Saint Augustin Part 9

And Monnica, utterly confused by such praise, answered with affectionate gruffness:

"Stop talking! You have never told bigger lies."

Most of the time these conversations were simply dialectic games in the taste of the period, games a little pedantic, and fatiguing from subtilty. The boisterous Licentius did not always enjoy himself. He was often inattentive; and his master scolded him. But all the same, the master understood how to amuse his two foster-children while he exercised their intelligence. At the end of one discussion he said to them laughing:

"Just at this hour, the sun warns me to put the playthings I had brought for the children back in the basket...."

Let us remark in pa.s.sing that this is the last time, before those centuries which are coming of universal intellectual silence or arid scholasticism-the last time that high questions will be discussed in this graceful light way, and with the same freedom of mind. The tradition begun by Socrates under the plane-trees on the banks of the Ilissus, is ending with Augustin under the chestnuts of Ca.s.sicium.

And yet, however gay and capricious the form, the substance of these dialogues, "On the Academics," "On Order," and "On the Happy Life," is serious, and even very serious. The best proof of their importance in Augustin's eyes is, that after taking care to have them reported in shorthand, he eventually published them. The notarii attended these discussions and let nothing be lost. The rise of the scrivener, of the notary, dates from this period. The administration of the Lower-Empire was frightfully given to scribbling. By contact with it, the Church became so too. Let us not press our complaints about it, since this craze for writing has procured for us, with a good deal of shot-rubbish, some precious historical doc.u.ments. In Augustin's case, these reports of his lectures at Ca.s.sicium have at least the value of shewing us the state of soul of the future Bishop of Hippo at a decisive moment of his life.

For these Dialogues, although they look like school exercises, reveal the intimate thoughts of Augustin on the morrow of his conversion. While he seems to be refuting the Academics, he is fighting the errors from which he, personally, had suffered so long. He clarified his new ideal. No; the search for truth, without hope of ever reaching it, cannot give happiness. And genuine happiness is only in G.o.d. And if a rhythm is to be found in things, then it is necessary to make the soul rhythmic also and so enable it to contemplate G.o.d. It is necessary to still within it the noise of the pa.s.sions. Hence, the need of inward reformation, and, at a final a.n.a.lysis, of asceticism.

But Augustin knew full well that these truths must be adapted to the weakness of the two lads he was teaching, and also to the common run of mankind. He has not yet in these years the uncompromising att.i.tude which ere long will give him a sterner virtue-an att.i.tude, however, unceasingly tempered by his charity and by the persistent recollections of his reading. It was now that he shaped the rule of conduct in worldly morals and education which the Christian experience of the future will adopt: "If you have always order in your hearts," he said to his pupils, "you must return to your verses. For a knowledge of liberal sciences, but a controlled and exact knowledge, forms men who will love the truth.... But there are other men, or, to put it better, other souls, who, although held in the body, are sought for the eternal marriage by the best and fairest of spouses. For these souls it is not enough to live; they wish to live happy.... But as for you, go, meanwhile, and find your Muses!"

"Go and find your Muses!" What a fine saying! How human and how wise! Here is clearly indicated the double ideal of those who continue to live in the world according to the Christian law of restraint and moderation, and of those who yearn to live in G.o.d. With Augustin the choice is made. He will never more look back. These Dialogues at Ca.s.sicium are his supreme farewell to the pagan Muse.

II

THE ECSTASY OF SAINT MONNICA

They stayed through the winter at Ca.s.sicium. However taken up he might be by the work of the estate and the care of his pupils, Augustin devoted himself chiefly to the great business of his salvation.

The Soliloquies, which he wrote then, render even the pa.s.sionate tone of the meditations which he perpetually gave way to during his watches and nights of insomnia. He searched for G.o.d, moaning: Fac me, Pater, quaerere te-"Cause me to seek Thee, O my Father." But still, he sought Him more as a philosopher than as a Christian. The old man in him was not dead. He had not quite stripped off the rhetorician or the intellectual. The over-tender heart remained, which had so much sacrificed to human love. In those ardent dialogues between himself and his reason, it is plain to see that reason is not quite the mistress. "I love only G.o.d and the soul," Augustin states with a touch of presumption. And his reason, which knows him well, answers: "Do you not then love your friends?"-"I love the soul; how therefore should I not love them?" What does this phrase, of such exquisite sensibility, and even already so aloof from worldly thoughts-what does it lack to give forth a sound entirely Christian? Just a slight change of accent.

