Saint Augustin Part 6

The vices of the Roman people, with whom he was obliged to live cheek by jowl, galled him still more painfully. And to begin with, the natives hated strangers. At the theatres they used to shout: "Down with the foreign residents!" Acute attacks of xenophobia often caused riots in the city. Some years before Augustin arrived, a panic about the food supply led to the expulsion, as useless mouths, of all foreigners domiciled in Rome, even the professors. Famine was an endemic disease there. And then, these lazy people were always hungry. The gluttony and drunkenness of the Romans roused the wonder and also the disgust of the sober races of the Empire-of the Greeks as well as the Africans. They ate everywhere-in the streets, at the theatre, at the circus, around the temples. The sight was so ign.o.ble, and the public intemperance so scandalous, that the Prefect, Ampelius, was obliged to issue an order prohibiting people who had any self-respect from eating in the street, the keepers of wine-shops from opening their places before ten o'clock in the morning, and the hawkers from selling cooked meat in the streets earlier than a certain hour of the day. But he might as well have saved himself the trouble. Religion itself encouraged this greediness. The pagan sacrifices were scarcely more than pretexts for stuffing. Under Julian, who carried the great public sacrifices of oxen to an abusive extent, the soldiers got drunk and gorged themselves with meat in the temples, and came out staggering. Then they would seize hold of any pa.s.sers-by, whom they forced to carry them shoulder-high to their barracks.

All this must be kept in mind so as to understand the strictness and unyielding att.i.tude of the Christian reaction. This Roman people, like the pagans in general, was frightfully material and sensual. The difficulty of shaking himself free from matter and the senses is going to be the great obstacle which delays Augustin's conversion; and if it was so with him, a fastidious and intellectual man, what about the crowd? Those people thought of nothing but eating and drinking and lewdness. When they left the tavern or their squalid rooms, they had only the obscenities of mimes, or the tumbles of the drivers in the circus, or the butcheries in the amphitheatre to elevate them. They pa.s.sed the night there under the awnings provided by the munic.i.p.ality. Their pa.s.sion for horse-races and actors and actresses, curbed though it was by the Christian emperors, continued even after the sack of Rome by the Barbarians. At the time of the famine, when the strangers were expelled, they excepted from this wholesale banishment three thousand female dancers with the members of their choirs, and their leaders of orchestra.

The aristocracy did not manifest tastes much superior. Save a few cultivated minds, sincerely fond of literature, the greatest number only saw in the literary pose an easy way of being fashionable. These became infatuated about an unknown author, or an ancient author whose books were not to be had. They had these books sought for and beautifully copied. They, "who hated study like poison," spoke only of their favourite author: the others did not exist for them. As a matter of fact, music had ousted literature: "the libraries were closed like sepulchres." But fashionable people were interested in an hydraulic organ, and they ordered from the lute-makers "lyres the size of chariots." Of course, this musical craze was sheer affectation. Actually, they were only interested in sports: to race, to arrange races, to breed horses, to train athletes and gladiators. As a pastime, they collected Oriental stuffs. Silk was then fashionable, and so were precious stones, enamels, heavy goldsmiths' work. Rows of rings were worn on each finger. People took the air in silk robes, held together by brooches carved in the figures of animals, a parasol in one hand, and a fan with gold fringes in the other. The costumes and fashions of Constantinople encroached upon the old Rome and the rest of the Western world.

Immense fortunes, which had gathered in the hands of certain people, either through inheritance or swindling, enabled them to keep up a senseless expenditure. Like the American millionaires of to-day, who have their houses and properties in both hemispheres, these great Roman lords possessed them in every country in the Empire. Symmachus, who was Prefect of the City when Augustin was in Rome, had considerable estates not only in Italy and in Sicily, but even in Mauretania. And yet, in spite of all their wealth and all the privileges they enjoyed, these rich people were neither happy nor at ease. At the least suspicion of a despotic power, their lives and property were threatened. Accusations of magic, of disrespect to the Caesar, of plots against the Emperor-any pretext was good to plunder them. During the preceding reign, that of the pitiless Valentinian, the Roman n.o.bility had been literally decimated by the executioner. A certain vice-Prefect, Maximinus, had gained a sinister reputation for cleverness in the art of manufacturing suspects. By his orders, a basket at the end of a string was hung out from one of the windows of the Praetorium, into which denunciations might be cast. The basket was in use day and night.

