. Still I saw not how that righteousness, which good and holy men submitted to, far more excellently and sublimely comprehended in one all those things which God commanded, 65and in no part varied, though in varying times it did not prescribe all things at once, but distributed and enjoined what was proper for each. And I, being blind, blamed those pious fathers, not only for making use of present things as God commanded and inspired them to do, but also for foreshowing things to come as God was revealing them.²⁴⁹²⁴⁹    Here, as at the end of sec. 17, he alludes to the typical and allegorical character of Old Testament histories. Though he does not with Origen go so far as to disparage the letter of Scripture (see De Civ. Dei, xiii. 21), but upholds it, he constantly employs the allegorical principle. He (alluding to the patriarchs) goes so far, indeed, as to say (Con. Faust., xxii. 24), that “not only the speech but the life of these men was prophetic; and the whole kingdom of the Hebrews was like a great prophet;” and again: “We may discover a prophecy of the coming of Christ and of the Church both in what they said and what they did”. This method of interpretation he first learned from Ambrose. See note on “the letter killeth,” etc. (below, vi. sec. 6), for the danger attending it. On the general subject, reference may also be made to his in Ps. cxxxvi. 3; Serm. 2; De Tentat. Abr. sec. 7; and De Civ. Dei, xvii. 3.

Chapter VIII.—He Argues Against the Same as to the Reason of Offences.

15. Can it at any time or place be an unrighteous thing for a man to love God with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind, and his neighbour as himself?²⁵⁰²⁵⁰    Deut. vi. 5, and Matt. xxii. 37–39. Therefore those offences which be contrary to nature are everywhere and at all times to be held in detestation and punished; such were those of the Sodomites, which should all nations commit, they should all be held guilty of the same crime by the divine law, which hath not so made men that they should in that way abuse one another. For even that fellowship which should be between God and us is violated, when that same nature of which He is author is polluted by the perversity of lust. But those offences which are contrary to the customs of men are to be avoided according to the customs severally prevailing; so that an agreement made, and confirmed by custom or law of any city or nation, may not be violated at the lawless pleasure of any, whether citizen or stranger. For any part which is not consistent with its whole is unseemly. But when God commands anything contrary to the customs or compacts of any nation to be done, though it were never done by them before, it is to be done; and if intermitted it is to be restored, and, if never established, to be established. For if it be lawful for a king, in the state over which he reigns, to command that which neither he himself nor any one before him had commanded, and to obey him cannot be held to be inimical to the public interest,—nay, it were so if he were not obeyed (for obedience to princes is a general compact of human society),—how much more, then, ought we unhesitatingly to obey God, the Governor of all His creatures! For as among the authorities of human society the greater authority is obeyed before the lesser, so must God above all.

16. So also in deeds of violence, where there is a desire to harm, whether by contumely or injury; and both of these either by reason of revenge, as one enemy against another; or to obtain some advantage over another, as the highwayman to the traveller; or for the avoiding of some evil, as with him who is in fear of another; or through envy, as the unfortunate man to one who is happy; or as he that is prosperous in anything to him who he fears will become equal to himself, or whose equality he grieves at; or for the mere pleasure in another’s pains, as the spectators of gladiators, or the deriders and mockers of others. These be the chief iniquities which spring forth from the lust of the flesh, of the eye, and of power, whether singly, or two together, or all at once. And so do men live in opposition to the three and seven, that psaltery “of ten strings,”²⁵¹²⁵¹    Ps. cxliv. 9. “St. Augustin (Quæst in Exod. ii. qu. 71) mentions the two modes of dividing the ten commandments into three and seven, or four and six, and gives what appear to have been his own private reasons for preferring the first. Both commonly existed in his day, but the Anglican mode appears to have been the most usual. It occurs in Origen, Greg. Naz., Jerome, Ambrose, Chrys. St. Augustin alludes to his division again, Serm. 8, 9, de x.Chordis, and sec. 33 on this psalm: ‘To the first commandment there belong three strings because God is trine. To the other, i.e., the love of our neighbour, seven strings. These let us join to those three, which belong to the love of God, if we would on the psaltery of ten strings sing a new song.’”—E.B.P. Thy ten commandments, O God most high and most sweet. But what foul offences can there be against Thee who canst not be defiled? Or what deeds of violence against thee who canst not be harmed? But Thou avengest that which men perpetrate against themselves, seeing also that when they sin against Thee, they do wickedly against their own souls; and iniquity gives itself the lie,²⁵²²⁵²    Ps. xxvii. 12, Vulg. either by corrupting or perverting their nature, which Thou hast made and ordained, or by an immoderate use of things permitted, or in “burning” in things forbidden to that use which is against nature;²⁵³²⁵³    Rom. i. 24–29. or when convicted, raging with heart and voice against Thee, kicking against the pricks;²⁵⁴²⁵⁴    Acts ix. 5. or when, breaking through the pale of human society, they audaciously rejoice in private combinations or divisions, according as they have been pleased or offended. And these things are done whenever Thou art forsaken, O Fountain of Life, who art the only and true Creator and Ruler of the universe, and by a self-willed pride any one false thing is selected therefrom and loved. So, then, by a humble piety we return to Thee; and thou purgest us from our evil customs, and art merciful unto the sins of those who confess unto Thee, and dost “hear the groaning of the prisoner,”²⁵⁵²⁵⁵    Ps. cii. 20. and dost loosen us from those fetters which we have forged for ourselves, if we lift not up against Thee the horns of a false liberty,—66losing all through craving more, by loving more our own private good than Thee, the good of all.