He himself began to see that he would do better not to philosophize so much and to draw nearer the Scripture, in listening to the wisdom of that with a contrite and humble heart. Upon the directions of Ambrose, whose advice he had asked by letter, he tried to read the prophet Isaiah, because Isaiah is the clearest foreteller of the Redemption. He found the book so difficult that he lost heart, and he put it aside till later. Meanwhile, he had forwarded his resignation as professor of Rhetoric to the Milan munic.i.p.ality. Then, when the time was come, he sent to Bishop Ambrose a written confession of his errors and faults, and represented to him his very firm intention to be baptized. He was quietly baptized on the twenty-fifth of April, during the Easter season of the year 387, together with his son Adeodatus, and his friend Alypius. Alypius had prepared most piously, disciplining himself with the harshest austerities, to the point of walking barefoot on the frozen soil.

So now the solitaries of Ca.s.sicium are back in Milan. Augustin's two pupils were gone. Trygetius doubtless had rejoined the army. Licentius had gone to live in Rome. But another fellow-countryman, an African from Thagaste, Evodius, formerly a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior, came to join the small group of new converts. Evodius, the future Bishop of Uzalis, in Africa, and baptized before Augustin, was a man of scrupulous piety and unquestioning faith. He talked of devout subjects with his friend, who, just fresh from baptism, experienced all the quietude of grace. They spoke of the community which St. Ambrose had either founded or organized at the gates of Milan, and in comparison with a life so austere, Augustin perceived that the life he had led at Ca.s.sicium was still stained with paganism. He must carry out his conversion to the end and live as a hermit after the manner of Antony and the solitaries of the Thebaid. Then it occurred to him that he still owned a little property at Thagaste-a house and fields. There they would settle and live in self-denial like the monks. The purity of the young Adeodatus predestined him to this ascetic existence. As for Monnica, who long since had taken the widow's veil, she had to make no change in her ways to lead a saintly life in the company of her son and grandson. It was agreed among them all to go back to Africa, and to start as soon as possible.

Thus, just after his baptism, Augustin shews but one desire: to bury himself in a retreat, to lead a humble and hidden life, divided between the study of the Scripture and the contemplation of G.o.d. Later on, his enemies were to accuse him of having become a convert from ambition, in view of the honours and riches of the episcopate. This is sheer calumny. His conversion could not have been more sincere, more disinterested-nor more heroic either: he was thirty-three years old. When we think of all he had loved and all he gave up, we can only bow the head and bend the knee before the lofty virtue of such an example.

In the course of the summer the caravan started and crossed the Apennines to set sail at Ostia. The date of this exodus has never been made quite clear. Perhaps Augustin and his companions fled before the hordes of the usurper Maximus, who, towards the end of August, crossed the Alps and marched on Milan, while the young Valentinian with all his Court took refuge at Aquileia. In any case, it was a trying journey, especially in the hot weather. When Monnica arrived she was very enfeebled. At Ostia they had to wait till a ship was sailing for Africa. Propitious conditions did not offer every day. At this period, travellers were at the mercy of the sea, of the wind, and of a thousand other circ.u.mstances. Time did not count; it was wasted freely. The ship sailed short distances at a time, skirting the coasts, where the length of the stay at every point touched depended on the master. On board these ships-feluccas hardly decked over-if the crossing was endless and unsafe, it was, above all, most uncomfortable. People were in no hurry to undergo the tortures of it, and s.p.a.ced them out as much as possible by frequent stoppages. On account of all these reasons, our Africans made a rather long stay at Ostia. They lodged, no doubt, with Christian brethren, hosts of Augustin or Monnica, in a tranquil house far out of earshot of the cosmopolitan crowd which overflowed in the hotels on the quay.

