The Confessions of St Augustine

The Confessions of St Augustine

During the period between the death of Constantine and the sack of Rome by the Vandals, that is, from about 340 A.D. to 450, took place the accumulation of the spiritual capital inherited from antiquity by the Middle Ages. Whether we look at religion and theology, or at science and politics, or at the leading ideas generally of the mediæval mind, everywhere we become conscious of the absolute dependence of these ideas on the intellectual acquisitions made by the Fathers of the Church in the century of migrations. These acquisitions, it is true, do not themselves bear the stamp of new production; rather are they entirely a selection from a 120much richer abundance of ideas and living forces.

When, in the reign of Constantine, the Church had gained the victory, her leaders sought to make themselves masters of all forms of spiritual life, and to subject everybody and everything to the dominion of the Church and her spirit. The great task, long since commenced, of fusing Christianity with the Empire and with ancient culture, was finished with astonishing quickness. Now first was the union between the Christian religion and ancient philosophy completed. Through the favour of circumstances an active interchange between East and West, Rome and Greece, was again brought about. The Latin Church was equipped with a store of Greek philosophy immediately before the great severance between East and West. It. would almost seem that the impending doom, the approaching night of barbarism, had been already foreboded. The firm building of the Church was completed in haste. Whatever 121in Greek philosophy seemed capable of use was drawn into the scheme of dogmatic teaching; the remainder was relegated to the rear as dangerous or as heretical, and thus gradually got rid of. The constitution of the Church was supplemented from the tried forms of the imperial constitution; the ecclesiastical canons followed the lines of Roman law. Public service was revised and its forms extended. Already whatever appeared imposing and venerable in the old heathen mysteries had been long imitated; but now the whole service became still more magnificent. Thus was formed that splendid pomp, that wonderful union of elevated thoughts with ceremonial forms, which even to-day makes the Catholic service so impressive. Art, again, was not forgotten: ancient tradition was made to yield up certain of its ‘motives’—few, but those highly significant and of high creative import—to which the Church lent the glamour of sanctity. Even the stores of ancient culture, and the literature of leisure, 122were prepared for the good of the coming centuries. The old heathen fables, heroic sagas, and novels were sifted and transformed into Christian Lives of Saints.

In every case the ascetic ideal of the Church formed the basis of these stories; though the contrast to the varied and sinful life in which this ideal was given its play, lent an especial charm to the old legends in their new form.

Thus everything borrowed from antiquity was made ‘Christian,’ and received, by its union with sanctity, the guarantee of permanence. The remnant of old culture, thus incorporated with the Church, was now able to defy the approaching storms and to serve the coming nations.

But it was after all a mere remnant, a poor selection from the capital of a falling world, protected by the authority of sanctity; not, indeed, lacking in inner unity, but as yet without progressive force or the power of growth.

In the Middle Ages, during more than seven centuries, if we disregard the fresh and youthful vigour contributed by the Germanic races, the West remained confined to the above possession; but, on the other hand, it owned a treasure of incomparable fulness, a man who lived at the end of the ancient time, and who projected his life over the centuries of the new—Augustine.

Between St Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian Church has possessed no one who could measure himself with Augustine; and in comprehensive influence no other is to be compared with him. We are right, both in the Middle Ages and to-day, to mark a distinction between the spirit of the East and that of the West; and we are right to observe in the latter a life and motion, the straining of mighty forces, high problems, and great aims. But, if so, the Church of the West at least owes this peculiarity of hers in no small degree to one man, Augustine. Along with the Church he 124served, he has moved through the centuries. We find him in the great mediæval theologians, including the greatest, Thomas Aquinas. His spirit sways the pietists and mystics of those ages: St Bernard no less than Thomas à Kempis. It is he that inspires the ecclesiastical reformers—those of the Karling epoch as much as a Wyclif, a Hus, a Wesel and a Wessel: while, on the other hand, it is the same man that gives to the ambitious Popes the ideal of a theocratic state to be realised on earth.

All this, perhaps, may to us, to-day, seem somewhat foreign: our culture, it is said, springs from the Renascence and the Reformation. True enough; but the spirit of Augustine ruled the beginnings of both. Upon Augustine, Petrarch and the great masters of the Renascence formed themselves; and without him Luther is not to be understood. Augustine, the founder of Roman Catholicism, is at the same time the only Father of the Church from whom Luther 125received any effective teaching, or whom the humanists honoured as a hero.

