There is no doubt that Monica ruled the family’s home life. She even managed to persuade the hapless Patricius to convert to Christianity, almost certainly in a fit of alcoholic remorse, the year before he died. And when it became apparent that young Augustine had inherited some of his father’s unspeakable habits, he was banished from the family home. But only briefly: Monica did not wish to let him out of her clutches.
Meanwhile Augustine continued to wrestle with his problem. In despair he would even occasionally turn to God, imploring him in touching fashion, ‘Lord, give me chastity – but not yet.’ He didn’t want God to ‘cure me too soon of the disease of lust, which I wanted satisfied, not quelled’.
Augustine was an extremely bright boy, and Monica had great ambitions for him. Before Patricius died he had scraped together enough money for the boy to continue his education at Carthage. Here, away from Mother, Augustine had a number of experiences in the bordellos and developed a taste for the theatre (later described in the Confessions as ‘a loathsome mange, which swells and festers with hideous pus. What miserable delirium!’). He then settled down to live with a woman, with whom he was to share a long and faithful loving relationship. She even had ‘an accidental son’ by Augustine. (Nothing is said against her personally in the Confessions; it’s what they repeatedly and enjoyably did together that upset him.)
But Augustine wasn’t just a prig with a problem. The turbulence that drove him to such (alleged) extremes of lewdness and such extremes of (purely literary) self-abasement also drove him with equal force to discover the truth about himself. Why did he behave in such a way? How could he be so utterly and despicably vile and polluted and at the same time yearn with equal longing for purity?
The psychology that might have reduced him to shallow normality was not available, and the Christianity offered by his mother appeared too simple to satisfy his demanding intellect. What he needed was a convincing explanation of his plight, sufficiently profound for him to believe. He began reading Cicero and was at once attracted to philosophy. It was Cicero, a graduate of Plato’s Academy, who taught him the difficult business of how to think properly. But Cicero offered no solution.
Augustine found what he was looking for in Manichaeism. This quasi-Christian sect had been founded a century earlier by a Persian named Mani, who had claimed to be the Holy Ghost and had ended by being crucified by fire worshipers. Manichaeism was essentially dualistic, its adherents believing that the world was a product of the conflict between Good and Evil (or Light and Darkness). Man’s soul consisted of light, entrapped by darkness from which it must seek to free itself. This was a belief tailor-made for Augustine in his present state, even if it had been proscribed as a heresy by the Christian church. Augustine embraced Manichaeism with open arms.
Mother was not pleased when Augustine arrived home after his four years of study in Carthage. The mistress and child she could accept (they could be dealt with later), but Manichaeism was another matter. This grieved her heart, and she saw no point in disguising the fact. Meanwhile Augustine began teaching rhetoric in his home town, and became interested in astronomy. But Augustine, now twenty, remained ambitious, and a year later he returned to Carthage, where he worked in the university as a visiting teacher. Unfortunately the times were changing and the students were out of control. Discipline problems became so great that teaching was virtually impossible. Augustine decided to set off with his mistress and young son to look for work in Rome.
By now Augustine was beginning to have intellectual doubts about Manichaeism. The latest findings of astronomy did not accord with the mythological explanations of the heavens offered by the Manichaeans. Augustine was visited by Bishop Faustus, the Manichaean scholar, and together they discussed these matters. But in the end the good-natured bishop was forced to confess that he had no answer to these problems, which set Augustine pondering.
Mother didn’t approve of the projected trip to Rome, and she came to Carthage to say so. Before the boat sailed there was a scene on the quayside, with Monica ‘clinging to me with all her strength in the hope that I would either come home or take her with me’. Augustine finally persuaded Monica that the boat would not sail until next morning, and she went off to visit a nearby shrine to St Cyprian. Augustine then secretly set sail under cover of darkness, ‘leaving her alone to her prayers and her tears’.
In Rome Augustine continued to mix with Manichaeans. Despite his doubts, he remained convinced by their doctrine that it was not us who sinned but some other darker nature that entrapped the soul. He continued teaching, and within a year his intellectual brilliance had been noticed. He was offered a post as professor of rhetoric at Milan.
Milan had recently replaced Rome as the administrative capital of the Roman Empire, which was in the process of splitting into its eastern and western halves. The empire was entering one of the more exotic periods of its long decline, with the crowning of teenage emperors and the like. (The army had recently excelled itself by proclaiming a four-year-old as emperor, but this example of military intelligence had been politely overlooked; a degenerate adult had briefly been put forward in his stead.) The present emperor now resided in Milan, but the most influential figure in the city was Bishop – later to become Saint – Ambrose. His power was so great that he had recently ordered the Emperor Theodosius to perform a penance after he had been responsible for a massacre in Thessalonica.
Ambrose was one of the ablest minds in Christendom, and his sermons attracted large audiences. Augustine went to hear one and was at once disabused of two prejudices he had held toward Christianity. He saw that this religion could be embraced by a man of great intellect. He also saw that the Bible was a more profound book than he had previously realised, and that it was not always to be understood literally.
A year after Augustine’s arrival in Milan, his mother finally caught up with him. By now Augustine was able to reassure Monica that he was no longer a Manichaean; but he was not yet a Christian either. He still had large ambitions ‘for fame and wealth and marriage’. Monica seems to have been all in favour, and soon persuaded him it was time he found himself a proper wife. A girl of suitable family was selected and they became engaged, despite the fact that she was so young he would have to wait for two years before they could legally marry. But there was a price to pay for all this. ‘The woman with whom I had been living [for over twelve years] was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage and this was a blow which crushed my heart to bleeding, because I loved her dearly.’ Augustine’s mistress – who remains nameless throughout the Confessions – was forced to leave her son with Augustine and was sent back to Africa ‘vowing never to give herself to another man’. (This last remark is usually taken as a token of her undying love for Augustine, though women may interpret it differently.) Augustine soon found the prospect of a two-year wait before his marriage quite unendurable, and he took another mistress – yet despite this he remained ‘devastated’ by the loss of his first mistress.
More than ever, Augustine now found himself tormented by ‘the problem of evil’. He could no longer believe in the Manichaeans, largely because of their intellectual inferiority. They appeared unable to answer his questions on astronomy or explain the problem of his irrepressible sexual impulse. Yet there seemed to be no alternative to their dualistic interpretation of the world. The soul of Light within him remained helplessly in the grip of Darkness beyond his control. Yet the very notion of dualism seemed more and more unacceptable to him. Then he discovered the writings of Plotinus.
Plotinus had been born in Alexandria at the beginning of the third century A.D. Like many brilliant critics, he thought he understood what he had read better than the author himself. In this case Plotinus was convinced that he understood the philosophy of Plato much better than Plato himself had managed. In his attempt to explain what Plato had really meant to say, Plotinus transformed Plato’s original theories into what came to be called Neoplatonism. Into the container of Platonic theory Plotinus poured a cocktail of features from Pythagoras, Aristotle, and the Stoics, adding a mystical twist of his own.
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