The Lure of Rome
By about the age of twenty, Augustine had obtained a post teaching Rhetoric at the University of Carthage. He remained there for a number of years, but two factors eventually made him decide to leave. One was his increasing dissatisfaction with the indisciplined behaviour of the students. “At Carthage”, he writes in words that have a curiously modern ring, “the students are beyond control and their behaviour is disgraceful. They come blustering into the lecture rooms like a troop of maniacs and upset the orderly arrangements which the master has made in the interests of his pupils. Their recklessness is unbelievable and they can often commit outrages which ought to be punished by law, were it not that custom protects them.” At the same time he was hearing reports of the excellent prospects for academic and social advancement to be found at Rome and this, together with the news that “the young students at Rome were much quieter than here”, led him in the year 383 to the decision to try his fortune in the Empire’s capital city.
Monica was distracted with grief. She saw the move as a still further step in her son’s downward course. On the day fixed for his departure, Augustine only managed to board the ship by deceiving his mother into believing that his purpose in going to the harbour was to take leave of a friend. He recalls: “She, indeed, was in dreadful grief at my going and followed me right to the coast. Then she clung to me, passionately determined that I should either go back home with her or take her to Rome, but I deceived her with the pretence that I had a friend whom I did not want to leave until he had sailed off with a fair wind. Thus I lied to my mother — and such a mother! . . . She would not return home without me, but I managed with some difficulty to persuade her to spend the night in a place near the ship, where there was an oratory in memory of St. Cyprian. That night I stole away from her. She remained, praying and weeping . . . The wind blew and filled our sails and the shore dropped from our sight. She went home, and I to Rome.”
As Augustine set sail across the darkened Mediterranean, neither he nor Monica could have anticipated the events which were, so soon, to bring matters to a crisis point.
On his arrival in Rome, Augustine, who was accompanied by his mistress, fell seriously ill and almost died. “I very nearly went to hell bearing the weight of all the deadly sins which I had committed.” It was an inauspicious beginning and the single year which Augustine spent in Rome proved to be a far from happy one. He continued for a time to associate with the Manichees but with less and less conviction of the validity of their doctrines. The more thought he gave to the great questions of human existence, the more disillusioned he became with the self-confident but superficial answers of Manichean theology. Still desperately longing for answers, however, Augustine joined a philosophical group in Rome known as the New Academy. They regarded themselves as heirs of the Academy of the Greek philosopher Plato. The main tenet of this school was, “Doubt everything and fluctuate between all opinions”, and in this radical scepticism lay it’s strong appeal for an enquiring mind increasingly disenchanted by empty superficialities. In pretending to so much less knowledge, the Academics now appeared to Augustine so much wiser than the Manichees.
At the end of his first year in Rome, Augustine was rather unexpectedly offered an excellent and lucrative post at Milan as the city’s Professor of Rhetoric. He had no hesitation in accepting it. Apart from other considerations, he was finding that the students at Rome, contrary to reputation, had their own brand of obnoxious conduct. They were not rowdy like his students at Carthage — they simply refused to pay their fees! It was, therefore, with some sense of relief that the impecunious tutor rode north from Rome on horseback through the beautiful Italian countryside to take up his new post at Milan. It was only later that he could see clearly the hand of God in this move, leading him to the place where he was shortly to find the One in whom all questions and answers meet.
The Net Closes In
At this time, the city of Milan had as its bishop the renowned and saintly Ambrose (340-397). “Known to the whole world as among the best of men”, Ambrose gave his days and nights to the study of the Scriptures and of Christian theology. Crowds flocked to hear him preach, which he did frequently — at times daily. This man of God was to have a profound influence on the young Professor. “I was brought by God to him in order that I should be brought by him to God.” At first, Augustine attended the preaching of Ambrose only to decide for himself whether or not his great fame as an orator was justified. But soon he forgot all about matters of style. The Scriptural content of Ambrose’s sermons gripped him. Ten long years had passed since his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius had turned him for such a brief period to the Bible. He had scarcely glanced at it since then. Now, however, under Ambrose’s powerful ministry he found himself driven, despite himself, to face the claims of Scripture and of Christ. He began to study the Bible privately and especially Paul’s epistles. He had long assumed that they contained mere “childish trifles” and he was quickly brought up with a jolt!