But Augustine has still closer points of contact with us than these. The religious language we speak, so familiar to us from songs, prayers, and books of devotion, bears the stamp of his mind. We speak, without knowing it, in his words; and it was he who first taught the deepest emotions how to find expression, and lent words to the eloquence of the heart. I am not here speaking of what is called the tongue of Zion. In this also he has his share, though to but a small degree. But it is the language of simple piety and of powerful Christian pathos; and further, that of our psychologists and pedagogues is still under his influence. Hundreds of great masters have since his time been given us; they have guided our thoughts, warmed our emotions, enriched our speech; but none has supplanted Augustine.

Finally, which is the main point, we find in his delineation of the essence of religion 126and of the deepest problems of morality, such striking depth and truth of observation, that we must still honour him as our master, and that his memory is still able in some measure, even to-day, to unite Protestant and Catholic.

I do not propose to set before you a complete picture of the activity and influence of this man. I prefer rather to portray him merely according to the work in which he has portrayed himself—the ‘Confessions’—the most characteristic of the many writings he has left us.

This work Augustine wrote in mature years—he was then forty-six—and twelve years after his baptism at Milan. He had already been for some time Bishop of Hippo in Northern Africa, when he felt impelled to give to himself and to the world, in the form of a confession to God, an account of his life down to his baptism, in order that, as he says, God might be praised. “He hath made us, but we had brought ourselves to destruction; 127He who made us, also hath made us anew.” “I tell this to the whole race of man, howsoever few thereof may read my writing, in order that I and all who read this may think from how great a depth must man cry to God.” At the end of his life, thirty years later, he looked back to this work. He calls it the one of his books which is read most fondly and most often. Some points in it, it is true, he himself censures; but, as a whole, in the presence of death itself, he marks it as a witness of the truth. It was not to be a mingling of Dichtung and Wahrheit; but he meant, plainly and without reserve, to show in the book what he had been.

The significance of the ‘Confessions’ is as great on the side of form as on that of content. Before all, they were a literary achievement. No poet, no philosopher before him undertook what he here performed; and I may add that almost a thousand years had to pass before a similar thing was done. It was the poets of the Renascence, who formed themselves 128on Augustine, that first gained from his example the daring to depict themselves and to present their personality to the world. For what do the ‘Confession’ of Augustine contain? The portrait of a soul—not psychological disquisitions on the Understanding, the Will, and the Emotions in Man, not abstract investigations into the nature of the soul, not superficial reasonings and moralising introspections like the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but the most exact portraiture of a distinct human personality, in his development from childhood to full age, with all his propensities, feelings, aims, mistakes; a portrait of a soul, in fact, drawn with a perfection of observation that leaves on one side the mechanical devices of psychology, and pursues the method of the physician and the physiologist.

Observation, indeed, is the strong point of Augustine. Because he observes, he is interested in everything that the professed philosopher disregards. He depicts the infant in the cradle and the naughtinesses of 129the child; and he passes reflections on the ‘innocence of childhood.’ He watches the beginnings of speech, and shows how speech develops itself slowly out of the mimetic tendency. He stands by the games of children, and sees in the child the adult, in the adult the child. Full of sympathy, he listens to the first sighs of the boy who has to learn. He accompanies him as he leaves home for school, and is thus plunged into the stream of human society. He observes the dominant educational system, how it reposes on fear and ambition. He compassionates youth on the false and fruitless matter that it has to learn. He is of opinion that we ought only to learn what is true, and that grammar is better than mythology, physics better than windy speculation. Next, he watches the busy doings of the adult: “The antics of children are called business in the grown-up.” He appraises society, and finds that every man in it strives to obtain good things, and that malice is an aim in itself to no man; but 130he finds, on the other hand, that the man who does not set his heart on moral perfection, sinks step by step to lower ideals, and that we have a greater repugnance to the good and holy, the longer we live without goodness and holiness. He observes the fascination and contagious power of social evils: “O Friendship, worse than the deepest enmity, unfathomable betrayer of souls! Merely because someone says, ‘Come, let us do this or that,’ and we are ashamed not to be shameless.” He reveals the dependence of the individual on the opinion of others: “Each man thinks he pushes others, and is only pushed in the deeper himself.” He regards the individual altogether not as a free, self-guiding personality, but as a link in an endless chain: “We wear the fetters of our mortality, and are fettered to society.” He watches the contented beggar, and indulges in reflections; he gives an amusing picture of the repute and the hollowness of a renowned teacher. He paints for us the professors and the students; 131the busy, trifling, charming intercourse between friends following the same calling. What is characteristic, indeed, never escapes him. But, above all, he watches the most secret motions of his own heart; he tracks the dainty ripples and mighty upheavings of his own feelings. He knows every subterfuge and by-path by which man strives to escape from his God and his high destiny.