It is clear that at the time that Augustin settled in Rome this abominable system was a little moderated. But accusation by detectives was always in the air. And living in this atmosphere of mistrust, hypocrisy, bribery, and cruelty-small wonder if the Carthaginian fell into bitter reflections upon Roman corruption. However impressive from the front, the Empire was not nice to look at close at hand.

But Augustin was, above all, home-sick. When he strolled tinder the shady trees of the Janiculum or Sall.u.s.t's gardens, he already said to himself what he would repeat later to his listeners at Hippo: "Take an African, put him in a place cool and green, and he won't stay there. He will feel he must go away and come back to his blazing desert." As for himself, he had something better to regret than a blazing desert. In front of the City of Gold, stretched out at his feet, and the horizon of the Sabine Hills, he remembered the feminine softness of the twilights upon the Lake of Tunis, the enchantment of moonlit nights upon the Gulf of Carthage, and that astonishing landscape to be discovered from the height of the terrace of Byrsa, which all the grandeur of the Roman campagna could not make him forget.

II

THE FINAL DISILLUSION

'The new professor had managed to secure a certain number of pupils whom he gathered together in his rooms. He could make enough to live at Rome by himself, if he could not support there the woman and child he had left behind at Carthage. In this matter of finding work, his host and his Manichee friends had done him some very good turns. Although forced to conceal their beliefs since the edict of Theodosius, there were a good many Manichees in the city. They formed an occult Church, strongly organized, and its adepts had relations with all cla.s.ses of Roman society. Possibly Augustin presented himself as one driven out of Africa by the persecution. Some compensation would be owing to this young man who had suffered for the good cause.

It was his friend Alypius, "the brother of his heart," who, having preceded him to Rome to study law at his parents' wishes, now was the most useful in helping Augustin to make himself known and find pupils. Himself a Manichee, converted by Augustin, and a member of one of the leading families in Thagaste, he had not long to wait for an important appointment in the Imperial administration. He was a.s.sessor to the Treasurer-General, or "Count of the Italian Bounty Office," and decided fiscal questions. Thanks to his influence, as well as to his acquaintances among the Manichees, he was a valuable friend for the new arrival, a friend who could aid him, not only with his purse, but with advice. Without much capacity for theorizing, this Alypius was a practical spirit, a straight and essentially honest soul, whose influence was excellent for his impetuous friend. Of very chaste habits, he urged Augustin to restraint. And even in abstract studies, the religious controversies which Augustin dragged him into, his strong good sense moderated the imaginative dashes, the overmuch subtilty which sometimes led the other beyond healthy reason.

Unhappily they were both very busy-the judge and the rhetorician-and although their friendship became still greater during this stay in Rome, they were not able to see each other as much as they desired. Their pleasures, too, were perhaps not the same. Augustin did not in the least care about being chaste, and Alypius had a pa.s.sion for the amphitheatre-a pa.s.sion which his friend disapproved of. Some time earlier, at Carthage, Augustin had filled him with disgust of the circus. But hardly was Alypius arrived in Rome, than he became mad about the gladiatorial shows. Some fellow-students took him to the amphitheatre, almost by force. Thereupon, he said that he would stay, since they had dragged him there; but he bet that he would keep his eyes shut all through the fight, and that nothing could make him open them. He sat down on the benches with those who had brought him, his eyelids pressed down, refusing to look. Suddenly there was a roar of shouting, the shout of the crowd hailing the fall of the first wounded. His lids parted of themselves; he saw the flow of blood. "At the sight of the blood" says Augustin, "he drank in ruthlessness; no longer did he turn away, but fixed his gaze, and he became mad-and he knew no more.... He was fascinated by the criminal atrocity of this battle, and drunk with the pleasure of blood."