There were many questions which Augustine would now have dearly liked to have put to Ambrose but he found it well-nigh impossible to get near the bishop. “I could not,” he writes, “ask him what I wanted as I would have liked to have done, for crowds of busy people in whose needs he was interested kept me from him. And when not occupied with them he devoted the scanty time left him to refreshing his body with needful food or his mind with reading. And even as he read his eyes followed the page and his mind pondered what it imbibed, but his tongue was silent. Often when he came — for none were forbidden to enter, nor was it customary to announce visitors — we would find him thus reading in silence. So we, too, would sit for long and watch him in silence — for who would have dared disturb a man so engaged? Then we would steal away, for we realised that during that brief space thus won for the refreshment of his mind he was taking holiday from preoccupation with other men’s affairs, and had no desire to be called away to other things . . . perhaps, too, it was with a view to saving his voice — which in his case easily got weak — that he thus very wisely read in silence.”
About this time the redoubtable Monica appears once more on the scene. She was not so easily shaken off and after a long and hazardous journey, rejoined her son in Milan. If Augustine had problems in gaining access to Ambrose, Monica at least was now seldom far from his side. She would accompany him to the services and they would then discuss the sermons together. Her influence on Augustine was probably never more telling than in these two years prior to his conversion in 386.
Two great barriers, however, still kept Augustine from embracing the Christian faith. The first was intellectual. While the sermons of Ambrose had finally exposed for him the absurdity of most of the Manichean doctrines, especially in relation to the inspiration and authority of the Old Testament, one fundamental difficulty remained. It may be difficult for us to understand this, but, under Manichean influence, Augustine even now found it impossible to conceive of God in other than material terms — as “one vast and bright body and he himself as part of that body.” That “God is a Spirit” was a truth he could not yet find intelligible far less believe. This difficulty was resolved for him in an unexpected way. He discovered the system of philosophy known as Neo-Platonism and was surprised by its many apparent similarities to Christian doctrine. These, he was soon to find, were superficial, but at this stage in his experience the Neo-Platonic doctrines helped to clear from his mind the tangled weeds of Manicheism and prepare it for more Scriptural plantings. He found help in three main areas.
First, with regard to the nature of God. The future great writer on the Trinity now began for the first time, in the words of Roy Battenhouse, “to understand how deity could be infinite and yet not diffused through finite or infinite space. God could be beyond all space and time and above all corporeal being as a transcendent source.” In Augustine’s own eloquent words, “And I said, Is truth therefore nothing because it is not diffused through space — neither finite nor infinite? And Thou didst cry to me from afar, ‘I am that I am’.”
Second, Augustine had been reading the Gospel of John and was surprised to discover how close the resemblance was between the Neo-Platonic doctrine of the Logos and that of the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel. He could not appreciate then how fragile that similarity was but he was helped to see that the soul of man, though bearing witness to the light, can never itself be the light, but that God, the Word, is that true light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world.
The third area in which he found intellectual help was that of sin. He came now to appreciate that, contrary to Manichean theology, sin does not originate in any eternal substance but from the perverseness of the will.
Augustine’s intellectual ferment in these years was matched only by the moral turmoil of his life. Soon after his arrival in Milan in 384, he had decided to leave his mistress in the interests of further social advancement. She clearly had a deep love for Augustine and returned to North Africa vowing never to know another man. Augustine had to wait two further years in order to marry a young “society” lady but found himself unable to do so. He took another concubine. For a period, he tells us, only one thing kept him from complete abandonment to a life of sensual pleasure. “Epicurus would have carried off the palm if I had not believed what Epicurus would not believe; that after death there remains life for the soul and places of recompense.”
But the prayers of Monica, the sermons of Ambrose and his own reading of Scripture were now, by God’s blessing, about to bear fruit. The brilliant prodigal was finding the far country an increasingly empty place. Augustine describes himself on the eve of his conversion as a man in sleep who, hearing the call to arise, is able to answer only with drowsy words, “Soon” and “Tomorrow”. “Save me”, he was saying, “but not yet.” Almighty grace was what was needed and grace was at hand.
Homecomings
One afternoon in August, 386, Augustine was in conversation with a Christian friend, Alypius. As they spoke together, “God was turning me round towards myself, taking me from behind my back where I had placed me unwilling to look at myself, and setting me before my face”. He experienced the most terrible conviction of sin. His whole past life seemed to spread out before him. Sins of heart and of body, of commission and omission, rose up as a great overhanging mountain which threatened to crush him to powder. He had to get away from Alypius. In agony of soul he hurried from the room and went into the garden of the house. He threw himself down under a fig tree, near to despair, not knowing what was to become of him. What happened next is best described in his own words: “Lo, I heard a voice as if it had been some boy or girl from a house not far off, uttering and often repeating in a sing-song manner, ‘Take up and read; take up and read.’ And instantly, with changed countenance, I began to consider intently whether children in some game of theirs were used to sing any such words; yet could I not find that I had ever heard the like. Then, stemming the course of my tears, I rose up, conceiving that I was required from heaven to read that chapter which the first opening of the book should lead me to.”