If we consider what was written elsewhere at that time, and the manner in which it was written, we are struck dumb with astonishment at the sight of this poetic delineation of truth, this unparalleled literary achievement. Stimulating influences were certainly not wanting. In the school of the Neoplatonists Augustine had learnt to flee the barren steppes of Aristotelian and Stoic psychology, and to fix his attention on mind and character, impulse and will. A great teacher—his own master, Ambrose of Milan—again, had introduced him to a new world of emotion and observation. But his ‘Confessions’ are none the 132less entirely his own. No forerunner threatens the claim of this undertaking to originality. It has, indeed, been observed that there is a morbid strain in the book, that he has made a stage-play of his bleeding heart, and it is true that in many places he seems to us overstrained, unhealthy, or even false; but if we remember in what an age of depraved taste and lying rhetoric he wrote, we shall justly wonder that he has raised himself so high above the foibles of the time.

As the very conception of Augustine’s book was new, so also was its execution and language. Not only is the force of his observation admirable, but equally so is the force of his diction. In the language of the ‘Confessions’ there meets us an inexhaustibly rich individuality, dowered at once with the irresistible impulse and faculty to express what it feels. Goethe makes his Tasso use the sad and proud saying:

“Though other men are in their torments dumb,
Me God permits to say how much I suffer.”

This is true equally of Augustine. But not only of his sufferings was he able to speak. It was given to him to trace every motion of his heart in words, and above all, to lend speech to the pious mind and to intercourse with God. Of the power of sin and of the blessedness of the heart that hangs on God, he has been able so to speak that even to-day every tender conscience must understand his language. Before him, Paul and the Psalmists alone had thus spoken; to their school Augustine, the pupil of the rhetoricians, went to learn: and thus arose the language of the ‘Confessions.’ It is not difficult to dissect it into its component parts, to discriminate the Biblical element from the rhetorical, and to point out much that is far-fetched, and archaic—frigid conceits and artificial turns. But that which strikes us to-day as strange, or even occasionally as painful, is richly compensated by the highest merits. Admirable, above all, is the use of sayings and ideas from Holy Writ. Through the position which he gives 134them, he lends to the most insignificant words something striking or moving. In that great literary art, the art of giving to a well-known saying the most effective setting, he has surpassed all others.

Wonderful also is his power of summing up the phenomena of life and the riddles of the soul in short maxims and antitheses, or in pregnant sentences and new connotations. Much of the ‘Confessions’ has passed into the languages of the Western nations. We use much, or find much in our great writers like Lessing and Goethe, without thinking of its origin. ‘The dumb chatterers,’ ‘victorious garrulity,’ ‘the biter bit,’ ‘the betrayed betrayers,’ the ‘hopeful young man,’ the ‘fetters of our mortality,’ the ‘rich poverty,’ ignominious glory,’ ‘hateful gibberish, ‘life of my life,’ and many similar images are either borrowed direct from Augustine, or can be traced back to him. But more important are his psychological descriptions and his maxims:—‘That was my life—was it a life?’ 135‘I became to myself a great problem,’ ‘Man is a deep abyss,’ ‘Peace of mind is the sign of our secret unity,’ ‘Every man has only his one Ego,’ ‘Every unordered spirit is its own punishment,’ ‘Every forbidden longing, by an unchangeable law, is followed by delusion,’ ‘You cannot do good without willing it, though what you do may in itself be good.’

These are a few isolated specimens; it would be easy to go on for a long time with other examples. But he is much greater even than here in his connected descriptions. One example among hundreds must suffice. He pictures himself as wishing to rise to a vigorous Christian life, but held back by the lust of the world and by custom:

“Thus the burden of the world lay softly on me as on a dreamer, and the thoughts in which my senses turned towards Thee, my God, were like the efforts of those who would rouse themselves from sleep, but, overcome by the depth of slumber, ever sink back again. And when Thou calledst to me, 136‘Awake, thou that sleepest,’ I would give thee no other answer than the words of delay and dream, ‘Presently, but let me dream a little longer.’ Yet the ‘presently’ had no end, and the ‘yet a little longer’ lengthened evermore.”