Ostia, situated at the mouth of the Tiber, was both the port and bond-warehouse of Rome. The Government stores-ships landed the African oil and corn there. It was a junction for commerce, the point where immigrants from all parts of the Mediterranean disbarked. To-day there is only left a wretched little village. But at some distance from this hamlet, the excavations of archaeologists have lately brought to light the remains of a large town. They have discovered at the entrance a place of burial with arcosol-tombs; and here perhaps the body of St. Monnica was laid. In this place of graves they came upon also a beautiful statue injured-a funeral Genius, or a Victory, with large folded wings like those of the Christian angels. Further on, the forum with its shops, the guard-house of the night-cohort, baths, a theatre, many large temples, arcaded streets paved with large flags, warehouses for merchandise. There may still be seen, lining the walls, the holes in which the ends of the amphorae used to be dropped to keep them upright. All this wreckage gives an idea of a populous centre where the stir of traffic and shipping was intense.

And yet in this noisy town, Augustin and his mother found means to withdraw themselves and join together in meditation and prayer. Amid this rather vulgar activity, in a noise of trade and seafaring, a mystic scene develops where the purified love of mother and son gleams upon us as in a light of apotheosis. They had at Ostia a foretaste, so to speak, of the eternal union in G.o.d. This was in the house where they had come on arrival. They talked softly, resting against a window which looked upon the garden.... But the scene has been made popular by Ary Scheffer's too well-known painting. You remember it: two faces, pale, bloodless, stripped of flesh, in which live only the burning eyes cast upward to the sky-a dense sky, baffling, heavy with all the secrets of eternity. No visible object, nothing, absolutely nothing, distracts them from their contemplation. The sea itself, although indicated by the painter, almost blends into the blue line of the horizon. Two souls and the sky-there you have the whole subject.

It is living poetry congealed in abstract thought. The att.i.tude of the characters, majestically seated, instead of leaning on the window-ledge, has, in Scheffer's picture, I know not what touch of stiffness, of slightly theatrical. And the general impression is a cold dryness which contrasts with the lyric warmth of the story in the Confessions.

For my part, I always thought, perhaps on the testimony of the picture, that the window of the house at Ostia opened above the garden in view of the sea. The sea, symbol of the infinite, ought to be present-so it seemed to me-at the final conversation between Monnica and Augustin. At Ostia itself I was obliged to give up this too literary notion; the sea is not visible there. No doubt at that time the channel was not so silted up as it is to-day. But the coast lies so low, that just hard by the actual mouth of the Tiber, the nearness of the sea can only be guessed by the reflection of the waves in the atmosphere, a sort of pearly halo, trembling on the edge of the sky. At present I am inclined to think that the window of the house at Ostia was very likely turned towards the vast melancholy horizon of the Agro Romano. "We pa.s.sed through, one after another," says Augustin, "all the things of a material order, unto heaven itself." Is it not natural to suppose that these things of a material order-these shapes of the earth with its plantations, its rivers, towns, and mountains-were under their eyes? The bleak spectacle which unrolled before their gaze agreed, at all events, with the disposition of their souls.

This great desolate plain has nothing oppressive, nothing which retains the eyes upon details too material. The colours about it are pale and slight, as if on the point of swooning away. Immense sterile stretches, fawn-coloured throughout, with here and there shining a little pink, a little green; gorse, furze-bushes by the deep banks of the river, or a few boschetti with dusty leaves, which feebly stand out upon the blondness of the soil. To the right, a pine forest. To the left, the undulations of the Roman hills expire into an emptiness infinitely sad. Afar, the violet scheme of the Alban mountains, with veiled and dream-like distances, shape indefinitely against the pearl light, limpid and serene, of the sky.

