St. Augustine of Hippo: Father of the Christian Church
wanderings of one Aeneas, forgetful of my own, and to weep for dead Dido, because she killed herself for love...
Why then did I hate the Greek classics, which have the like tales? For Homer also curiously wove the like fictions, and is most sweetlyvain, yet was he bitter to my boyish taste. And so I suppose would Virgil be to Grecian children, when forced to learn him as I was Homer. Difficulty, in truth, the difficulty of a foreign tongue, dashed, as it were, with gall all the sweetness of Grecian fable. For not one word of it did I understand, and to make me understand I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and punishments. Time was also (as an infant) I knew no Latin; but this I learned without fear or suffering, by mere observation, amid the caresses of my nursery and jests of friends, smiling and sportively encouraging me. This I learned without any pressure of punishment to urge me on, for my heart urged me to give birth to its conceptions, which I could only do by learning words not of those who taught, but of those who talked with me; in whose ears also I gave birth to the thoughts, whatever I conceived. No doubt, then, that a free curiosity has more force in our learning these things, than a frightful enforcement."
As he continued to display exceptional intellectual promise, his family invested the majority of their meager earnings in securing him an academic career that would ultimately qualify him for government service. At about the age of 17, Augustine was sent to Carthage to continue his education in rhetoric, the vocation of orators, largely through the generosity of the wealthy landowner Romanianus, an older family friend and benefactor who held the title flaman (priest) in a local Pagan sect. By some accounts, he was related to Augustine's family.
Chapter 2: Manichaeism
After attending secondary school at Madauros and studying rhetoric at Carthage, Augustine moved away from Christian teachings and began following the Manichaean religion, a Persian philosophy combining the teachings of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. The religion professed to appeal to reason rather than blind authority. As Augustine would later explain, the faith of the Church seemed "much too unphilosophical for any man of culture to embrace."
In Augustine's time, Manichaeism claimed to be the true Christianity. Accounting for the nature of the world as the product of a conflict between the forces of light and dark (which existed before the creation of the world), and the soul of man as an element of the light entangled in the dark, Manichaeism claimed Jesus as the "redeemer" who enables the "imprisoned particles of light" to return to their own realms. By this system, Jesus is treated as the second component of the trinity, the "Light" communicating the "Father" to those below. While the higher order of their church were strictly ascetic and celibate, young men like Augustine typically joined the lower order as a "hearer," a position permitting marriage and sex as a "concession to human weakness." This concession undoubtedly appealed to Augustine as a young adult, and he would later confess to living a hedonistic lifestyle during that time. It was during this period of his life that Augustine uttered his famous tongue-in-cheek prayer, "da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo" ("Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.").? In Confessions, he would allude to this time, writing, "But what marvel that I was thus carried away to vanities, and went out from Thy presence, O my God, when men were set before me as models, who, if in relating some action of theirs, in itself not ill, they committed some barbarism or solecism, being censured, were abashed; but when in rich and adomed and well-ordered discourse they related their own disordered life, being bepraised, they gloried?"
Augustine associated with other young men who boasted of their sexual conquests, and he maintained a number of sexual relationships, including one with a woman named "Una". Una was a woman of low birth from Carthage with whom Augustine would share a bed for nearly 15 years and produce a son, Adeodatus. Augustine was extremely bright, but he was taken aback by his own son, later noting, "The grandeur of his mind filled me with a kind of terror." He would write about Una in Confessions, "For this space of nine years (from my nineteenth year to my eight-and-twentieth) we lived seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, in divers lusts; openly, by sciences which they call liberal..."
According to legend, Augustine's turn away from Christianity greatly upset his mother Monica, nearly leading to a permanent estrangement between mother and son. However, as the Catholic Encyclopedia put it, "At Carthage Augustine had become a Manichean and when on his return home he ventilated certain heretical propositions she drove him away from her table, but a strangevision which she had urged her to recall him. It was at this time that she went to see a certain holy bishop, whose name is not given, but who consoled her with the now famous words, 'the child of those tears shall never perish." Her persistence would eventually pay off and help make her a saint in the Catholic Church, but it would take several years for Augustine to return to the Christian fold.
Augustine's life didn't consist of all play and no work, however. During this period, he discovered Cicero's (now lost) dialogue Hortensius, which he later described as "leaving a lasting impression" and a desire to seek "the wisdom of eternal truth". These studies instilled in Augustine an enthusiasm for philosophy which to him equated not just to a devotion to the pursuit of truth but a conviction to the superiority of life (vita contemplativa) over any simple secular ambition. As historian Norman Cantor would point out in The Civilization of the Middle Ages, "[ Augustine] was a genius — an intellectual giant — and he received a thorough classical education. He was not much of a linguist (his Greek was poor, and he never learned Hebrew) but he was a master of Latin rhetoric; certain passages in The City of God equal the writings of Cicero in complexity and eloquence."
By this time, Augustine had already become an aspiring writer, and ironically his earliest
Augustine. (Trans. Henry Chadwick). Saint Augustine: Confessions. Page 145.