Great as is his art, he never destroyed the uniformity of his style, which is from one fount, because dominated by a single rounded personality. It is a person that meets us in his language, and we feel that this person is everywhere richer than his expression. This is the key to the understanding of the enduring influence of Augustine. Life is kindled only upon life, one lover inflames the other: these are his own words, and we may apply them to himself. He was far greater than his writings, for he understood how by his writings to draw men into his life. And with all the tenderness of feeling, with all the constant melting into emotion and the lyricism of the style, there is yet a sublime repose throughout the work. The 137motto of the book—“Thou, Lord, hast made us after Thine own image, and our heart cannot be at rest till it finds rest in Thee”—is at the same time the seal of the book and the keynote of its language. No fear, no bitterness thenceforward troubles the reader; and that though the book is a sketch of the history of distress and inner trouble. “Fear is the evil thing,” says Augustine in one place; but he talks with God fearlessly as with a friend. He has not ceased to see riddles everywhere—in the course of the world, in man, in himself; but the riddles have ceased to oppress him, for he trusts that God in His wisdom has ordered all things. Mists of sorrow and of tears still surround him, but at heart he is free. The impression, then, that the book leaves, may be compared with the impression we receive when, after a dark and rainy day, the sun at length gains the victory, and a mild ray lightens the refreshed land.

But the wonderful form and the magical language of the book are not, after all, its 138most important characteristics. It is the content, the story he tells, that gives it its real value. As a record of facts, the book is poor indeed. It paints the life of a scholar who grew up under conditions then normal, who had not to contend with adverse fortune or want, who absorbs the manifold wisdom of his time, and accepts a public office in order at last, with scepticism and dissatisfaction, to hand himself over to a holy life of resignation, to theological science, and to the firm-based authority of the Church. It was a course of development such as not a few of Augustine’s contemporaries passed through. No other outlet, indeed, was then possible to piety and a serious scientific mind. If we conceive the story of Augustine from this point of view, we can get rid of a widespread prejudice, for the existence of which, it is true, he is himself to some degree responsible.

In wide circles the ‘Confessions’ are viewed as the portrait of a Prodigal Son, of a man who, after a wild and wasteful 139career, suddenly comes to himself and repents, or else as the picture of a heathen who, after a life of vice, is suddenly overcome by the truth of the Christian religion. No view can be more mistaken. Rather do the ‘Confessions’ portray a man brought up from youth by a faithful mother in the Christian, that is, in the Catholic, faith; who yet, at the same time, from his youth, by the influence of his father and of the mode of culture into which he was plunged, received an impulse towards the highest secular aims. They depict a man on whose mind from childhood the name of Christ has been ineffaceably imprinted, but who, as soon as he is roused to independent thought, is informed by the impulse to seek truth. In this effort, like us all, he is held down by ambition, worldliness, and sensuality; but he struggles unceasingly against them. He wins, at last, the victory over self, but in doing so he sacrifices his freedom of purpose to the authority of the Church, because in the message of this 140Church he has experienced the power of breaking with the world and devoting himself to God.

In his external life this change presents itself as a breach with his past; and it is in this view that he has himself depicted it. To him there is here nothing but a contrast between the past and the present. But in his inner life, in spite of his own representations, everything appears to us a quite intelligible development. It is true—and we understand the reason—that he was unable to judge himself in any other way. No one who has passed from inner unrest to peace, from slavery to the world to freedom in God and dominion over himself, can possibly, in surveying the path he trod in the past, call it the way of truth. But others, both contemporary and later, may judge differently; and in this case such a judgment is made specially easy. For the man who here speaks to us is, against his will, compelled to give evidence that, even before his conversion, he strove unceasingly after 141truth and moral force; and, on the other hand, the numerous writings he produced immediately after his ‘break with the past,’ prove that that break was by no means so complete as the ‘Confessions’—written twelve years afterwards—would have us believe. Much of what only came to maturity in him during those twelve years, he has unconsciously transferred to the moment of conversion. At that time he was no ecclesiastical theologian. Spite of his resolve to submit himself to the Church, he was still living wholly in philosophical problems. The great break was limited entirely to worldly occupations and to his renunciation of the flesh; the interests that had hitherto occupied his mind it did not affect. Thus it is not hard to refute Augustine out of Augustine, and to show that he has in his ‘Confessions’ antedated many a change of thought. Yet, at bottom, he was right. His life, essentially, had but two periods—one, that which he paints in the words, “ In distraction I fell to pieces bit by bit, 142and lost myself in the Many”; the other, that in which he found in God the strength and unity of his being.