Augustin and Monnica, resting on the window-ledge, looked forth. Doubtless it was towards evening, at the hour when southern windows are thrown open to the cool after a burning day. They looked forth. "We marvelled," says Augustin, "at the beauty of Thy works, O my G.o.d!..." Rome was back there beyond the hills, with its palaces, its temples, the gleam of its gilding and its marbles. But the far-off image of the imperial city could not conquer the eternal sadness which rises from the Agro. An air of funeral loneliness lay above this plain, ready to be engulfed by the creeping shadows. How easy it was to break free of these vain corporeal appearances which decomposed of themselves! "Then," Augustin resumes, "we soared with glowing hearts still higher." (He speaks as if he and his mother were risen with equal flight to the vision. It is more probable that he was drawn up by Monnica, long since familiar with the ways of the spirit, used to visions, and to mystic talks with G.o.d....) Where was this G.o.d? All the creatures, questioned by their anguished entreaty, answered: Quaere super nos-"Seek above us!" They sought; they mounted higher and higher: "And so we came to our own minds, and pa.s.sed beyond them into the region of unfailing plenty, where Thou feedest Israel for ever with the food of truth.... And as we talked, and we strove eagerly towards this divine region, by a leap with the whole force of our hearts, we touched it for an instant.... Then we sighed, we fell back, and left there fastened the first fruits of the Spirit, and heard again the babble of our own tongues, this mortal speech wherein each word has a beginning and an ending."

"We fell back!" The marvellous vision had vanished. But a great silence was about them, silence of things, silence of the soul. And they said to each other:

"If the tumult of the flesh were hushed; hushed these shadows of earth, sea, sky; suppose this vision endured, and all other far inferior modes of vision were taken away, and this alone were to ravish the beholder, and absorb him, and plunge him in mystic joy, so that eternal life might be like this moment of comprehension which has made us sigh with Love-might not that be the fulfilment of 'Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord'? Ah, when shall this be? Shall it not be, O my G.o.d, when we rise again among the dead...?"

Little by little they came down to earth. The dying colours of the sunset-tide smouldered into the white mists of the Agro. The world entered into night. Then Monnica, impelled by a certain presentiment, said to Augustin:

"My son, as for me, I find no further pleasure in life. What I am still to do, or why I still linger here, I know not.... There was only one thing made me want to tarry a little longer in this life, that I might see you a Christian and a Catholic before I died. My G.o.d has granted me this boon far beyond what I hoped for. So what am I doing here?"

She felt it; her work was done. She had exhausted, as Augustin says, all the hope of the century-consumpta spe saeculi. For her the parting was near. This ecstasy was that of one dying, who has raised a corner of the veil, and who no longer belongs to this world.

And, in fact, five or six days later she fell ill. She had fever. The climate of Ostia bred fevers, as it does to-day, and it was always unsanitary on account of all the foreigners who brought in every infection of the Orient. Furthermore, the weariness of a long journey in summer had worn out this woman, old before her time. She had to go to bed. Soon she got worse, and then lost consciousness. They believed she was in the agony. They all came round her bed-Augustin, his brother Navigius, Evodius, the two cousins from Thagaste, Rusticus, and Lastidia.n.u.s. But suddenly she shuddered, raised herself, and asked in a bewildered way:

"Where was I?"

Then, seeing the grief on their faces, she knew that she was lost, and she said in a steady voice:

"You will bury your mother here."

Navigius, frightened by this sight of death, protested with all his affection for her:

"No. You will get well, mother. You will come home again. You won't die in a foreign land."

She looked at him with sorrowful eyes, as if hurt that he spoke so little like a Christian, and turning to Augustin:

"See how he talks," she said.

And after a silence, she went on in a firmer voice, as if to impress on her sons her final wishes:

"Lay this body where you will, and be not anxious about it. Only I beseech you, remember me at the altar of G.o.d, wherever you are."

That was the supreme renunciation. How could an African woman, so much attached to her country, agree to be buried in a stranger soil? Pagan notions were still very strong in this community, and the place of burial was an important consideration. Monnica, like all other widows, had settled upon hers. At Thagaste she had had her place prepared beside her husband Patricius. And here now she appeared to give that up. Augustin's companions were astonished at such abnegation. As for himself, he marvelled at the completeness of the change worked in his mother's soul by Grace. And as he thought over all the virtues of her life, the strength of her faith-from that moment, he had no doubt that she was a saint.

She still lingered for some time. Finally, on the ninth day of her illness, she died at the age of fifty-six.