These breathless phrases of the Confessions seem to throb still with the wild frenzy of the crowd. They convey to us directly the kind of Sadic excitement which people went to find about the arena. Really, a wholesome sight for future Christians, for all the souls that the brutality of pagan customs revolted! The very year that Augustin was at Rome, certain prisoners of war, Sarmatian soldiers, condemned to kill each other in the amphitheatre, chose suicide rather than this shameful death. There was in this something to make him reflect-him and his friends. The fundamental injustices whereon the ancient world rested-the crushing of the slave and the conquered, the contempt for human life-these things they touched with the finger when they looked on at the butcheries in the amphitheatre. All those whose hearts sickened with disgust and horror before these slaughter-house scenes, all those who longed for a little more mildness, a little more justice, were all recruits marked out for the peaceful army of the Christ.

For Alypius, especially, it was not a bad thing to have known this blood-drunkenness at first hand: he shall be only the more ashamed when he falls at the feet of the merciful G.o.d. Equally useful was it for him to have personal experience of the harshness of men's justice; and in the fulfilment of his duties as a judge to observe its errors and flaws. While he was a student at Carthage he just escaped being condemned to death upon a false accusation of theft-the theft of a piece of lead! Already they were dragging him, if not to the place of capital punishment, at least to prison, when a chance meeting with a friend of his who was a senator saved him from the threatening mob. At Rome, while a.s.sessor to the Count of the Italian Bounty Office, he had to resist an attempt to bribe him, and by doing so risked losing his appointment, and, no doubt, something worse too. Official venality and dishonesty were evils so deeply rooted, that he himself nearly succ.u.mbed. He wanted some books copied, and he had the temptation to get this done at the charge of the Treasury. This peculation had, in his eyes, a good enough excuse, and it was certain to go undetected. Nevertheless, when he thought it over he changed his mind, and virtuously refrained from giving himself a library at the expense of the State.

Augustin, who relates these anecdotes, draws the same moral from them as we do, to wit-that for a man who was going to be a bishop and, as such, administrator and judge, this time spent in the Government service was a good preparatory school. Most of the other great leaders of this generation of Christians had also been officials; before ordination, they had been mixed up in business and politics, and had lived freely the life of their century. So it was with St. Ambrose, with St. Paulinus of Nola, with Augustin himself, and Evodius and Alypius, his friends.

And yet, however absorbed in their work the two Africans might be, it is pretty near certain that intellectual questions took the lead of all others. This is manifest in Augustin's case at least. He must have astonished the good Alypius when he got to Rome by acknowledging that he hardly believed in Manicheeism any longer. And he set forth his doubts about their masters' cosmogony and physical science, his suspicions touching the hidden immorality of the sect. As for himself, the controversies, which were the Manichees' strong point, did not dazzle him any longer. At Carthage, but lately, he had heard a Catholic, a certain Helpidius, oppose to them arguments from Scripture, which they were unable to refute. To make matters worse, the Manichee Bishop of Rome made a bad impression on him from the very outset. This man, he tells us, was of rough appearance, without culture or polite manners. Doubtless this unmannerly peasant, in his reception of the young professor, had not shewn himself sufficiently alive to his merits, and the professor felt aggrieved.

From then, his keen dialectic and his satirical spirit (Augustin had formidable powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the G.o.d of Light and the G.o.d of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness, were immersed in certain plants and liquors. Hence, the distinction they made between clean and unclean food. All those foods were pure which contained some part of the Divine Light; impure, those which did not. The purity of food became evident by certain qualities of taste, smell, and appearance. But now Augustin found a good deal of arbitrariness in these distinctions, and a good deal of simplicity in the belief that the Divine Light dwelt in a vegetable. "Are they not ashamed," he said, "to search G.o.d with their palates or with their nose? And if His presence is revealed by a special brilliancy, by the goodness of the taste or the smell, why allow that dish and condemn this, which is of equal savour, light, and perfume?