Chapter IX.—That the Judgment of God and Men as to Human Acts of Violence, is Different.

17. But amidst these offences of infamy and violence, and so many iniquities, are the sins of men who are, on the whole, making progress; which, by those who judge rightly, and after the rule of perfection, are censured, yet commended withal, upon the hope of bearing fruit, like as in the green blade of the growing corn. And there are some which resemble offences of infamy or violence, and yet are not sins, because they neither offend Thee, our Lord God, nor social custom: when, for example, things suitable for the times are provided for the use of life, and we are uncertain whether it be out of a lust of having; or when acts are punished by constituted authority for the sake of correction, and we are uncertain whether it be out of a lust of hurting. Many a deed, then, which in the sight of men is disapproved, is approved by Thy testimony; and many a one who is praised by men is, Thou being witness, condemned; because frequently the view of the deed, and the mind of the doer, and the hidden exigency of the period, severally vary. But when Thou unexpectedly commandest an unusual and unthought-of thing—yea, even if Thou hast formerly forbidden it, and still for the time keepest secret the reason of Thy command, and it even be contrary to the ordinance of some society of men, who doubts but it is to be done, inasmuch as that society is righteous which serves Thee?²⁵⁶²⁵⁶    The Manichæans, like the deistical writers of the last century, attacked the spoiling of the Egyptians, the slaughter of the Canaanites, and such episodes. Referring to the former, Augustin says (Con. Faust. xxii. 71), “Then, as for Faustus’ objection to the spoiling of the Egyptians, he knows not what he says. In this Moses not only did not sin, but it would have been sin not to do it. It was by the command of God, who, from His knowledge both of the actions and of the hearts of men, can decide upon what every one should be made to suffer, and through whose agency. The people at that time were still carnal, and engrossed with earthly affection; while the Egyptians were in open rebellion against God, for they used the gold, God’s creature, in the service of idols, to the dishonour of the Creator, and they had grievously oppressed strangers by making them work without pay. Thus the Egyptians deserved the punishment, and the Israelites were suitably employed in inflicting it.” For an exhaustive vindication of the conduct of the children of Israel as the agents of God in punishing the Canaanites, see Graves on the Pentateuch, Part iii. lecture I. See also De Civ. Dei, i. 26; and Quæst. in Jos. 8, 16, etc. But blessed are they who know Thy commands! For all things were done by them who served Thee either to exhibit something necessary at the time, or to foreshow things to come.²⁵⁷²⁵⁷    See note on sec. 14, above.

Chapter X.—He Reproves the Triflings of the Manichæans as to the Fruits of the Earth.

18. These things being ignorant of, I derided those holy servants and prophets of Thine. And what did I gain by deriding them but to be derided by Thee, being insensibly, and little by little, led on to those follies, as to credit that a fig-tree wept when it was plucked, and that the mother-tree shed milky tears? Which fig notwithstanding, plucked not by his own but another’s wickedness, had some “saint”²⁵⁸²⁵⁸    i.e. Manichæan saint. eaten and mingled with his entrails, he should breathe out of it angels; yea, in his prayers he shall assuredly groan and sigh forth particles of God, which particles of the most high and true God should have remained bound in that fig unless they had been set free by the teeth and belly of some “elect saint”!²⁵⁹²⁵⁹    According to this extraordinary system, it was the privilege of the “elect” to set free in eating such parts of the divine substance as were imprisoned in the vegetable creation (Con. Faust. xxxi. 5). They did not marry or work in the fields, and led an ascetic life, the “hearers” or catechumens being privileged to provide them with food. The “elect” passed immediately on dying into the realm of light, while, as a reward for their service, the souls of the “hearers” after death transmigrated into plants (from which they might be most readily freed), or into the “elect,” so as, in their turn, to pass away into the realm of light. See Con. Faust. v. 10, xx. 23; and in Ps. cxl. And I, miserable one, believed that more mercy was to be shown to the fruits of the earth than unto men, for whom they were created; for if a hungry man—who was not a Manichæan—should beg for any, that morsel which should be given him would appear, as it were, condemned to capital punishment.²⁶⁰²⁶⁰    Augustin frequently alludes to their conduct to the poor, in refusing to give them bread or the fruits of the earth, lest in eating they should defile the portion of God contained therein. But to avoid the odium of their conduct, they would inconsequently give money whereby food might be bought. See in Ps. cxl. sec. 12; and De Mor. Manich. 36, 37, and 53.

Chapter XI.—He Refers to the Tears, and the Memorable Dream Concerning Her Son, Granted by God to His Mother.

19. And Thou sendedst Thine hand from above,²⁶¹²⁶¹    Ps. cxliv. 7. and drewest my soul out of that profound darkness, when my mother, Thy faithful one, wept to thee on my behalf more than mothers are wont to weep the bodily death of their children. For she saw that I was dead by that faith and spirit which she had from Thee, and Thou heardest her, O Lord. Thou heardest her, and despisedst not her tears, when, pouring down, they watered the earth²⁶²²⁶²    He alludes here to that devout manner of the Eastern ancients, who used to lie flat on their faces in prayer.—W. W. under her eyes in every place where she prayed; yea, Thou heardest her. For whence was that dream with which Thou consoledst her, so that she permitted me to live with her, and to have my meals at the same table in the house, which she had begun to avoid, hating and detesting the blasphemies of my error? For she saw herself standing on a certain wooden rule,²⁶³²⁶³    Symbolical of the rule of faith. See viii. sec. 30, below. and a bright youth advancing towards her, joyous and smiling 67upon her, whilst she was grieving and bowed down with sorrow. But he having inquired of her the cause of her sorrow and daily weeping (he wishing to teach, as is their wont, and not to be taught), and she answering that it was my perdition she was lamenting, he bade her rest contented, and told her to behold and see “that where she was, there was I also.” And when she looked she saw me standing near her on the same rule. Whence was this, unless that Thine ears were inclined towards her heart? O Thou Good Omnipotent, who so carest for every one of us as if Thou caredst for him only, and so for all as if they were but one!

