Saint Augustin by Louis Bertrand
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Louis Bertrand >> Saint Augustin
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They named him Aurelius Augustinus. Was Aurelius his family name? We cannot
tell. The Africans always applied very fantastically the rules of Roman
nomenclature. Anyhow, this name was common enough in Africa. The Bishop of
Carthage, primate of the province and a friend of Augustin, was also called
Aurelius. Pious commentators have sought to find in this name an omen of
Augustin's future renown as an orator. They have remarked that the word
_aurum_, gold, is contained in Aurelius--a prophetic indication of the
golden mouth of the great preacher of Hippo.
Meanwhile, he was a baby like any other baby, who only knew, as he tells
us, how to take his mother's breast. However, he speaks of nurses who
suckled him; no doubt these were servants or slaves of the household.
They gave him their milk, like those Algerian women who, to-day, if their
neighbour is called away, take her child and feed it. Besides, with them
children are weaned much later than with us. You can see mothers sitting at
their doors put down their work and call to a child of two or three playing
in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember
these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they
made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer.
The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the
servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the
populace and small trader class. He learned Punic without thinking about
it, in playing with other children of Thagaste, just as the sons of our
colonists learn Arab in playing with little boys who wear chechias on their
heads.
He is a Christian, a bishop, already a venerated Father, consulted by the
whole Catholic world, and he tells us all that. He tells it in a serious
and contrite way, with a manifest anxiety to attribute to God, as the sole
cause, all the benefits which embellished his childhood, as well as to
deplore his faults and wretchedness, fatal consequence of the original
Fall. And still, we can make out clearly that these suave and far-off
memories have a charm for him which he cannot quite guard himself against.
The attitude of the author of the _Confessions_ is ambiguous and a little
constrained. The father who has loved his child, who has joined in his
games, struggles in him against the theologian who later on was to uphold
the doctrine of Grace against the heretics. He feels that he must shew, not
only that Grace is necessary for salvation and that little children ought
to be baptized, but that they are capable of sinning. Yes, the children sin
even at nurse. And Augustin relates this story of a baby that he had seen:
"I know, because I have seen, jealousy in a babe. It could not speak, yet
it eyed its foster-brother _with pale cheeks and looks of hate_." Children
are already men. The egoism and greediness of the grown man may be already
descried in the newly born.
However, the theologian of Grace was not able to drive from his mind
this verse of the Gospel: _Sinite ad me parvulos venire_--"Suffer little
children to come unto Me." But he interprets this in a very narrow sense,
luring it into an argument which furthers his case. For him, the small
height of children is a symbol of the humility without which no one can
enter God's kingdom. The Master, according to him, never intended us to
take children as an example. They are but flesh of sin. He only drew from
their littleness one of those similitudes which He, with His fondness for
symbols, favoured.
Well, let us dare to say it: Augustin goes wrong here. Such is the penalty
of human thought, which in its justest statements always wounds some
truth less clear or mutilates some tender sentiment. Radically, Augustin
is right. The child is wicked as man is. We know it. But against the
relentlessness of the theologian we place the divine gentleness of Christ:
"Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the Kingdom of
God."
IV
THE FIRST GAMES
"I loved to play," Augustin says, in telling us of those far-off years.
Is it surprising if this quick and supple intelligence, who mastered
without effort, and as if by instinct, the encyclopędic knowledge of his
age, who found himself at his ease amidst the deepest abstractions, did, at
the beginning, take life as a game?
The amusements of the little Africans of to-day are not very many, nor very
various either. They have no inventive imagination. In this matter their
French playfellows have taught them a good deal. If they play marbles, or
hopscotch, or rounders, it is in imitation of the _Roumis_. And yet they
are great little players. Games of chance attract them above all. At these
they spend hour after hour, stretched out flat on their stomachs in some
shady corner, and they play with an astonishing intensity of passion. All
their attention is absorbed in what they are about; they employ on the game
all the cunning of their wits, precociously developed, and so soon stuck
fast in material things.
