Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Confessions 9
Cicero and the Old Latin Bible
In Carthage, Augustine studied rhetoric, that is, the art of public speaking. Ancient education relied on a "great books" curriculum, and so students of rhetoric were expected to master the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.), the great statesman of the Roman Republic whose eloquence was esteemed as the pinnacle of Latin oratory. In his studies, Augustine came across Cicero's Hortensius.11 This led him to commit himself to a life of wisdom. But Augustine was raised Christian and therefore sought out wisdom as Christians understood it. He turned naturally to the Bible, but it proved, especially in its crude Old Latin translation, deeply disappointing. From Confessions, Book 3:
(4.7) In the regular course of study, I came upon the book of a certain Cicero whose tongue nearly all admire, but not his heart.12 But that book of his contained an exhortation to philosophy. It was called Hortensius. In fact, that book changed my way of feeling and changed the character of my prayers to You, O Lord. It altered my wishes and my desires. Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and I yearned with an unbelievable burning fire within my heart for the immortality of wisdom. I began to rise up so that I might return to You. For it was not to sharpen my tongue (this was the apparent object being bought at my mother's expense, for I was in my nineteenth year, and my father had died two years before)—it was not, I say, to sharpen my tongue that I used that book. It was not its style of speech which influenced me, but rather what it spoke about.
(4.8) How burning was my desire, O my God, how burning my desire to fly back to You from earthly things! I was unaware of what You were doing with me. For "wisdom dwells with You" (Jb 12:13, 16). The love of wisdom bears the Greek name "philosophy," and it was this love that that book enkindled in me. . . . What brought me relish in this exhortation [of Cicero] was that I was excited and aroused and inflamed to love, seek after, attain, and strongly embrace not this or that philosophic school, but wisdom itself, whatever it is. The only thing to dim my blaze was the fact that the name of Christ was not there, for this name, by Your mercy, O Lord (Ps 24:7), this name of my Savior, Your Son, my youthful heart had drunk in piously with my mother's milk and until that time had retained it in its depths. Whatever lacked this name could not completely win me over, howsoever well expressed and polished and true appearing.
11. Only fragments of Cicero's Hortensius survive. See Maurice Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron, CEASA 5–6 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1958), 19–48; Karin Schlapbach, Aug-Lex 3 (2006): 425–36. 12. "A certain Cicero": The phrase "a certain" (cuiusdam) may sound dismissive, but it simply seems to have been a rhetorical convention. Augustine uses the same of St. Paul: conf. 12.15.20. On this, see O'Donnell, 2:164.