20. Whence was this, also, that when she had narrated this vision to me, and I tried to put this construction on it, “That she rather should not despair of being some day what I was,” she immediately, without hesitation, replied, “No; for it was not told me that ‘where he is, there shalt thou be,’ but ‘where thou art, there shall he be’”? I confess to Thee, O Lord, that, to the best of my remembrance (and I have oft spoken of this), Thy answer through my watchful mother—that she was not disquieted by the speciousness of my false interpretation, and saw in a moment what was to be seen, and which I myself had not in truth perceived before she spoke—even then moved me more than the dream itself, by which the happiness to that pious woman, to be realized so long after, was, for the alleviation of her present anxiety, so long before predicted. For nearly nine years passed in which I wallowed in the slime of that deep pit and the darkness of falsehood, striving often to rise, but being all the more heavily dashed down. But yet that chaste, pious, and sober widow (such as Thou lovest), now more buoyed up with hope, though no whit less zealous in her weeping and mourning, desisted not, at all the hours of her supplications, to bewail my case unto Thee. And her prayers entered into Thy presence,²⁶⁴²⁶⁴    Ps. lxxxviii. 1. and yet Thou didst still suffer me to be involved and re-involved in that darkness.

Chapter XII.—The Excellent Answer of the Bishop When Referred to by His Mother as to the Conversion of Her Son.

21. And meanwhile Thou grantedst her another answer, which I recall; for much I pass over, hastening on to those things which the more strongly impel me to confess unto Thee, and much I do not remember. Thou didst grant her then another answer, by a priest of Thine, a certain bishop, reared in Thy Church and well versed in Thy books. He, when this woman had entreated that he would vouchsafe to have some talk with me, refute my errors, unteach me evil things, and teach me good (for this he was in the habit of doing when he found people fitted to receive it), refused, very prudently, as I afterwards came to see. For he answered that I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of that heresy, and that I had already perplexed divers inexperienced persons with vexatious questions,²⁶⁵²⁶⁵    We can easily understand that Augustin’s dialectic skill would render him a formidable opponent, while, with the zeal of a neophyte, he urged those difficulties of Scripture (De Agon. Christ. iv ) which the Manichæans knew so well how to employ. In an interesting passage (De Duab. Anim. con. Manich. ix.) he tells us that his victories over “inexperienced persons” stimulated him to fresh conquests, and thus kept him bound longer than he would otherwise have been in the chains of this heresy. as she had informed him. “But leave him alone for a time,” saith he, “only pray God for him; he will of himself, by reading, discover what that error is, and how great its impiety.” He disclosed to her at the same time how he himself, when a little one, had, by his misguided mother, been given over to the Manichæans, and had not only read, but even written out almost all their books, and had come to see (without argument or proof from any one) how much that sect was to be shunned, and had shunned it. Which when he had said, and she would not be satisfied, but repeated more earnestly her entreaties, shedding copious tears, that he would see and discourse with me, he, a little vexed at her importunity, exclaimed, “Go thy way, and God bless thee, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” Which answer (as she often mentioned in her conversations with me) she accepted as though it were a voice from heaven.

————————————

68

Book IV.

————————————

Then follows a period of nine years from the nineteenth year of his age, during which having lost a friend, he followed the Manichæans—and wrote books on the fair and fit, and published a work on the liberal arts, and the categories of Aristotle.

————————————

Chapter I.—Concerning that Most Unhappy Time in Which He, Being Deceived, Deceived Others; And Concerning the Mockers of His Confession.

1. During this space of nine years, then, from my nineteenth to my eight and twentieth year, we went on seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, in divers lusts; publicly, by sciences which they style “liberal”—secretly, with a falsity called religion. Here proud, there superstitious, everywhere vain! Here, striving after the emptiness of popular fame, even to theatrical applauses, and poetic contests, and strifes for grassy garlands, and the follies of shows and the intemperance of desire. There, seeking to be purged from these our corruptions by carrying food to those who were called “elect” and “holy,” out of which, in the laboratory of their stomachs, they should make for us angels and gods, by whom we might be delivered.²⁶⁶²⁶⁶    Augustin tells us that he went not beyond the rank of a “hearer,” because he found the Manichæan teachers readier in refuting others than in establishing their own views, and seems only to have looked for some esoteric doctrine to have been disclosed to him under their materialistic teaching as to God—viz. that He was an unmeasured Light that extended all ways but one, infinitely (Serm. iv. sec 5.)—rather than to have really accepted it.—De Util. Cred. Præf. See also iii. sec. 18, notes 1 and 2, above. These things did I follow eagerly, and practise with my friends—by me and with me deceived. Let the arrogant, and such as have not been yet savingly cast down and stricken by Thee, O my God, laugh at me; but notwithstanding I would confess to Thee mine own shame in Thy praise. Bear with me, I beseech Thee, and give me grace to retrace in my present remembrance the circlings of my past errors, and to “offer to Thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving.”²⁶⁷²⁶⁷    Ps. cxvi. 17. For what am I to myself without Thee, but a guide to mine own downfall? Or what am I even at the best, but one sucking Thy milk,²⁶⁸²⁶⁸    1 Pet. ii. 2. and feeding upon Thee, the meat that perisheth not?²⁶⁹²⁶⁹    John vi. 27. But what kind of man is any man, seeing that he is but a man? Let, then, the strong and the mighty laugh at us, but let us who are “poor and needy”²⁷⁰²⁷⁰    Ps. lxxiv. 21. confess unto Thee.