When Augustin recalls the games of his childhood, he only mentions "nuts,"
handball, and birds. To capture a bird, that winged, light, and brilliant
thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth. But in
Africa, where there are plenty of birds, big people as well as little
love them. In the Moorish cafés, in the wretchedest _gourbis_, cages made
of reeds are hung on the walls, all rustling with trills and fluttering
of wings. Quail, thrushes, nightingales are imprisoned in them. The
nightingale, the singing-bird beyond all others, so difficult to tame, is
the honoured guest, the privileged dweller in these rustic cages. With
the rose, he is an essential part of Arab poetry. The woods round about
Thagaste were full of nightingales. Not the least doubt that the child
Augustin had felt the little musical throats of these singing-birds throb
between his hands. His sermons, his heaviest treatises, have a recollection
of them. He draws from them an evidence in favour of the creating Word who
has put beauty and harmony everywhere. In the song of the nightingale he
finds, as it were, an echo of the music of the spheres.
If he loved birds, as a poet who knows not that he is a poet, did he love
as well to play at "nuts"? "Nuts," or thimble-rigging, is only a graceful
and crafty game, too crafty for a dreaming and careless little boy. It
calls for watchfulness and presence of mind. Grown men play at it as well
as children. A step of a staircase is used as a table by the players, or
the pavement of a courtyard. Three shells are laid on the stone and a
dried pea. Then, with rapid baffling movements, hands brown and alert fly
from one shell to another, shuffle them, mix them up, juggle the dried
pea sometimes under this shell, sometimes under that,--and the point is
to guess which shell the pea has got under. By means of certain astute
methods, an artful player can make the pea stick to his fingers, or to the
inside of the shell, and the opponent loses every time. They cheat with a
calm shamelessness. Augustin cheated too--which did not prevent him from
bitterly denouncing the cheating of his fellow-players.
The truth is, that he would not have quite belonged to his country if he
had not lied and stolen now and then. He lied to his tutor and to his
schoolmasters. He stole at his parents' table, in the kitchen, and in the
cellar. But he stole like a man of quality, to make presents and to win
over his playfellows: he ruled the other boys by his presents--a noteworthy
characteristic in this future ruler of souls. Morals like these, a little
rough, shape free and bold natures. Those African children were much less
coddled, much less scolded, than to-day. Monnica had something else to do
than to look after the boys. So for them it was a continual life in the
open air, which makes the body strong and hard. Augustin and his companions
should be pictured as young wild-cats.
This roughness came out strong at games of ball, and generally at all
the games in which there are two sides, conquerors and prisoners, or
fights with sticks and stones. Stone-throwing is an incurable habit
among the little Africans. Even now in the towns our police are obliged
to take measures against these ferocious children. In Augustin's time,
at Cherchell, which is the ancient _Cęsarea Mauretanię_, the childish
population was split into two hostile camps which stoned each other. On
certain holidays the fathers and big brothers joined the children; blood
flowed, and there were deaths.
The bishop Augustin recalls with severity the "superb victories" he won in
jousts of this kind. But I find it hard to believe that such a delicate
child (he was sickly almost all his life) could have got much pleasure out
of these brutal sports. If he was drawn into them by the example of others,
it must have been through the imagination they appealed to him. In these
battles, wherein sides took the field as Romans against Carthaginians,
Greeks against Trojans, he believed himself Scipio or Hannibal, Achilles
or Hector. He experienced beforehand, as a rhetorician, the intoxication
of a triumph which playfellows who were stronger and better provided with
muscles gave him a hard fight for. He did not always get the upper hand,
except perhaps when he bribed the enemy. But an eager young soul, such
as he was, can hardly be content with half-victories; he wants to excel.
Accordingly, he sought his revenge in those games wherein the mind has the
chief part. He listened to stories with delight, and in his turn repeated
them to his little friends, thus trying upon an audience of boys that charm
of speech by which later he was to subdue crowds. They also played at
acting, at gladiators, at drivers and horses. Some of Augustin's companions
were sons of wealthy citizens who gave splendid entertainments to their
fellow-countrymen. As these dramatic representations, or games of the
arena or circus, drew near, the little child-world was overcome by a
fever of imitation. All the children of Thagaste imitated the actors, the
_mirmillones_, or the horsemen in the amphitheatre, just as the young
Spaniards of to-day imitate the _toreros_.
In the midst of these amusements Augustin fell ill; he had fever and
violent pains in the stomach. They thought he was going to die. It appears
that it was himself who in this extreme situation asked for baptism.
Monnica was making all haste to have the sacrament administered, when
suddenly, against all expectation, the child recovered. Again was baptism
postponed, and from the same reason: to lessen the gravity of the sins
which young Augustin was bound to commit. His mother, who no doubt foresaw
some of them, again fell in with the custom.
