24. Conf. 5.13.23–6.5.7 (CCL 27:70–78); trans. Bourke FOTC 21:124–37. (continued)
was spoken for who was almost two years younger than the age suitable for marriage; since she was pleasing, we waited. . . .25
(15.25) In the meantime, my sins were multiplied (Sir 23:3). When the woman with whom I had lived for so long was torn from my side because she was a hindrance to my marriage, my heart, to which she clung, was cut and wounded, and the wound drew blood. She returned to Africa, vowing to You that she would never know another man and leaving with me the natural son whose mother she was. But I, unfortunate, unable even to emulate a woman and impatient at the delay attendant upon waiting two years for the girl to whom I had proposed, because I was not a lover of marriage but a slave of lust, procured another woman—but not as a wife. Thus, it was as if the whole (or increased) illness of my soul was sustained and continued, under the escort of a persisting custom, into the very realm of matrimony. Nor was that wound of mine healed, which had been made by cutting off the first woman. Rather, after the fever and most severe pain, it began to fester and, though the pain seemed cooler, it was more desperate.26
"Books of the Platonists"
In Milan, Augustine came across certain Platonist books. Which Platonists and which books have been much disputed, but they almost certainly included the Enneads of Plotinus (202–270) and/or essays by his disciple Porphyry (c. 232–c. 303).27 These sparked an intellectual revolution in Augustine, providing him new ways of thinking about God, the soul, evil, beauty, and much else. They also recommended a spirituality and method of meditation by which one turns inward in order to turn upward towards God, passing from the visible to the invisible, from the temporal to the eternal. In the following passage, Augustine speaks of a pivotal experience. This account, while indebted to Neoplatonic terminology, in fact marks out how Christian mysticism differs from Neoplatonic: Augustine experienced not a mystical union with the One but an encounter with God that revealed the reality of his sinful fallen state and his (and all humanity's) need for grace and for an incarnate mediator, Jesus Christ. By the time he wrote
25. "Two years younger than the age suitable for marriage": According to Roman law, girls were permitted to marry at the age of twelve (Justinian, Institutiones 1.10.22). Roman practice of marrying such young girls, however appalling to us, was commonplace. On concubinage and marriage in the ancient world, see Paul Veyne, ed., The History of Private Life, Vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Charles Munier, "Concubinatus," Aug-Lex, 1:1112–13.
26. Conf. 6.13.23–15.25 (CCL 27:89–90); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21:155–58. 27. Over the last century, scholars have debated this question at length and in detail. For an overview, see Goulven Madec, "Le néoplatonisme dans la conversion d'Augustin: État d'une question centenaire," in Petites Études Augustiniennes, CEASA 142 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1994), 51–69; also O'Donnell, 2:421–24. On Augustine's Platonism, see the texts and notes in Chapter 2.