Chapter II.—He Teaches Rhetoric, the Only Thing He Loved, and Scorns the Soothsayer, Who Promised Him Victory.

2. In those years I taught the art of rhetoric, and, overcome by cupidity, put to sale a loquacity by which to overcome. Yet I preferred—Lord, Thou knowest—to have honest scholars (as they are esteemed); and these I, without artifice, taught artifices, not to be put in practise against the life of the guiltless, though sometimes for the life of the guilty. And Thou, O God, from afar sawest me stumbling in that slippery path, and amid much smoke²⁷¹²⁷¹    Isa. xlii. 3, and Matt. xii. 20. sending out some flashes of fidelity, which I exhibited in that my guidance of such as loved vanity and sought after leasing,²⁷²²⁷²    Ps. iv. 2. I being their companion. In those years I had one (whom I knew not in what is called lawful wedlock, but whom my wayward passion, void of understanding, had discovered), yet one only, remaining faithful even to her; in whom I found out truly by my own experience what difference there is between the restraints of the marriage bonds, contracted for the sake of issue, and the compact of a lustful love, where children are born against the parents will, although, being born, they compel love.

3. I remember, too, that when I decided to compete for a theatrical prize, a soothsayer demanded of me what I would give him to win; but I, detesting and abominating such foul mysteries, answered, “That if the garland were of imperishable gold, I would not suffer a fly to be destroyed to secure it for me.” For he was to slay certain living creatures in his sacrifices, and by those honours to invite the devils to give me their support. But this ill thing I also refused, 69not out of a pure love²⁷³²⁷³    “He alone is truly pure who waiteth on God, and keepeth himself to Him alone ” (Aug. De Vita Beata, sec. 18). “Whoso seeketh God is pure, because the soul hath in God her legitimate husband. Whosoever seeketh of God anything besides God, doth not love God purely. If a wife loved her husband because he is rich, she is not pure, for she loveth not her husband but the gold of her husband” (Aug. Serm. 137). “Whoso seeks from God any other reward but God, and for it would serve God, esteems what he wishes to receive more than Him from whom he would receive it. What, then? hath God no reward? None, save Himself. The reward of God is God Himself. This it loveth; if it love aught beside, it is no pure love. You depart from the immortal flame, you will be chilled, corrupted. Do not depart; it will be thy corruption, will be fornication in thee” (Aug. in Ps. lxxii. sec. 32). “The pure fear of the Lord (Ps. xix. 9) is that wherewith the Church, the more ardently she loveth her husband, the more diligently she avoids offending Him, and therefore love, when perfected, casteth not out this fear, but it remaineth for ever and ever” (Aug. in loc.). “Under the name of pure fear is signified that will whereby we must needs be averse from sin, and avoid sin, not through the constant anxiety of infirmity, but through the tranquillity of affection” (De Civ. Dei, xiv. sec. 65).—E. B. P. for Thee, O God of my heart; for I knew not how to love Thee, knowing not how to conceive aught beyond corporeal brightness.²⁷⁴²⁷⁴    See note on sec. 9, below. And doth not a soul, sighing after such-like fictions, commit fornication against Thee, trust in false things,²⁷⁵²⁷⁵    “Indisputably we must take care, lest the mind, believing that which it does not see, feign to itself something which is not, and hope for and love that which is false. For in that case it will not be charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned, which is the end of the commandment” (De Trin. viii. sec. 6). And again (Confessions, i. 1): “For who can call on Thee, not knowing Thee? For he that knoweth Thee not may call on Thee as other than Thou art.” and nourish the wind?²⁷⁶²⁷⁶    Hosea xii. 1. But I would not, forsooth, have sacrifices offered to devils on my behalf, though I myself was offering sacrifices to them by that superstition. For what else is nourishing the wind but nourishing them, that is, by our wanderings to become their enjoyment and derision?

Chapter III.—Not Even the Most Experienced Men Could Persuade Him of the Vanity of Astrology to Which He Was Devoted.