It is possible that Patricius interfered this time in a more decided way.
Just at this period Catholicism was in an unfavourable situation. The
short reign of Julian had started a violent pagan reaction. Everywhere
the temples were reopening, the sacrifices beginning again. Moreover,
the Donatists secretly aided the pagans. Their _Seids_, more or less
acknowledged, the Circoncelliones, bands of fanatical peasants, scoured
through the Numidian country, attacking the Catholics, ravaging and
pillaging, and burning their farms and villas. Was this a good time to
make a noisy profession of faith, to be enrolled among the ranks of the
conquered party?
Little Augustin knew nothing of all these calculations of motherly prudence
and fatherly diplomacy: he begged for baptism, so he tells us. This seems
very remarkable in so young a child. But he lived in a house where all the
service was done by Christians. He heard the talk of Monnica's friends;
perhaps, too, of his grandparents, who were Catholics faithful and austere.
And then, his soul was naturally religious. That explains everything:
he asked for baptism to be like grown-up people, and because he was
predestined. Among children, the chosen have these sudden flashes of light.
At certain moments they feel what one day they shall be. Anyhow, Monnica
must have seen this sign with joy.
He got well, and took up again his little boy's life, divided between play,
and dawdling, and school.
School! painful memory for Augustin! They sent him to the _primus
magister_, the elementary teacher, a real terror, armed with a long switch
which came down without pity on idle boys. Seated on benches around him, or
crouched on mats, the boys sang out all together: "One and one are two, two
and two are four"--horrible refrain which deafened the whole neighbourhood.
The school was often a mere shed, or a _pergola_ in the fields which was
protected fairly well from sun and rain by cloths stretched overhead--a hut
rented for a trifle, wide open to the winds, with a mosquito-net stretched
out before the entrance. All who were there must have frozen in winter
and broiled in summer. Augustin remembered it as a slaves' chain-prison
(_ergastulum_) of boyhood.
He hated school and what they taught there--the alphabet, counting, and
the rudiments of Latin and Greek grammar. He had a perfect horror of
lessons--of Greek above all. This schoolboy, who became, when his turn
came, a master, objected to the methods of school. His mind, which grasped
things instinctively at a single bound, could not stand the gradual
procedure of the teaching faculty. He either mastered difficulties at
once, or gave them up. Augustin was one of the numerous victims of the
everlasting mistake of schoolmasters, who do not know how to arrange
their lessons to accord with various kinds of mind. Like most of those
who eventually become great men, he was no good as a pupil. He was often
punished, thrashed--and cruelly thrashed. The master's scourge filled
him with an unspeakable terror. When he was smarting all over from cuts
and came to complain to his parents, they laughed at him or made fun of
him--yes, even the pious Monnica. Then the poor lad, not knowing whom to
turn to, remembered hearing his mother and the servants talk of a Being,
very powerful and very good, who defends the orphan and the oppressed. And
he said from the depths of his heart:
"O my God, please grant that I am not whipped at school."
But God did not hear his prayer because he was not a good boy. Augustin was
in despair.
It is evident that these punishments were cruel, because forty years
afterwards he denounces them with horror. In his mind, they are tortures
comparable to the wooden horse or the iron pincers. Nothing is small
for children, especially for a sensitive child like Augustin. Their
sensitiveness and their imagination exaggerate all things out of due
measure. In this matter, also, schoolmasters often go wrong. They do not
know how to handle delicate organizations. They strike fiercely, when a
few words said at the right moment would have much more effect on the
culprit.... Monnica's son suffered as much from the rod as he took pride
in his successes at games. If, as Scipio, he was filled with a sensation
of glory in his battles against other boys, no doubt he pictured himself
a martyr, a St. Laurence or St. Sebastian, when he was swished. He never
pardoned--save as a Christian--his schoolmasters for having brutalized him.
Nevertheless, despite his hatred for ill-ordered lessons, his precocious
intelligence was remarked by everybody. It was clear that such lucky gifts
should not be neglected. Monnica, no doubt, was the first to get this into
her head, and she advised Patricius to make Augustin read for a learned
profession.