The former of these periods lies before us in his ‘Confessions.’ These have been repeatedly compared with those of Rousseau and Hamann, but really belong to a totally different class. In spite of the most deep-seated differences, I can compare Augustine’s book with no other except Goethe ‘Faust.’ In the ‘Confessions’ we meet a living Faust, whose end is, of course, not that of the Faust of the poem. There is much affinity between the two, nevertheless. All those anguished revelations in the early scenes of ‘Faust,’ from the “Alas, I have explored Philosophy,” to the resolve on suicide (“Say thy firm farewell to the sun”) appear in the ‘Confessions.’ With heart-stirring emphasis Augustine cries again and again, “O truth, how the very marrow of my soul sighs after thee!” How often, like Faust, does he complain that the “hot struggle of eternal study” has left him no wiser than 143before. How often does he compassionate his pupils that he, a drunken teacher, has given them the wine of error. How painfully, too, falls from his lips the confession—“And now, to feel that nothing can be known, this is a thought that burns into my heart.” “Could dog, were I a dog, so live?” says Faust; and Augustine, with the most savage envy, envies the ragged but cheerful beggar. He too, “to magic, with severe and patient toil, has now applied, despairing of all other guide, that from some spirit he may hear deep truths, to others unrevealed, and mysteries from mankind sealed”; and in his soul, too, there rises the enticing question, “whether Death, when it dissolves all feeling, dissolves and takes away all sorrows too.”

Even the solution which Goethe gives to his poem, the way by which Faust attains release, is not quite without its parallel in Augustine. Faust, we read, is saved by heavenly love:

And again:

All this is precisely in the spirit of Augustine; and the idea of the wonderful concluding scene of the second part of Faust rests on one of his conceptions, little as Goethe was conscious of the fact. It is unlikely that Goethe had any direct acquaintance with Augustine; he probably knew him only at secondhand. That in this world of illusion and error, love, divine love, alone is strength and truth; that this love alone, in fettering, frees and blesses—this is the fundamental thought of the ‘Confessions’ and of most of 145Augustine’s later works. The righteousness which avails with God is the love with which He fills us; and therefore the beginning of love, which is righteousness, is the beginning of blessedness, and perfected love is perfected blessedness. Such is the knowledge to which the struggling philosopher has attained, after seeking in vain elsewhere for rest and peace.

Nevertheless, there is a great gulf between the Faust of the poem and this Faust of reality. The former, in all his struggles, stands with a foot firmly planted on this earth. The God who has given him over for the time being to the devil, is not the good for the possession of which he strives; the inner battle with one’s own weakness and sin is scarcely hinted at. To Augustine, on the contrary, the strife for truth is the strife for a supernatural good, for the holy and the high—in a word, for God. It is for this reason that the conclusion of Faust has about it an air of strangeness; we are in no degree prepared for this sudden turn. In Augustine the conclusion follows by an inner 146necessity. His wanderings prove to be, the very paths along which he has been led directly to this aim—blessedness through divine love.

Let us, in a few touches, draw a picture of these paths. Interesting in themselves, they are further interesting because they are typical of the time. Augustine entered into the closest sympathy with all the great spiritual forces of his age. His personality became actually enlarged till it embraced that of the whole existing world; and his individual advance therefore shows us how that world passed from heathenism and philosophy into Catholicism.