"Yea, why do they look upon the golden melon as come out of G.o.d's treasure-house, and yet will have none of the golden fat of the ham or the yellow of an egg? Why does the whiteness of lettuce proclaim to them the Divinity, and the whiteness of cream nothing at all? And why this horror of meat? For, look you, roast sucking-pig offers us a brilliant colour, an agreeable smell, and an appetizing taste-sure signs, according to them, of the Divine Presence."... Once started on this topic, Augustin's vivacity has no limits. He even drops into jokes which would offend modern shamefacedness by their Aristophanic breadth.

These arguments, to say the truth, did not shake the foundations of the doctrine, and if a doctrine must be judged according to its works, the Manichees might entrench themselves behind their rigid moral rules, and their conduct. Contrary to the more accommodating Catholicism, they paraded a puritan intolerance. But Augustin had found out at Carthage that this austerity was for the most part hypocrisy. At Rome he was thoroughly enlightened.

The Elect of the religion made a great impression by their fasts and their abstinence from meat. Now it became clear that these devout personages, under pious pretexts, literally destroyed themselves by over-eating and indigestion. They held, in fact, that the chief work of piety consisted in setting free particles of the Divine Light, imprisoned in matter by the wiles of the G.o.d of Darkness. They being the Pure, they purified matter by absorbing it into their bodies. The faithful brought them stores of fruit and vegetables, served them with real feasts, so that by eating these things they might liberate a little of the Divine Substance. Of course, they abstained from all flesh, flesh being the dwelling-place of the Dark G.o.d, and also from fermented wine, which they called "the devil's gall." But how they made up for it over the rest! Augustin makes great fun of these people who would think it a sin if they took as a full meal a small bit of bacon and cabbage, with two or three mouthfuls of undiluted wine, and yet ordered to be served up, from three o'clock in the afternoon, all kinds of fruit and vegetables, the most exquisite too, rendered piquant by spices, the Manichees holding that spices were very full of fiery and luminous principles. Then, their palates t.i.tillating from pepper, they swallowed large draughts of mulled wine or wine and honey, and the juice of oranges, lemons, and grapes. And these junketings began over again at nightfall. They had a preference for certain cakes, and especially for truffles and mushrooms-vegetables more particularly mystic.

Such a diet put human gluttony to a heavy test. Many a scandal came to light in the Roman community. The Elect made themselves sick by devouring the prodigious quant.i.ty of good cheer brought to them with a view to purification. As it was a sacrilege to let any be lost, the unhappy people forced themselves to get down the lot. There were even victims: children, gorged with delicacies, died of stuffing. For children, being innocent things, were deemed to have quite special purifying virtues.

Augustin was beginning to get indignant at all this nonsense. Still, except for these extravagances, he continued to believe in the asceticism of the Elect-asceticism of such severity that the main part of the faithful found it impossible to practise. And see! just at this moment, whom should he discover very strange things about but Bishop Faustus, that Faustus whom he had looked for at Carthage as a Messiah. The holy man, while he preached renunciation, granted himself a good many indulgences: he lay, for one thing, on feathers, or upon soft goatskin rugs. And these puritans were not even honest. The Manichee Bishop of Rome, that man of rough manners who had so offended Augustin, was on the point of being convicted of stealing the general cash-box. Lastly, there were rumours in the air, accusing the Elect of giving themselves over to reprehensible practices in their private meetings. They condemned marriage and child-bearing as works of the devil, but they authorized fornication, and even, it is said, certain acts against nature. That, for Augustin, was the final disillusion.

In spite of it, he did not separate openly from the sect. He kept his rank of auditor in the Manichee Church. What held him to it, were some plausible considerations on the intellectual side. Manicheeism, with its distinction of two Principles, accounted conveniently for the problem of evil and human responsibility. Neither G.o.d nor man was answerable for sin and pain, since it was the other, the Dark Principle, who distributed them through the world among men. Augustin, who continued to sin, continued likewise to be very comfortable with such a system of morals and metaphysics. Besides, he was not one of those convinced, downright minds who feel the need to quarrel noisily with what they take to be error. No one has opposed heresies more powerfully, and with a more tireless patience, than he has. But he always put some consideration into the business. He knew by experience how easy it is to fall into error, and he said this charitably to those whom he wished to persuade. There was nothing about him like St. Jerome.