4. Those impostors, then, whom they designate Mathematicians, I consulted without hesitation, because they used no sacrifices, and invoked the aid of no spirit for their divinations, which art Christian and true piety fitly rejects and condemns.²⁷⁷²⁷⁷    Augustin classes the votaries of both wizards and astrologers (De Doctr. Christ. ii. 23; and De Civ. Dei, x. 9; compare also Justin Martyr, Apol. ii. c. 5) as alike “deluded and imposed on by the false angels, to whom the lowest part of the world has been put in subjection by the law of God’s providence;” and he says, “All arts of this sort are either nullities, or are part of a guilty superstition springing out of a baleful fellowship between men and devils, and are to be utterly repudiated and avoided by the Christian, as the covenants of a false and treacherous friendship.” It is remarkable that though these arts were strongly denounced in the Pentateuch, the Jews—acquiring them from the surrounding Gentile nations—have embedded them deeply in their oral law, said also to be given by Moses (e.g. in Moed Katon 28, and Shabbath 156, prosperity comes from the influence of the stars; in Shabbath 61 it is a question whether the influence of the stars or a charm has been effective; and in Sanhedrin 17 magic is one of the qualifications for the Sanhedrim). It might have been expected that the Christians, if only from that reaction against Judaism which shows itself in Origen’s disparagement of the letter of the Old Testament Scriptures (see De Princip. iv. 15, 16), would have shrunk from such strange arts. But the influx of pagans, who had practiced them, into the Christian Church appears gradually to have leavened it in no slight degree. This is not only true of the Valentinians (see Kaye’s Clement of Alex. vi.) and other heretics, but the influence of these contacts is seen even in the writings of the “orthodox.” Those who can read between the lines will find no slight trace of this (after separating what they would conceive to be true from what is manifestly false) in the story told by Zonaras, in his Annals, of the controversy between the Rabbis and Sylvester, Bishop of Rome, before Constantine. The Jews were worsted in argument, and evidently thought an appeal to miracles might, from the Emperor’s education, bring him over to their side. An ox is brought forth. The Jewish wonder-worker whispers a mystic name into its ear, and it falls dead; but Sylvester, according to the story, is quite equal to the occasion, and restores the animal to life again by uttering the name of the Redeemer. It may have been that the cessation of miracles may have gradually led unstable professors of Christianity to invent miracles; and, as Bishop Kaye observes (Tertullian, p. 95), “the success of the first attempts naturally encouraged others to practice similar impositions on the credulity of mankind.” As to the time of the cessation of miracles, comparison may be profitably made of the views of Kaye, in the early part of c. ii. of his Tertullian, and of Blunt, in his Right Use of the Early Fathers, series ii. lecture 6. For good it is to confess unto Thee, and to say, “Be merciful unto me, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee;”²⁷⁸²⁷⁸    Ps. xli. 4. and not to abuse Thy goodness for a license to sin, but to remember the words of the Lord, “Behold, thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.”²⁷⁹²⁷⁹    John v. 14. All of which salutary advice they endeavour to destroy when they say, “The cause of thy sin is inevitably determined in heaven;” and, “This did Venus, or Saturn, or Mars;” in order that man, forsooth, flesh and blood, and proud corruption, may be blameless, while the Creator and Ordainer of heaven and stars is to bear the blame. And who is this but Thee, our God, the sweetness and well-spring of righteousness, who renderest “to every man according to his deeds,”²⁸⁰²⁸⁰    Rom. ii. 6, and Matt. xvi. 27. and despisest not “a broken and a contrite heart!”²⁸¹²⁸¹    Ps. li. 17.

5. There was in those days a wise man, very skilful in medicine, and much renowned therein, who had with his own proconsular hand put the Agonistic garland upon my distempered head, not, though, as a physician;²⁸²²⁸²    This physician was Vindicianus, the “acute old man” mentioned in vii. sec. 8, below, and again in Ep. 138, as “the most eminent physician of his day.” Augustin’s disease, however, could not be reached by his remedies. We are irresistibly reminded of the words of our great poet:—
   “Canst thou minister to a mind diseased;
   Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
   Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
   And, with some sweet oblivious antidote,
   Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
    Which weighs upon the heart!” —Macbeth, act. v. scene 3.
   
for this disease Thou alone healest, who resistest the proud, and givest grace to the humble.²⁸³²⁸³    1 Pet. v. 5, and Jas. iv. 6. But didst Thou fail me even by that old man, or forbear from healing my soul? For when I had become more familiar with him, and hung assiduously and fixedly on his conversation (for though couched in simple language, it was replete with vivacity, life, and earnestness), when he had perceived from my discourse that I was given to books of the horoscope-casters, he, in a kind and fatherly manner, advised me to throw them away, and not vainly bestow the care and labour necessary for useful things upon these vanities; saying that he himself in his earlier years had studied that art with a view to gaining his living 70by following it as a profession, and that, as he had understood Hippocrates, he would soon have understood this, and yet he had given it up, and followed medicine, for no other reason than that he discovered it to be utterly false, and he, being a man of character, would not gain his living by beguiling people. “But thou,” saith he, “who hast rhetoric to support thyself by, so that thou followest this of free will, not of necessity—all the more, then, oughtest thou to give me credit herein, who laboured to attain it so perfectly, as I wished to gain my living by it alone.” When I asked him to account for so many true things being foretold by it, he answered me (as he could) “that the force of chance, diffused throughout the whole order of nature, brought this about. For if when a man by accident opens the leaves of some poet, who sang and intended something far different, a verse oftentimes fell out wondrously apposite to the present business, it were not to be wondered at,” he continued, “if out of the soul of man, by some higher instinct, not knowing what goes on within itself, an answer should be given by chance, not art, which should coincide with the business and actions of the questioner.”

6. And thus truly, either by or through him, Thou didst look after me. And Thou didst delineate in my memory what I might afterwards search out for myself. But at that time neither he, nor my most dear Nebridius, a youth most good and most circumspect, who scoffed at that whole stock of divination, could persuade me to forsake it, the authority of the authors influencing me still more; and as yet I had lighted upon no certain proof—such as I sought—whereby it might without doubt appear that what had been truly foretold by those consulted was by accident or chance, not by the art of the star-gazers.

Chapter IV.—Sorely Distressed by Weeping at the Death of His Friend, He Provides Consolation for Himself.