Augustin closed her eyes. A great sorrow surged into his heart. And yet he who was so quick to tears had the courage not to cry.... Suddenly a noise of weeping rose in the room of death: it was the young Adeodatus, who lamented at the sight of the corpse. He sobbed in such a heartbroken way that those who were there, demoralized by the distress of it, were obliged to rebuke him. This struck Augustin so deeply, that many years afterwards the broken sound of this sobbing still haunted his ears. "Methought," he says, "that it was my own childish soul which thus broke out in the weeping of my son." As for him, with the whole effort of his reason struggling against his heart, he only wanted to think of the glory which the saint had just entered into. His companions felt likewise. Evodius caught up a psalter, and before Monnica's body, not yet cold, he began to chant the Psalm, "My song shall be of mercy and judgment; unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing." All who were in the house took up the responses.

In the meantime, while the layers-out were preparing the corpse for burial, the brethren drew Augustin into another room. His friends and relations stood round him. He consoled the others and himself. He spoke, as the custom was, upon the deliverance of the faithful soul and the happiness which is promised. They might have imagined that he had no sense of grief, "But in Thy hearing, O my G.o.d, where none of them could hear, I was chiding the softness of my heart, and holding back the tide of sorrow.... Alas! well did I know what I was choking down in my heart."

Not even at the church, where the sacrifice was offered for Monnica's soul, nor at the cemetery before the coffin, did he weep. From a sense of Christian seemliness, he feared to scandalize his brethren by imitating the desolation of the pagans and of those who die without hope. But this very effort that he made to keep back his tears became another cause of suffering. The day ended in a black sadness, a sadness he could not shake off. It stifled him. Then he remembered the Greek proverb-"The bath drives away sorrow;" and he determined to go and bathe. He went into the tepidarium and stretched himself out on the hot slab. Useless remedy! "The bitterness of my trouble was not carried from my heart with the sweat that flowed from my limbs." The attendants rolled him in warm towels and led him to the resting-couch. Worn out by tiredness and so many emotions, he fell into a heavy sleep. The next day, upon awaking, a fresh briskness was in all his being. Some verses came singing into his memory; they were the first words of the confident and joyous hymn of St. Ambrose:

"Creator of the earth and sky, Ruling the firmament on high, Clothing the day with robes of light, Blessing with gracious sleep the night,- That rest may comfort weary men To face their usual toil again, And soothe awhile the hara.s.sed mind, And sorrow's heavy load unbind."

Suddenly, at the word sorrow, the thought of his dead mother came back to him, with the regret for that kind heart he had lost. A wave of despair overwhelmed him. He flung himself sobbing on the bed, and at last wept all the tears he had pent up so long.

III

THE MONK OF THAGASTE

Almost a year went by before Augustin continued his journey. It is hard to account for this delay. Why should he thus put off his return to Africa, he who was so anxious to fly the world?

It is likely that Monnica's illness, the arrangements about her funeral, and other matters to settle, kept him at Ostia till the beginning of winter. The weather became stormy, the sea dangerous. Navigation was regularly interrupted from November-sometimes even earlier, from the first days of October, if the tempests and the equinox were exceptionally violent. It would then be necessary to wait till spring. Besides, word came that the fleet of the usurper Maximus, then at war with Theodosius, blockaded the African coast. Travellers ran the risk of being captured by the enemy. From all these reasons, Augustin would be prevented from sailing before the end of the following summer. In the meantime, he went to live in Rome. He employed his leisure to work up a case against the Manichees, his brethren of the day before. Once he had adopted Catholicism, he must have expected pa.s.sionate attacks from his former brothers in religion. To close their mouths, he gathered against them an elaborate ma.s.s of doc.u.ments, bristling with the latest scandals. He busied himself also with a thorough study of their doctrines, the better to refute them: in him the dialectician never slept. Then, when he had an opportunity, he visited the Roman monasteries, studying their rule and organization, so as to decide on a model for the convent which he always intended to establish in his own country. At last, he went back to Ostia some time in August or September, 388, where he found a ship bound for Carthage.