Personal reasons, moreover, obliged him not to break with his fellow-religionists who had supported him, nursed him even, on his arrival at Rome, and who, as we shall see in a moment, might still do him services. Augustin was not, like his friend Alypius, a practical mind, but he had tact, and in spite of all the impulsiveness and mettle of his nature, a certain suppleness which enabled him to manoeuvre without too many collisions in the midst of the most embarra.s.sing conjunctures. Through instinctive prudence he prolonged his indecision. Little by little, he who had formerly flung himself so enthusiastically in pursuit of Truth, glided into scepticism-the scepticism of the Academics in its usual form.

And at the same time that he lost his taste for speculative thinking, new annoyances in his profession put the finishing touch on his discouragement. If the Roman students were less noisy than those of Carthage, they had a deplorable habit of walking off and leaving their masters unpaid. Augustin was ere long victimized in this way: he lost his time and his words. As at Carthage, so at Rome, he had to face the fact that he could not live by his profession. What was he to do? Would he have to go back home? He had fallen into despair, when an unforeseen chance turned up for him.

The town council of Milan threw open a professorship of Rhetoric to public compet.i.tion. It would be salvation for him if he could get appointed. For a long time he had wanted a post in the State education. In receipt of a fixed salary, he would no longer have to worry about beating up a cla.s.s, or to guard against the dishonesty of his pupils. He put his name down immediately among the candidates. But no more in those days than in ours was simple merit by itself enough. It was necessary to pull strings. His friends the Manichees undertook to do this for him. They urged his claims warmly on the Prefect Symmachus, who doubtless presided at the compet.i.tive trials. By an amusing irony of fate, Augustin owed his place to people he was getting ready to separate from, whom even he was soon going to attack, and also to a man who was in a way the official enemy of Christianity. The pagan Symmachus appointing to an important post a future Catholic bishop-there is matter for surprise in that! But Symmachus, who had been Proconsul at Carthage, protected the Africans in Rome. Furthermore, it is likely that the Manichees represented their candidate to him as a man hostile to Catholics. Now in this year, A.D. 384, the Prefect had just begun an open struggle with the Catholics. He believed, therefore, that he made a good choice in appointing Augustin.

So a chain of events, with which his will had hardly anything to do, was going to draw the young rhetorician to Milan-yes, and how much farther!-to where he did not want to go, to where the prayers of Monnica summoned him unceasingly: "Where I am, there shall you be also." When he was leaving Rome, he did not much expect that. What he chiefly thought of was that he had at last won an independent financial position, and that he was become an official of some importance. He had a flattering evidence of this at once: It was at the expense of the city of Milan and in the Imperial carriages that he travelled through Italy to take up his new post.

III

THE MEETING BETWEEN AMBROSE AND AUGUSTIN

Before he left Rome, and during his journey to Milan, Augustin must have recalled more than once the verses of Terence which his friend Marcia.n.u.s had quoted by way of encouragement and advice the night he set sail for Italy:

"This day which brings to thee another life Demands that thou another man shalt be."

He was thirty years old. The time of youthful wilfulness was over. Age, disappointments, the difficulties of life, had developed his character. He was now become a man of position, an eminent official, in a very large city which was the second capital of the Western Empire and the princ.i.p.al residence of the Court. If he wished to avoid further set-backs in his career, it behoved him to choose a line of conduct carefully thought out.

And first of all, it was time to get rid of Manicheeism. A Manichee would have made a scandal in a city where the greatest part of the population was Christian, and the Court was Catholic, although it did not conceal its sympathy with Arianism. It was a long time now since Augustin had been a Manichee in his heart. Accordingly, he was not obliged to feign in order to re-enter a Church which already included him formally among its catechumens. Doubtless he was a very lukewarm catechumen, since at intervals he inclined to scepticism. But he thought it decent to remain, at least for the time being, in the Catholic body, in which his mother had brought him up, until the day when some sure light should arise to direct his path. Now St. Ambrose was at that time the Catholic Bishop of Milan. Augustin was very eager to gain his goodwill. Ambrose was an undoubted political power, an important personage, a celebrated orator whose renown was shed all across the Roman world. He belonged to an ill.u.s.trious family. His father had been Praetorian prefect of Gaul. He himself, with the t.i.tle of Consul, was governing the provinces of Emilia and Liguria when the Milanese forced him, much against his will, to become their bishop. Baptized, ordained priest, and consecrated, one on top of the other, it was only apparently that he gave up his civil functions. From the height of his episcopal throne he always personified the highest authority in the country.