7. In those years, when I first began to teach rhetoric in my native town, I had acquired a very dear friend, from association in our studies, of mine own age, and, like myself, just rising up into the flower of youth. He had grown up with me from childhood, and we had been both school-fellows and play-fellows. But he was not then my friend, nor, indeed, afterwards, as true friendship is; for true it is not but in such as Thou bindest together, cleaving unto Thee by that love which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us.²⁸⁴²⁸⁴    Rom. v. 5. But yet it was too sweet, being ripened by the fervour of similar studies. For, from the true faith (which he, as a youth, had not soundly and thoroughly become master of), I had turned him aside towards those superstitious and pernicious fables which my mother mourned in me. With me this man’s mind now erred, nor could my soul exist without him. But behold, Thou wert close behind Thy fugitives—at once God of vengeance²⁸⁵²⁸⁵    Ps. xciv. 1. and Fountain of mercies, who turnest us to Thyself by wondrous means. Thou removedst that man from this life when he had scarce completed one whole year of my friendship, sweet to me above all the sweetness of that my life.

8. “Who can show forth all Thy praise”²⁸⁶²⁸⁶    Ps. cvi. 2. which he hath experienced in himself alone? What was it that Thou didst then, O my God, and how unsearchable are the depths of Thy judgments!²⁸⁷²⁸⁷    Ps. xxxvi. 6, and Rom. xi. 33. For when, sore sick of a fever, he long lay unconscious in a death-sweat, and all despaired of his recovery, he was baptized without his knowledge;²⁸⁸²⁸⁸    See i. sec. 17, note 3, above. myself meanwhile little caring, presuming that his soul would retain rather what it had imbibed from me, than what was done to his unconscious body. Far different, however, was it, for he was revived and restored. Straightway, as soon as I could talk to him (which I could as soon as he was able, for I never left him, and we hung too much upon each other), I attempted to jest with him, as if he also would jest with me at that baptism which he had received when mind and senses were in abeyance, but had now learnt that he had received. But he shuddered at me, as if I were his enemy; and, with a remarkable and unexpected freedom, admonished me, if I desired to continue his friend, to desist from speaking to him in such a way. I, confounded and confused, concealed all my emotions, till he should get well, and his health be strong enough to allow me to deal with him as I wished. But he was withdrawn from my frenzy, that with Thee he might be preserved for my comfort. A few days after, during my absence, he had a return of the fever, and died.

9. At this sorrow my heart was utterly darkened, and whatever I looked upon was death. My native country was a torture to me, and my father’s house a wondrous unhappiness; and whatsoever I had participated in with him, wanting him, turned into a frightful torture. Mine eyes sought him everywhere, but he was not granted them; and I hated all places because he was not in them; nor could they now say to me, “Behold; he is coming,” as they did when he was alive and absent. I 71became a great puzzle to myself, and asked my soul why she was so sad, and why she so exceedingly disquieted me;²⁸⁹²⁸⁹    Ps. xlii. 5. but she knew not what to answer me. And if I said, “Hope thou in God,”²⁹⁰²⁹⁰    Ibid. she very properly obeyed me not; because that most dear friend whom she had lost was, being man, both truer and better than that phantasm²⁹¹²⁹¹    The mind may rest in theories and abstractions, but the heart craves a being that it can love; and Archbishop Whately has shown in one of his essays that the idol worship of every age had doubtless its origin in the craving of mind and heart for an embodiment of the object of worship. “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,” says Philip (John xiv. 8), and he expresses the longing of the soul; and when the Lord replies, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,” He reveals to us God’s satisfaction of human wants in the incarnation of His Son. Augustin’s heart was now thrown in upon itself, and his view of God gave him no consolation. It satisfied his mind, perhaps, in a measure, to think of God as a “corporeal brightness” (see iii. 12; iv. 3, 12, 31; v. 19, etc.) when free from trouble, but it could not satisfy him now. He had yet to learn of Him who is the very image of God—who by His divine power raised the dead to life again, while, with perfect human sympathy, He could “weep with those that wept,”—the “Son of Man” (not of a man, He being miraculously born, but of the race of men [ἀνθρῶπου]), i.e. the Son of Mankind. See also viii. sec. 27, note, below. she was bid to hope in. Naught but tears were sweet to me, and they succeeded my friend in the dearest of my affections.

Chapter V.—Why Weeping is Pleasant to the Wretched.

10. And now, O Lord, these things are passed away, and time hath healed my wound. May I learn from Thee, who art Truth, and apply the ear of my heart unto Thy mouth, that Thou mayest tell me why weeping should be so sweet to the unhappy.²⁹²²⁹²    For so it has ever been found to be:—
   “Est quædam flere voluptas;
   Expletur lacrymis egeriturque dolor.”
   —Ovid, Trist. iv. 3, 38. Hast Thou—although present everywhere—cast away far from Thee our misery? And Thou abidest in Thyself, but we are disquieted with divers trials; and yet, unless we wept in Thine ears, there would be no hope for us remaining. Whence, then, is it that such sweet fruit is plucked from the bitterness of life, from groans, tears, sighs, and lamentations? Is it the hope that Thou hearest us that sweetens it? This is true of prayer, for therein is a desire to approach unto Thee. But is it also in grief for a thing lost, and the sorrow with which I was then overwhelmed? For I had neither hope of his coming to life again, nor did I seek this with my tears; but I grieved and wept only, for I was miserable, and had lost my joy. Or is weeping a bitter thing, and for distaste of the things which aforetime we enjoyed before, and even then, when we are loathing them, does it cause us pleasure?

Chapter VI.—His Friend Being Snatched Away by Death, He Imagines that He Remains Only as Half.

