Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Philosopher 41 some outstanding deeds, they are still believed to be what they used to be."6 We see him still as what he used to be in some respects, yet on the cusp of a new life. By mid-387, after his baptism, Augustine and his circle left Milan for good. They got only as far as Rome—stuck for a full year, unable to set sail for Africa, because a rebel Roman general and his navy had blockaded the seaport of Ostia. During this interim, Augustine's mother would die. In 388, he, his friends, and family finally returned to Africa, first to Carthage and then to Thagaste, where they embarked on a grand experiment in Christian community. This phase, too, was liminal in its own way, a pause between baptism and ordination. His newly formed community could be seen as either something old or something new. To some, like his friend Nebridius, it seemed an old-fashioned gesture, the embrace of a life of philosophic retirement. But it also hinted at something new. The new fashion then sweeping Christianity was organized asceticism. Augustine's community appears as one ephemeral instance of the wide-ranging experiments in monasticism springing up around the late fourth-century Empire.7 Settled in Thagaste, Augustine and his companions consciously styled themselves "servants of God" (servi Dei). He had grand hopes for them: to "grow godlike in retirement."8 Such dreams proved short-lived. Within the year, his son Adeodatus and his friend Nebridius would die.
These early works are Augustine's least reader-friendly. Partly it is the subtlety of the topics. Augustine admitted, years later, that even he found one of them, On the Immortality of the Soul, challenging: "Because of the intricacy and brevity of its reasoning, it is so obscure that even my attention flags as I read it and I myself can scarcely understand it."9 Mostly these seem, from our vantage point, stiff or artificial. The dialogues may adopt the guise of being verbatim transcripts of actual conversations, but they are, in fact, highly selfconscious literary works, composed for an educated elite, at ease with and attuned to the conventions of the philosophic dialogue—and Augustine's subtle disruptions of these.10 In these works, he still thinks and speaks as a cultivated intellectual addressing other cultivated intellectuals. At the end of his life, he looked back on the Cassiciacum works with mixed feelings: "Even though I had given up the earthly prospects that I had once cherished," these
6. De ordine 2.10.29 (CCL 29:123–24); trans. Russell, FOTC 5:307. 7. See William Harmless, "Monasticism," in Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David Hunter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 493–517.
8. Ep. 10.2 (CCL 31:25): deificari . . . in otio. 9. Retr. 1.5.1 (CCL 57:16); trans. Bogan, FOTC 60:20. 10. On the literary aspect of the dialogues, see especially the study of Catherine Conybeare, The Irrational Augustine, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Joanne McWilliam, "The Cassiciacum Autobiography," Studia Patristica 18.4 (1990): 14–43; John J. O'Meara, "The Historicity of Augustine's Early Dialogues," Vigiliae Christianae 5 (1951): 150–78.