Born at Tagasta, a country town of Northern Africa, Augustine showed as a boy good but not brilliant capacity. After he had studied in the school of his native town and at Madaura, his father with some difficulty found the means to have him educated at Carthage. This father was in the ordinary way respectable, but weak in character, and in his private life not free from reproach. He had no higher 147aim for his son than a career of worldly prosperity. He was himself a heathen; but his wife was a Christian—a relation not uncommon in the middle of the fourth century; it was the women who spread Christianity in the family. To his mother Augustine has raised a noble monument, not only in his ‘Confessions,’ but elsewhere in his works. He tells how she taught him to pray, and with what passion he drank in her lessons: often, he tells us, he fervently prayed to God that at school he might escape the ferule. Later in life he recalled how as a boy, in the delirium of fever, he cried out furiously for baptism; and, in all his wanderings, one relic of childhood remained with him never to be extinguished—reverence for Christ. Again and again in his ‘Confessions’ he tells us that all wisdom left him unsatisfied that was not somehow connected with the name of Christ. Thus the recollections of youth became of the highest significance to the man. Faust says:

“O once, in boyhood’s happy time, Heaven’s love
Showered down upon me, with mysterious kiss Hallowing the stillness of the Sabbath day!
Yearnings for something that I knew not of,
Deep meanings in the full tones of the bells.”

How often, with wonderful variations, is this same thought heard resounding in the ‘Confessions’ of Augustine!

Till the boy’s seventeenth year imagination and youthful pleasure predominated in his mind. He had at first little taste for learning, although he mastered his lessons with ease. His only delight was to joke and play with his friends. To his mothers grief, also, he early fell into the sins of youth—sins which to his father and to society were no sins at all. At this time, in Carthage, one of Cicero’s writings, the ‘Hortensius,’ came into his hands; and it is from this moment that he reckons the beginning of a new and higher effort. The ‘Hortensius’ no longer exists; but we can clearly make out its spirit from the remaining works of the man: a high moral flight, a serious interest in the 149pursuit of truth, but on an uncertain foundation, stimulating rather than strengthening the principles; a book well adapted to wean a youthful mind from the wild life of a student to introspection and the study of the highest questions. And this it actually accomplished for Augustine; he severed himself henceforward from his boon companions, in order with absolute devotion to search for truth. But the book gave him no power over his sensual desires; and he soon found that he had outgrown a tuition which did not satisfy his understanding, left his religious feeling still hungry, and gave him no power of self-mastery. He had learned to know Cicero, the philosopher and moralist, and had become no better than before. But what Cicero did for him—leading him from an empty and trifling existence to serious self-examination and to the search for truth—moralists like Cicero did for the world of that time generally. Augustine remained, as the earliest books he wrote as a Catholic Christian prove, 150far more powerfully and permanently influenced than he is willing to allow. He now turned to Manichæism, a doctrine which then exercised a great attraction on the deeper spirits. Anyone who had gained some impressions from the contents of the Bible, but held the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible as a false one—especially if he could not surmount the stumbling-blocks of the Old Testament; anyone who was determined to cast aside leading-strings and examine things freely for himself; anyone who sought to know what inner principle holds the world together; anyone who strove from the physical to grasp the constitution of the spiritual world and the problem of evil—became in those days a Manichæan. Again, this sect, partly from necessity, partly by an inward impulse, surrounded itself like our freemasons with secrets, and formed at the same time a firm inner ring within the society of the age. Finally, its members exhibited a serious way of life; and the neophyte, in mounting step 151by step to ever higher and narrower circles, found himself at last in a company of saints and redeemers. Into this society Augustine entered, and to it he belonged for the nine years preceding this twenty-eighth year of his life. What attracted him to it was the fact that it allowed Christ a high rank, and yet assured to its disciples a reasonable solution of the riddle of the world. Hungry as he was, he flung himself greedily upon this spiritual nourishment. The doctrine that evil and good are alike physical forces—that the struggle in man’s breast is only the continuation of the great struggle in nature between light and darkness, sun and cloud—struck him as profound and satisfactory. In place of a shallow ethic he found here a deep metaphysic. Nevertheless, after but a few years—he had meanwhile become a professor in Carthage—he began to have his doubts. It was the astrological knowledge, which he had sought along with the metaphysical, that first appeared to him as mere deception. Next, 152a deeper study of Aristotle sobered his view of the Manichæan physics. His clear intelligence began to perceive that the whole Manichæan wisdom reposed on a physical mythology. The inborn turn of his mind towards the experimental and real gained the victory as soon as it was reinforced by the influence of Aristotle, the great logician and natural scientist of the ancient world. It was he that led back Augustine, like so many before and after, to a calm and sober thinking. Of all fables, the Manichæan now seemed to him the worst, because absolutely nothing in the world of the actual corresponds to them. But the actual was his aim; and he made no secret of his rising doubts to his brethren in the society. At the time there was living in Rome a renowned Manichæan teacher, named Faustus. The friends who found themselves unable to solve the doubts of Augustine consoled him with the name of Faustus. “ Faustus will make it all right,” they said; “Faustus will come and explain 153it all.” Augustine allowed himself to be thus consoled for some time. At last, however, Faustus came in the flesh. The only section of the ‘Confessions’ over which lies a breath of humour, is that in which is painted the belauded Faustus, the perfect drawing-room professor, who yet was honest enough to confess, when Augustine alone was by, his own ignorance. Thenceforward, in his heart of hearts, Augustine was done with Manichæism.