11. But why do I speak of these things? For this is not the time to question, but rather to confess unto Thee. Miserable I was, and miserable is every soul fettered by the friendship of perishable things—he is torn to pieces when he loses them, and then is sensible of the misery which he had before ever he lost them. Thus was it at that time with me; I wept most bitterly, and found rest in bitterness. Thus was I miserable, and that life of misery I accounted dearer than my friend. For though I would willingly have changed it, yet I was even more unwilling to lose it than him; yea, I knew not whether I was willing to lose it even for him, as is handed down to us (if not an invention) of Pylades and Orestes, that they would gladly have died one for another, or both together, it being worse than death to them not to live together. But there had sprung up in me some kind of feeling, too, contrary to this, for both exceedingly wearisome was it to me to live, and dreadful to die, I suppose, the more I loved him, so much the more did I hate and fear, as a most cruel enemy, that death which had robbed me of him; and I imagined it would suddenly annihilate all men, as it had power over him. Thus, I remember, it was with me. Behold my heart, O my God! Behold and look into me, for I remember it well, O my Hope! who cleansest me from the uncleanness of such affections, directing mine eyes towards Thee, and plucking my feet out of the net.²⁹³²⁹³    Ps. xxv. 15. For I was astonished that other mortals lived, since he whom I loved, as if he would never die, was dead; and I wondered still more that I, who was to him a second self, could live when he was dead. Well did one say of his friend, “Thou half of my soul,”²⁹⁴²⁹⁴    Horace, Carm. i. ode 3. for I felt that my soul and his soul were but one soul in two bodies;²⁹⁵²⁹⁵    Ovid, Trist. iv. eleg. iv. 72. and, consequently, my life was a horror to me, because I would not live in half. And therefore, perchance, was I afraid to die, lest he should die wholly²⁹⁶²⁹⁶    Augustin’s reference to this passage in his Retractations is quoted at the beginning of the book. He might have gone further than to describe his words here as declamatio levis, since the conclusion is not logical. whom I had so greatly loved.

Chapter VII.—Troubled by Restlessness and Grief, He Leaves His Country a Second Time for Carthage.

12. O madness, which knowest not how to love men as men should be loved! O foolish man that I then was, enduring with so much impatience the lot of man! So I fretted, sighed, wept, tormented myself, and took neither rest nor advice. For I bore about with me a rent and polluted soul, impatient of being borne by me, and where to repose it I found not. Not 72in pleasant groves, not in sport or song, not in fragrant spots, nor in magnificent banquetings, nor in the pleasures of the bed and the couch, nor, finally, in books and songs did it find repose. All things looked terrible, even the very light itself; and whatsoever was not what he was, was repulsive and hateful, except groans and tears, for in those alone found I a little repose. But when my soul was withdrawn from them, a heavy burden of misery weighed me down. To Thee, O Lord, should it have been raised, for Thee to lighten and avert it.²⁹⁷²⁹⁷    “The great and merciful Architect of His Church, whom not only the philosophers have styled, but the Scripture itself calls τεχνίτης (an artist or artificer), employs not on us the hammer and chisel with an intent to wound or mangle us, but only to square and fashion our hard and stubborn hearts into such lively stones as may both grace and strengthen His heavenly structure.”—Boyle. This I knew, but was neither willing nor able; all the more since, in my thoughts of Thee, Thou wert not any solid or substantial thing to me. For Thou wert not Thyself, but an empty phantasm,²⁹⁸²⁹⁸    See iii. 9; iv. 3, 12, 31; v. 19. and my error was my god. If I attempted to discharge my burden thereon, that it might find rest, it sank into emptiness, and came rushing down again upon me, and I remained to myself an unhappy spot, where I could neither stay nor depart from. For whither could my heart fly from my heart? Whither could I fly from mine own self? Whither not follow myself? And yet fled I from my country; for so should my eyes look less for him where they were not accustomed to see him. And thus I left the town of Thagaste, and came to Carthage.

Chapter VIII.—That His Grief Ceased by Time, and the Consolation of Friends.

13. Times lose no time, nor do they idly roll through our senses. They work strange operations on the mind.²⁹⁹²⁹⁹    As Seneca has it: “Quod ratio non quit, sæpe sanabit mora” (Agam. 130). Behold, they came and went from day to day, and by coming and going they disseminated in my mind other ideas and other remembrances, and by little and little patched me up again with the former kind of delights, unto which that sorrow of mine yielded. But yet there succeeded, not certainly other sorrows, yet the causes of other sorrows.³⁰⁰³⁰⁰    See iv. cc. 1, 10, 12, and vi. c. 16. For whence had that former sorrow so easily penetrated to the quick, but that I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one who must die as if he were never to die? But what revived and refreshed me especially was the consolations of other friends,³⁰¹³⁰¹    “Friendship,” says Lord Bacon, in his essay thereon,—the sentiment being perhaps suggested by Cicero’s “Secundas res splendidiores facit amicitia et adversas partiens communicansque leviores” (De Amicit. 6),—“redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves.” Augustin appears to have been eminently open to influences of this kind. In his De Duab. Anim. con. Manich. (c. ix.) he tells us that friendship was one of the bonds that kept him in the ranks of the Manichæans; and here we find that, aided by time and weeping, it restored him in his great grief. See also v. sec. 19, and vi. sec 26, below. with whom I did love what instead of Thee I loved. And this was a monstrous fable and protracted lie, by whose adulterous contact our soul, which lay itching in our ears, was being polluted. But that fable would not die to me so oft as any of my friends died. There were other things in them which did more lay hold of my mind,—to discourse and jest with them; to indulge in an interchange of kindnesses; to read together pleasant books; together to trifle, and together to be earnest; to differ at times without ill-humour, as a man would do with his own self; and even by the infrequency of these differences to give zest to our more frequent consentings; sometimes teaching, sometimes being taught; longing for the absent with impatience, and welcoming the coming with joy. These and similar expressions, emanating from the hearts of those who loved and were beloved in return, by the countenance, the tongue, the eyes, and a thousand pleasing movements, were so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of many to make but one.