Augustine re-entered the house and took up a copy of Paul’s epistles which he had earlier been reading. It lay open at Romans Chapter 13. The words he first read were those of the 13th and 14th verses: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.”
“No further would I read,” he recalls, “nor was there cause why I should; for instantly with the end of this sentence, as by a clear and constant light infused into my heart, the darkness of all former doubts was driven away.”
The restless heart had found its true repose.
Quietly he told Alypius what had happened. Together they rejoiced. “From thence we went in to my mother; we told her and she was filled with overflowing joy. And when we declared to her in order how it had all happened, she did exult and triumph and bless thee, O Lord, who art “able to do exceeding abundantly above that which we can either ask or think.” Augustine’s experience and feelings at this time are well captured in the following remarkable words: “I have loved Thee late, Thou beauty, so old and so new; I have loved Thee late! And lo! Thou wast within, but I was without, and was seeking Thee there. And into Thy fair creation I plunged myself in my ugliness; for Thou wast with me and I was not with Thee! Those things kept me away from Thee, which had not been, except they had been in Thee! Thou didst call and didst cry aloud and break through my deafness. Thou didst glimmer, Thou didst shine, and didst drive away my blindness. Thou didst breathe and I drew breath, and breathed in Thee. I tasted Thee and I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me and I burn for Thy peace. If I, with all that is within me, may once live in Thee, then shall pain and trouble forsake me; entirely filled with Thee, all shall be life to me.”
On April 25th, 387, Augustine, with his friend Alypius and son Adeodatus, was baptized at Milan by Ambrose. Later that year, he abandoned his promising career and left Milan to return with Monica and a few friends to North Africa. His ambition now was to devote the rest of his life directly to the service of his new-found Lord and Saviour. His mother Monica, however, was not to see her native land again.
The party reached Ostia, Rome’s seaport, at the mouth of the Tiber. There they had to wait several days for suitable shipping. These were days of warm fellowship among the Christians in the group. The Lord was very near. In one of the most memorable passages in the Confessions, Augustine remembers how on a warm and sunny afternoon at Ostia, he and Monica stood together at a window overlooking the beautiful garden of their lodging-house. They were conversing about heaven. “There did we confer alone with much dear tenderness of what kind should be that eternal life of saints in heaven which the eye hath not seen nor the ear heard nor hath it entered into the heart of man.”
As they spoke together of “the region of riches unending where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth,” they were transported with joy. “If this were to continue,” he writes, “and all other visions in order far inferior might be withdrawn and this alone might so transport and swallow up and wrap him who beheld it in those intrinsical joys, so that his life might be for all eternity such as was this moment of understanding; would not this be that whereof it is written, ‘Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord’?”
He describes how, at that moment, the world with all its delights and attractions grew utterly contemptible. Monica turned to him and said, “My son, for my part I find no more pleasure in this life. What I am still to do or why I am still here in the world I do not know, for I have no more to hope for on this earth. One thing only there was for which I desired to stay in this life a little while — that was to see you a Christian before I died. God has granted me my wish and more besides, for I now see you as his servant, spurning such pleasures as the world can give.”
Five days later, still at Ostia, Monica took ill. She knew the end was near. Augustine grieved at the thought of his mother being buried so far from home. This earned for him the rebuke, “Nothing, my son, is far from God and I have no fear that He will know at the end of the world from what place He is to raise me up.” On the ninth day of her illness Monica died in triumph. The little group sang the 100th Psalm at her beside. For a time Augustine restrained his grief but at last he found some relief in tears. “I wept for my mother now dead and departed from my sight, who had wept so many years for me that I should live for ever in God’s sight.”
The death of Monica marks the end of the autobiographical chapters of the Confessions, and the conclusion of the first main part of Augustine’s life. His purpose, as we saw, in tracing his experiences during these years was to magnify the love and power of God in drawing him out of such a “fearful pit”. And this purpose is lost on us if we do not leave the Confessions with a fresh sense of wonder at that “amazing grace” which can lay hold on the most debauched and depraved and transform them into the most mighty and useful servants of the Lord. Soli Deo Gloria!
Soon after, Augustine sailed for North Africa earnestly seeking the Lord’s guidance as to a field of usefulness. He could scarcely have imagined the way in which his prayers were shortly to be answered.
(To be continued)