The business of the _curia_ was not exactly brilliant, and so he may have
perceived that his son might raise their fortunes if he had definite
employment. Augustin, a professor of eloquence or a celebrated pleader,
might be the saviour and the benefactor of his family. The town councils,
and even the Imperial treasury, paid large salaries to rhetoricians. In
those days, rhetoric led to everything. Some of the professors who went
from town to town giving lectures made considerable fortunes. At Thagaste
they pointed with admiration to the example of the rhetorician Victorinus,
an African, a fellow-countryman, who had made a big reputation over-seas,
and had his statue in the Roman Forum. And many years before, had not M.
Cornelius Fronto, of Cirta, another African, become the tutor of Marcus
Aurelius, who covered him with honours and wealth and finally raised him to
the Consulship? Pertinax himself, did he not begin as a simple teacher of
grammar, and become Proconsul of Africa and then Emperor of Rome? How many
stimulants for provincial ambition!...
Augustin's parents reasoned as the middle-class parents of to-day. They
discounted the future, and however hard up they were, they resolved to
make sacrifices for his education. And as the schools of Thagaste were
inadequate, it was decided to send this very promising boy to Madaura.
V
THE SCHOOLBOY OF MADAURA
A new world opened before Augustin. It was perhaps the first time he had
ever gone away from Thagaste.
Of course, Madaura is not very far off; there are about thirty miles at
most between the two towns. But there are no short journeys for children.
This one lay along the military road which ran from Hippo to Theveste--a
great Roman causeway paved with large flags on the outskirts of towns, and
carefully pebbled over all the rest of the distance. Erect upon the high
saddle of his horse, Augustin, who was to become a tireless traveller
and move about ceaselessly over African roads during all his episcopal
life--Augustin got his first glimpse of the poetry of the open road, a
poetry which we have lost for ever.
How amusing they were, the African roads of those days, how full of sights!
Pauses were made at inns with walls thick as the ramparts of citadels,
their interiors bordered by stables built in arcades, heaped up with
travellers' packs and harness. In the centre were the trough and cistern;
and to the little rooms opening in a circle on to the balcony, drifted up
a smell of oil and fodder, and the noise of men and of beasts of burthen,
and of the camels as they entered majestically, curving their long necks
under the lintel of the door. Then there was talk with the merchants, just
arrived from the south, who brought news of the nomad countries, and had
stories to tell. And then, without hurrying, a start was made again for the
next stage. Long files of chariots were encountered carrying provisions to
soldiers garrisoned on the frontier, or the State-distributed corn of the
Roman people to the sea-ports; or again, from time to time, the _lectica_,
brought along by slaves or mules, of a bishop on a visitation; and then the
litter, with close-drawn curtains, of a matron or some great personage. Of
a sudden all pulled sharp to one side; the vehicles lined up on the edge of
the road; and there passed at full speed, in a cloud of dust, a messenger
of the Imperial Post....
Certainly this road from Hippo to Theveste was one of the busiest and most
picturesque in the province: it was one of its main arteries.
At first the look of the country is rather like the neighbourhood of
Thagaste. The wooded and mountainous landscape still spreads out its
little breast-shaped hills and its sheets of verdure. Here and there the
road skirts the deeply-ravined valley of the Medjerda. At the foot of the
precipitous slopes, the river can be heard brawling in a torrent over its
stony bed, and there are sharp descents among thickets of juniper and the
fringed roots of the dwarf-pines. Then, as the descent continues, the land
becomes thinner and spaces bare of vegetation appear oftener. At last, upon
a piece of tableland, Madaura comes into view, all white in the midst of
the vast tawny plain, where to-day nothing is to be seen but a mausoleum
in ruins, the remains of a Byzantine fortress, and vague traces vanishing
away.
This is the first rise of the great plain which declines towards Theveste
and the group of the Aures Mountains. Coming from the woodland country of
Thagaste, the nakedness of it is startling. Here and there, thin cows crop
starveling shrubs which have grown on the bank of some _oued_ run dry.
Little asses, turned loose, save themselves at a gallop towards the tents
of the nomads, spread out, black and hairy, like immense bats on the
whiteness of the land. Nearer, a woman's red _haick_ interposes, the single
stain of bright colour breaking the indefinite brown and grey of the plain.