But what next? Aristotle, it is true, had brought emancipation; but he was able to give no hint upon the questions to which Augustine sought an answer. It was here that Augustine began again to draw near the Church. But the Church forbade free inquiry; she maintained the fables of the Old Testament; she proclaimed, as Augustine thought, a God with eyes and ears, and made Him out to be the creator of evil. It was impossible that she should be the depositary of truth. Then, he decided, there can be no 154truth at all; we must doubt everything. To this view he now resigned his soul, and fortified it by the reading of sceptical philosophers. He sought for a ready-made truth, and yet was unwilling to stifle his restless longing for it. No wonder that he fell into scepticism; he felt himself, in his heart of hearts, poor and without a stay. Yet more, he had long laid upon himself the obligation to cast aside all immorality and obtain entire dominion over himself: an aim which, as he himself unwillingly confesses, he did in some regards attain. To the common frivolities and trivialities, to the theatres and plays, he had bidden farewell; and he was conscientious in the discharge of his professorial duties. But the love of fame and of honour among men was a different matter; and above all he was unable to free himself from a connection which he already regarded as immoral. Little as it contravened the social laws of the age, to him this relation caused a deep breach and cleavage in his personality. He saw himself 155severed from the good and holy, and from God; in spite of all his good resolutions, he saw himself entangled with the world and with sensuality; and, as he confesses later, he would not let himself be healed, because his sickness was dear to him. Yet, as in his serious contemporaries, pure moral feeling and artificiality even then were in him closely interwoven. A holy life appeared to him to be nothing but a life of most utter renunciation; and to lead such a life he was still without the strength. In these perplexities, and in the mood of a sceptic, he left Carthage in order to work in Rome as a professor of rhetoric. The Carthaginian students with their loose manners had given him a distaste for his native Africa. But in Rome also he had some bad experiences with his pupils, and accordingly but a few months passed before he took a public professorship at Milan. The Manichæans, with whom he still maintained constant relations, since “nothing better had as yet appeared,” had secured him 156this post by their recommendations to the influential Symmachus.

Here in Milan the transformation was at last completed, slowly it is true, but with extraordinary transparency and dramatic sequence. Augustine recognised with growing clearness that man can gain a solid hold in the highest questions only by serious unintermitting self-discipline; and he was now to prove that man gains moral force by freely giving himself up to a personality far surpassing his own. In Milan he met Bishop Ambrose. Hitherto he had fallen in with no Catholic Christian capable of impressing him. Such a one he was now to know. If at first it was perhaps the kindliness and extraordinary eloquence of Ambrose that captivated him, it was soon the matter of the Bishop’s sermons that drew his attention. He himself tells us in the ‘Confessions’ that the highest service Ambrose did him was to remove the stumbling-blocks of the Old Testament. Certainly the Greek method of 157interpretation, of which Ambrose was an exponent, exerted a strong influence on Augustine as on every cultivated mind of the age. But the really dominating force in Ambrose was the personality that lay behind his words. It was here that Augustine broke openly with Manichæism. If truth is to be found anywhere, it must be in the Church; to this acknowledgment he was brought by the influence of the great Bishop. The picture of Christ which his mother had been the first to show him, rose again before his soul, and he never afterwards lost it.

But Ambrose had no time to trouble himself about a man who, though he would willingly have believed, was nothing but a sceptic; and even yet there remained a fundamental stumbling-block to be removed. Augustine could not bring himself to believe that there can be an active spiritual being without material substance. The spiritual conception of God and the idealistic view of the world seemed to him unprovable, impossible. But 158while he thus struggled in vain for certainty, his despair at finding himself still a slave to the world and sense, and unable to attain the mastery over himself, was much deeper than before. Fear of his Judge and fear of death lay like a dead-weight on his soul. He thirsted for strength; already he would have given all for this—honour, calling, nay even understanding itself. But like the sleeper that strives to rise, he sank back again and again. The most various plans fluttered before his mind: along with congenial friends and pupils, he hugged himself in the idea of withdrawing altogether from the world, and living, far from the madding crowd, a common life of personal training and of the search for truth. But the decision had as yet no force; its execution was hindered by the calls of wife and business. What essentially he was already seeking in his theoretical and practical doubts was but one thing—intercourse with the living God, who frees us from sin. But God did not appear to him, and he did not find Him.

