Schiavoni, Venice). Scala (continued)
Introduction xi
but he spoke it with a detectable African accent.4 He was proud of his African heritage, and he owed much in both theology and piety to traditions of North African Christianity.5 Augustine the bishop had neither miter nor crosier. He said no private masses and had no private chapel. Nor did he wear distinctive episcopal garb. There was, at the time, no settled uniform for clergy. Augustine, by his own account, spurned fineries and dressed with great simplicity, likely in the rough robes of a monk. Carpaccio's image is wrong in other ways as well. It is almost impossible to imagine the historical Augustine spending long hours alone writing. He seems everywhere and always surrounded by people, by close friends and clamoring parishioners: preaching extemporaneously to large and noisy crowds in Hippo and Carthage; listening in frustration to lawsuits between contentious local litigants; chewing over the Bible with his monks and clergy as they shared their common meals; or deliberating long hours in council with his fellow North African bishops. Augustine was certainly an author, but few writings were likely written with his own pen. He mostly spoke his books, dictating them, often late at night, to stenographers who worked on the staff of his government-supported church. We think of Augustine as a great writer, but contemporaries knew him as a great talker. He was, in fact, a talker by profession, a highly trained and enormously gifted orator. He certainly consulted books, but most often cited them, especially the Bible, from his prodigious memory.
Pictures cannot capture that voice of his. The historical Augustine comes down to us as all voice. One hears through that voice, through that endless flow of sonorous words, an intellect at times fierce and combative, but more often penetrating and restless, always searching, always probing. But what catches our ear, as it caught the ear of his first hearers, is the heart beneath that voice, that uncanny ability of his to speak across the centuries, heart to heart, his heart to ours.
The book you have in your hand offers, in its own way, a portrait of Augustine. Its materials are not paint on a canvas, but words on a page. Its words are mostly Augustine's own. In these pages, I try and let Augustine tell his own story in his own words. In the process, I hope to help readers tune their ears to the melodies of his speech and to the swirl of his mind. His was an agitated eloquence, and he used it to ponder and wrestle aloud with life's
4. In De ordine 2.17.45 (BA 4/2:296), Augustine complains that "even I, for whom a thorough study of these matters [of pronunciation and diction] has been a dire necessity, am nevertheless censured by the Italians for my pronunciation of many words" (trans. Russell, FOTC 5:321).
5. See J. Kevin Coyle, "The Self-Identity of North African Christians in Augustine's Time," Augustinus Afer: Saint Augustin: africanité et universalité: Actes du colloque international Alger-Annaba, 1–7 avril 2001, ed. PierreYves Fux, Jean-Michel Roessli, and Otto Wermelinger (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 2003), 61–74.