Here is felt the harshness of Numidia; it is almost the stark spaces of
the desert world. But on the side towards the east, the architecture of
mountains, wildly sculptured, stands against the level reaches of the
horizon. Upon the clear background of the sky, shew, distinctly, lateral
spurs and a cone like to the mystic representation of Tanit. Towards the
south, crumbling isolated crags appear, scattered about like gigantic
pedestals uncrowned of their statues, or like the pipes of an organ raised
there to capture and attune the cry of the great winds of the _steppe_.
This country is characterized by a different kind of energy from Thagaste.
There is more air and light and space. If the plantation is sparse, the
beautiful shape of the land may be observed all the better. Nothing breaks
or lessens the grand effects of the light.... And let no one say that
Augustin's eyes cared not for all that, he who wrote after his conversion,
and in all the austerity of his repentance: "If sentient things had not a
soul, we should not love them so much."
It is here, between Madaura and Thagaste, during the eager years of youth,
that he gathered together the seeds of sensations and images which,
later on, were to burst forth into fiery and boiling metaphors in the
_Confessions_, and in his homilies and paraphrases of Holy Scripture. Later
on, he will not have the time to observe, or he will have lost the power.
Rhetoric will stretch its commonplace veil between him and the unceasing
springtide of the earth. Ambition will turn him away from those sights
which reveal themselves only to hearts unselfish and indifferent. Then,
later on, Faith will seize hold of him to the exclusion of all else. He
will no longer perceive the creation save at odd moments in a kind of
metaphysical dream, and, so to speak, across the glory of the Creator.
But in these youthful years all things burst upon him with extraordinary
violence and ecstasy. His undulled senses swallowed greedily the whole
banquet offered by this wide world to his hunger for pleasure. The fugitive
beauty of things and beings, with all their charms, revealed itself to
him in its newness: _novissimarum rerum fugaces pulchritudines, earumque
suavitates_. This craving for sensation will still exist in the great
Christian teacher, and betray itself in the warm and coloured figures
of his style. Of course, he was not as a worldly describer, who studies
to produce phrases which present an image, or arranges glittering
pictures--all such endeavours he knew nothing about. But by instinct, and
thanks to his warm African temperament, he was a kind of impressionist and
metaphysical poet.
If the rural landscape of Thagaste is reflected in certain passages--the
pleasantest and most well known--of the _Confessions_, all the intellectual
part of Augustin's work finds its symbolical commentary here in this arid
and light-splashed plain of Madaura. Like it, the thought of Augustin has
no shadows. Like it too, it is lightened by strange and splendid tints
which seem to come from far off, from a focal fire invisible to human eyes.
No modern writer has better praised the light--not only the immortal light
of the blessed, but that light which rests on the African fields, and
is on land and sea; and nobody has spoken of it with more amplitude and
wonder. The truth is, that in no country in the world, not even in Egypt,
in the rose-coloured lands of Karnak and Luxor, is the light more pure and
admirable than in these great bare plains of Numidia and the region of the
Sahara. Is there not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this
play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as
the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing--of
lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of
fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders
into darkness, even as ideas in the obscure depths of the intelligence
which reposes....
Not less than this land, stern even to sadness, but hot and sumptuous, the
town of Madaura must have impressed Augustin.
It was an old Numidian city, proud of its antiquity. Long before the Roman
conquest, it had been a fortress of King Syphax. Afterwards, the conquerors
settled there, and in the second century of our era, Apuleius, the most
famous of its children, could state before a proconsul, not without pride,
that Madaura was a very prosperous colony. It is probable that this old
town was not so much Romanized as its neighbours, Thimgad and Lambesa,
which were of recent foundation and had been built all at once by decree of
the Government. But it may well have been as Roman as Theveste, a no less
ancient city, where the population was probably just as mixed. Madaura,
like Theveste, had its temples with pillars and Corinthian porticoes, its
triumphal arches (these were run up everywhere), its forum surrounded by a
covered gallery and peopled with statues. Statues also were very liberally
distributed in those days. We know of at least three at Madaura which
Augustin mentions in one of his letters: A god Mars in his heroic
nakedness, and another Mars armed from head to foot; opposite, the statue
of a man, in realistic style, stretching out three fingers to neutralize
the evil eye. These familiar figures remained very clear in the
recollection of Augustin. In the evening, or at the hour of the siesta, he
had stretched himself under their pedestals and played at dice or bones in
the cool shade of the god Mars, or of the Man with outstretched fingers.
The slabs of marble of the portico made a good place to play or sleep.
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