As soon as he arrived at Milan, Augustin hurried to call upon his bishop. Knowing him as we do, he must have approached Ambrose in a great transport of enthusiasm. His imagination, too, was kindled. In his thought this was a man of letters, an orator, a famous writer, almost a fellow-worker, that he was going to see. The young professor admired in Bishop Ambrose all the glory that he was ambitious of, and all that he already believed himself to be. He fancied, that however great might be the difference in their positions, he would find himself at once on an equal footing with this high personage, and would have a familiar talk with him, as he used to have at Carthage with the Proconsul Vindicia.n.u.s. He told himself also that Ambrose was a priest, that is to say, a doctor of souls: he meant to open to him all his spiritual wretchedness, the anguish of his mind and heart. He expected consolation from him, if not cure.

Well, he was mistaken. Although in all his writings he speaks of "the holy Bishop of Milan" with feelings of sincere respect and admiration, he lets it be understood that his expectations were not realized. If the Manichean bishop of Rome had offended him by his rough manners, Ambrose disconcerted him alike by his politeness, his kindliness, and by the reserve, perhaps involuntarily haughty, of his reception. "He received me," says Augustin, "like a father, and as a bishop he was pleased enough at my coming:"-peregrinationem meam satis episcopaliter dilexit. This satis episcopaliter looks very like a sly banter at the expense of the saint. It is infinitely probable that St. Ambrose received Augustin, not exactly as a man of no account, but still, as a sheep of his flock, and not as a gifted orator, and that, in short, he shewed him the same "episcopal" benevolence as he had from a sense of duty for all his hearers. It is possible too that Ambrose was on his guard from the outset with this African, appointed a munic.i.p.al professor through the good offices of the pagan Symmachus, his personal enemy. In the opinion of the Italian Catholics, nothing good came from Carthage: these Carthaginians were generally Manichees or Donatists-sectaries the more dangerous because they claimed to be orthodox, and, mingling with the faithful, hypocritically contaminated them. And then Ambrose, the great lord, the former Governor of Liguria, the counsellor of the Emperors, may not have quite concealed a certain ironic commiseration for this "dealer in words," this young rhetorician who was still puffed up with his own importance.

Be this as it will, it was a lesson in humility that St. Ambrose, without intending it, gave to Augustin. The lesson was not understood. The rhetoric professor gathered only one thing from the visit, which was, that the Bishop of Milan had received him well. And as human vanity immediately lends vast significance to the least advances of distinguished or powerful persons, Augustin felt thankful for it. He began to love Ambrose almost as much as he admired him, and he admired him for reasons altogether worldly. "Ambrose I counted one of the happy ones of this world, because he was held in such honour by the great." The qualification which immediately follows shews naively enough the sensual Augustin's state of mind at that time: "Only it seemed to me that celibacy must be a heavy burthen upon him."

In those years the Bishop of Milan might, indeed, pa.s.s for a happy man in the eyes of the world. He was the friend of the very glorious and very victorious Theodosius; he had been the adviser of the young Emperor Gratian, but lately a.s.sa.s.sinated; and although the Empress Justina, devoted to the Arians, plotted against him, he had still great influence in the council of Valentinian II-a little Emperor thirteen years old, whom a Court of pagans and Arians endeavoured to draw into an anti-Catholic reaction.

Almost as soon as Augustin arrived in Milan, he was able to see for himself the great authority and esteem which Ambrose possessed, the occasion being a dispute which made a great noise.