Chapter IX.—That the Love of a Human Being, However Constant in Loving and Returning Love, Perishes; While He Who Loves God Never Loses a Friend.

14. This is it that is loved in friends; and so loved that a man’s conscience accuses itself if he love not him by whom he is beloved, or love not again him that loves him, expecting nothing from him but indications of his love. Hence that mourning if one die, and gloom of sorrow, that steeping of the heart in tears, all sweetness turned into bitterness, and upon the loss of the life of the dying, the death of the living. Blessed be he who loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thy sake. For he alone loses none dear to him to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God, the God that created heaven and earth,³⁰²³⁰²    Gen. i. 1. and filleth them,³⁰³³⁰³    Jer. xxiii. 24. because by filling them He created them?³⁰⁴³⁰⁴    See i. 2, 3, above. None loseth Thee but he who leaveth Thee. And he who leaveth Thee, whither goeth he, or whither fleeth he, but from Thee well pleased to Thee angry? For where doth not he find Thy law in his own punishment? “And Thy law is the truth,”³⁰⁵³⁰⁵    Ps. cxix. 142, and John xvii. 17. and truth Thou.³⁰⁶³⁰⁶    John xiv. 6.

Chapter X.—That All Things Exist that They May Perish, and that We are Not Safe Unless God Watches Over Us.

15. “Turn us again, O Lord God of Hosts, 73cause Thy face to shine; and we shall be saved.”³⁰⁷³⁰⁷    Ps. lxxx. 19. For whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless towards Thee, it is affixed to sorrows,³⁰⁸³⁰⁸    See iv. cc. 1, 12, and vi. c. 16, below. yea, though it is affixed to beauteous things without Thee and without itself. And yet they were not unless they were from Thee. They rise and set; and by rising, they begin as it were to be; and they grow, that they may become perfect; and when perfect, they wax old and perish; and all wax not old, but all perish. Therefore when they rise and tend to be, the more rapidly they grow that they may be, so much the more they hasten not to be. This is the way of them.³⁰⁹³⁰⁹    It is interesting in connection with the above passages to note what Augustin says elsewhere as to the origin of the law of death in the sin of our first parents. In his De Gen. ad Lit. (vi. 25) he speaks thus of their condition in the garden, and the provision made for the maintenance of their life: “Aliud est non posse mori, sicut quasdam naturas immortales creavit Deus; aliud est autem posse non mori, secundum quem modum primus creatus est homo immortalis.” Adam, he goes on to say, was able to avert death, by partaking of the tree of life. He enlarges on this doctrine in Book xiii. De Civ. Dei. He says (sec. 20): “Our first parents decayed not with years, nor drew nearer to death—a condition secured to them in God’s marvellous grace by the tree of life, which grew along with the forbidden tree in the midst of Paradise.” Again (sec. 19) he says: “Why do the philosophers find that absurd which the Christian faith preaches, namely, that our first parents were so created, that, if they had not sinned, they would not have been dismissed from their bodies by any death, but would have been endowed with immortality as the reward of their obedience, and would have lived eternally with their bodies?” That this was the doctrine of the early Church has been fully shown by Bishop Bull in his State of Man before the Fall, vol. ii. Theophilus of Antioch was of opinion (Ad Autolyc. c. 24) that Adam might have gone on from strength to strength, until at last he “would have been taken up into heaven.” See also on this subject Dean Buckland’s Sermon on Death; and Delitzsch, Bibl. Psychol. vi. secs. 1 and 2. Thus much hast Thou given them, because they are parts of things, which exist not all at the same time, but by departing and succeeding they together make up the universe, of which they are parts. And even thus is our speech accomplished by signs emitting a sound; but this, again, is not perfected unless one word pass away when it has sounded its part, in order that another may succeed it. Let my soul praise Thee out of all these things, O God, the Creator of all; but let not my soul be affixed to these things by the glue of love, through the senses of the body. For they go whither they were to go, that they might no longer be; and they rend her with pestilent desires, because she longs to be, and yet loves to rest in what she loves. But in these things no place is to be found; they stay not—they flee; and who is he that is able to follow them with the senses of the flesh? Or who can grasp them, even when they are near? For tardy is the sense of the flesh, because it is the sense of the flesh, and its boundary is itself. It sufficeth for that for which it was made, but it is not sufficient to stay things running their course from their appointed starting-place to the end appointed. For in Thy word, by which they were created, they hear the fiat, “Hence and hitherto.”

Chapter XI.—That Portions of the World are Not to Be Loved; But that God, Their Author, is Immutable, and His Word Eternal.

16. Be not foolish, O my soul, and deaden not the ear of thine heart with the tumult of thy folly. Hearken thou also. The word itself invokes thee to return; and there is the place of rest imperturbable, where love is not abandoned if itself abandoneth not. Behold, these things pass away, that others may succeed them, and so this lower universe be made complete in all its parts. But do I depart anywhere, saith the word of God? There fix thy habitation. There commit whatsoever thou hast thence, O my soul; at all events now thou art tired out with deceits. Commit to truth whatsoever thou hast from the truth, and nothing shall thou lose; and thy decay shall flourish again, and all thy diseases be healed,³¹⁰³¹⁰