Augustine in His Own Words
(5.9) So I decided to direct my attention to the Holy Scriptures, to see what they were like. I see it now as something not open to the proud nor laid bare to mere children, something lowly on first being approached but exalted on further reading, something veiled in mysteries. But I was not such that I could lower my head to go through its doorway and up its steps. I did not feel the same about turning to Scripture as I now do in speaking of it. Rather, it seemed to me unworthy of being compared with the Ciceronian standard of worth. My unhealthy pride shunned its style, and my intellectual vision failed to penetrate its interiority. True, this vision is such that it grows along with children, but I disdained to be a child and, inflated with arrogance, I thought myself grown-up.13
"The Son of These Tears"
At this decisive moment Augustine embraced Manicheism, a gnostic religion founded in third-century Persia. Manichees portrayed themselves as a sort of elite Christianity and attacked orthodox Christianity, its teaching, its lifestyle, and its Bible, especially the Old Testament. Much of the drama and the philosophical meditation of Confessions centers on how Augustine probes his former Manichean self, not only asking why he joined the Manichees but also denouncing his old ways of thinking and sounding out his current and quite pointed objections to the Manichean worldview. We will explore Manicheism and Augustine's arguments against it at length in Chapter 6. Here our focus is on biography. The following is a famous scene of Augustine's mother Monnica begging the local bishop to intervene and convince her son to leave what she saw as a dark heretical cult. From Confessions, Book 3:
(11.20) Almost nine years went by during which I "wallowed in the deep mire" (Ps 68:3) and darkness of error, while I frequently tried to rise above it, only to sink down more heavily. Yet that chaste, holy, and sober widow (such as you love), already more cheerful in her hopes but no more sparing in her tears and lamentations, ceased not to weep for me before You in all the hours of her prayers. And her "prayers entered into Your sight" (Ps 87:3), but You permitted me still to roll about and flounder in that dark fog.
(12.21) You gave me, in the meantime, another answer which I remember. For I pass over many things because I am hurrying on to those things which more urgently demand that I confess to You, and many things I do not remember. Yes, You gave another answer through Your priest, a certain bishop who was educated in the Church and well trained in Your books. When that
13. Conf. 3.4.7–5.9 (CCL 27:29–31); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:56 (modified). See Chapter 5 for Augustine's view of the Bible and its interpretation.