Two years earlier, Gratian had had the statue and altar of Victory removed from the Curia, declaring that this pagan emblem and its accompaniments no longer served any purpose in an a.s.sembly of which the majority was Christian. By the same stroke, he suppressed the incomes of the sacerdotal colleges with all their privileges, particularly those of the Vestals; confiscated for the revenue the sums granted for the exercise of religion; seized the property of the temples; and forbade the priests to receive bequests of real estate. This meant the complete separation of the State and the ancient religion. The pagan minority in the Senate, with Symmachus, the Prefect, at its head, protested against this edict. A deputation was sent to Milan to place the pagan grievances before the Emperor. Gratian refused to receive them. It was thought that his successor, Valentinian II, being feebler, would be more obliging. A new senatorial committee presented themselves with a pet.i.tion drawn up by Symmachus-a genuine piece of oratory which Ambrose himself admired, or pretended to admire. This speech made a deep impression when it was read in the Imperial Council. But Ambrose intervened with all his eloquence. He demanded that the common law should be applied equally to pagans as to Christians, and it was he who won the day. Victory was not replaced in the Roman Curia, neither were the goods of the temples returned.

Augustin must have been very much struck by this advantage which Catholicism had gained. It became clear that henceforth this was to be the State religion. And he who envied so much the fortunate of the world, might take note, besides, that the new religion brought, along with the faith, riches and honours to its adepts. At Rome he had listened to the disparaging by pagans and his Manichee friends of the popes and their clergy. They made fun of the fashionable clerics and legacy hunters. It was related that the Roman Pontiff, servant of the G.o.d of the poor, maintained a gorgeous establishment, and that his table rivalled the Imperial table in luxury. The prefect Praetextatus, a resolute pagan, said scoffingly to Pope Damasus: "Make me Bishop of Rome, and I'll become a Christian at once."

Certainly, commonplace human reasons can neither bring about nor account for a sincere conversion. Conversion is a divine work. But human reasons, arranged by a mysterious Will with regard to this work, may at least prepare a soul for it. Anyhow, it cannot be neglected that Augustin, coming to Milan full of ambitious plans, there saw Catholicism treated with so much importance in the person of Ambrose. This religion, which till then he had despised, now appeared to him as a triumphant religion worth serving.

But though such considerations might attract Augustin's attention, they took no hold on his conscience. It was well enough for an intriguer about the Court to get converted from self-interest. As for him, he wanted all or nothing; the chief good in his eyes was certainty and truth. He scarcely believed in this any longer, and surely had no hope of finding it among the Catholics; but still he went to hear Ambrose's sermons. He went in the first place as a critic of language, with the rather jealous curiosity of the trained man who watches how another man does it. He wanted to judge himself if the sacred orator was as good as his reputation. The firm and substantial eloquence of this former official, this statesman who was more than anything a man of action, immediately got control of the frivolous rhetorician. To be sure, he did not find in Ambrose's sermons the exhilaration or the verbal caress which had captivated him in those of Faustus the Manichean; but yet they had a persuasive grace which held him. Augustin heard the bishop with pleasure. Still, if he liked to hear him talk, he remained contemptuous of the doctrine he preached.

Then, little by little, this doctrine forced itself on his meditations: he perceived that it was more serious than he had thought hitherto, or, at least, that it could be defended. Ambrose had started in Italy the exegetical methods of the Orientals. He discovered in Scripture allegorical meanings, sometimes edifying, sometimes deep, always satisfying for a reasonable mind. Augustin, who was inclined to subtilty, much relished these explanations which, if ingenious, were often forced. The Bible no longer seemed to him so absurd. Finally, the immoralities which the Manichees made such a great point of against the Holy Writ, were justified, according to Ambrose, by historical considerations: what G.o.d did not allow to-day, He allowed formerly by reason of the conditions of existence. However, though the Bible might be neither absurd nor contrary to morals, this did not prove that it was true. Augustin found no outlet for his doubts.

He would have been glad to have Ambrose help him to get rid of them. Many a time he tried to have a talk with him about these things. But the Bishop of Milan was so very busy a personage! "I could not ask him," says Augustin, "what I wanted as I wanted, because the shoals of busy people who consulted him about their affairs, and to whose infirmities he ministered, came between me and his ear and lips. And in the few moments when he was not thus surrounded, he was refreshing either his body with needful food, or his mind with reading. While he read his eye wandered along the page and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when we attended (for the door was open to all, and no one was announced), we saw him reading silently, but never otherwise, and after sitting for some time without speaking (for who would presume to trouble one so occupied?) we went away again. We divined that, for the little s.p.a.ce of time which was all that he could secure for the refreshment of his mind, he allowed himself a holiday from the distraction of other people's business, and did not wish to be interrupted; and perhaps he was afraid lest eager listeners should invite him to explain the harder pa.s.sages of his author, or to enter upon the discussion of difficult topics, and hinder him from perusing as many volumes as he wished.... Of course the reason that guided a man of such remarkable virtue must have been good...."

n.o.body could comment more subtly-nor, be it said also, more maliciously-the att.i.tude of St. Ambrose towards Augustin, than Augustin himself does it here. At the time he wrote this page, the events he was relating had happened a long time ago. But he is a Christian, and, in his turn, he is a bishop: he understands now what he could not understand then. He feels thoroughly at heart that if Ambrose withdrew himself, it was because the professor of rhetoric was not in a state of mind to have a profitable discussion with a believer: he lacked the necessary humility of heart and intellect. But at the moment, he must have taken things in quite another way, and have felt rather hurt, not to say more, at the bishop's apparent indifference.

Just picture a young writer of to-day, pretty well convinced of his value, but uneasy about his future, coming to ask advice of an older man already famous-well, Augustin's advances to Ambrose were not unlike that, save that they had a much more serious character, since it was not a question of literature, but of the salvation of a soul. At this period, what Augustin saw in Ambrose, even when he consulted him on sacred matters, was chiefly the orator, that is to say, a rather older rival.... He enters. He is shewn into the private room of the great man, without being announced, like any ordinary person. The great man does not lay aside his book to greet him, does not even speak a word to him.... What would the official professor of Rhetoric to the City of Milan think of such a reception? One can make out clearly enough through the lines of the Confessions. He said to himself that Ambrose, being a bishop, had charge of souls, and he was surprised that the bishop, no matter how great a lord he might be, made no attempt whatever to offer him spiritual aid. And as he was still devoid of Christian charity, no doubt he thought too that Ambrose was conscious that he had not the ability to wrestle with a dialectician of Augustin's strength, and that, into the bargain, the prelate was to seek in knowledge of the Scriptures. And, in truth, Ambrose had been made a bishop so suddenly that he must have found himself obliged to improvise a hasty knowledge. Anyhow, Augustin concluded that if he refused to discuss, it was because he was afraid of being at a disadvantage.

Very surely St. Ambrose had no notion of what the catechumen was thinking. He soared too high to trouble about miserable stings to self-respect. In his ministry he was for all alike, and he would have thought it against Christian equality to shew any special favour to Augustin. If, in the brief talks he had with the young rhetorician, he was able to gather anything of his character, he could not have formed a very favourable opinion of it. The high-strung temperament of the African, these vague yearnings of the spirit, these sterile melancholies, this continual temporizing before the faith-all that could only displease Ambrose, the practical Roman, the official used all his life to command.

However that was, Augustin, in following years, never allowed himself the least reproach towards Ambrose. On the contrary, everywhere he loads him with praise, quotes him repeatedly in his treatises, and takes refuge on his authority. He calls him his "father." But once, when he is speaking of the spiritual desolation in which he was plunged at Milan, there does escape him something like a veiled complaint which appears to be aimed at Ambrose. After recalling the eagerness with which he sought truth in those days, he adds: "If any one could have been found then to trouble about instructing me, he would have had a most willing and docile pupil."

This phrase, in such marked contrast with so many laudatory pa.s.sages in the Confessions about St. Ambrose, seems to be indeed a statement of the plain truth. If G.o.d made use of Ambrose to convert Augustin, it is nevertheless likely that Ambrose personally did nothing, or very little, to bring about this conversion.

IV

PLANS OF MARRIAGE