Help came to him from an unexpected quarter. He was reading some writings of the Neoplatonic school—a school in which Greek philosophy spoke its last word, and uttered its last testament. Like a dying man who only under compulsion, in the midst of his agonies, busies himself with the things of this world, Greek philosophy directed all her thoughts to the highest, to the holy, to God. Everything lofty and noble that she had gained in the course of a long toil, she compacted into a bold idealistic system, and a practical direction to the holy life. In Neoplatonism she taught that we must follow the authority of revelation, and that there is only one reality, God, and only one aim, to mount up to Him; that evil is nothing but separation from God, and the world of sense only an unreal appearance; that we can only attain to God by self-discipline and selfrestraint, by contemplation ever rising from lower to higher spheres, and finally by an indescribable intoxication, an ‘ecstasy,’ in 160which God Himself embraces the soul and sends His light upon her:

These concluding words of ‘Faust’ are Neoplatonism all over. The Neoplatonic philosophy had more and more renounced the ‘dry light’ of science; it had thrown itself into the arms of revelation, in order to raise men above themselves. This, the last product of the proud Greek mind, did not disdain even Christian writings in its desire to learn from them. St John’s Gospel was read and highly valued in Neoplatonic circles. It was in this philosophy that Augustine now steeped himself; it was this that solved for him his theoretical riddles and doubts; it was this that drew him out of scepticism and subjugated him for ever. The reality of spiritual values, the spiritual conception of God, became 161for him now a certainty. The keen criticism which he formerly had applied to the theoretical groundwork of philosophical systems here failed him. Scepticism had dulled his critical faculty; or rather—he sought above all for guidance to the blessed life, and for an authority which might guarantee to him the living God. What he sought he transferred to the new philosophy: for the holy being to which he wished to give himself up, and whose nearness he wished to feel, was not, as he imagined it, given to him by Neoplatonism. The true difference he did not fail to see; but in its deepest meaning he penetrated it neither now nor later. That there existed a philosophy on to which he could fasten what his soul longed for, was to him important before all else. Neoplatonism became to him, as to many before and after, a pathway to the Church; by its means he acquired confidence in the fundamental ideas of the ecclesiastical theology of the time. It is remarkable how speedily, how imperceptibly he passed from 162Neoplatonism to the recognition of the Bible in its entirety and of the Catholic doctrine; or rather, how he came to see Neoplatonism as true, but not as the whole truth. There was wanting to it, above all, one item—the recognition of redemption through the incarnate God, and thereby the right way to truth. These philosophers, said he, see the Promised Land like Moses, but they know not how to enter in and possess it. This he fancied that he now knew: by the subjection of the understanding to Christ. But Christ, as he had learnt from Ambrose, is only where the Church is. We must therefore believe, and believe what the Church believes. Augustine in his ‘Confessions’ allows us no doubt that the decision to submit ourselves to authority is the condition of the attainment of the truth. This decision he made, and thus became a Catholic Christian. In this inner transformation the causes are wonderfully linked together—the Neoplatonic influence, the enduring impression of the Person of 163Christ, strengthened by the perusal of Paul’s Epistles, and the grand authority of the Church.

He was now a Catholic Christian by conviction and will; but he himself describes his state of mind in the words: “Thus I had found the pearl of great price, but I still hesitated to sell all I had; I delighted in the law of God after the inward man, but I found another law in my members.” No theory, no doctrine, could here avail him: only overpowering personal impressions could subject him or carry him away. And such impressions arrived. First, it was the news of a famous heathen orator in Rome, who had suddenly renounced a brilliant career and publicly professed himself a Catholic; a report that stirred him to his depths. Then, a few days later, a fellow-countryman, happening to visit him, told him an event that had recently taken place in Trèves. A few young imperial officials had gone a walk in the gardens on the city-walls, and 164there fallen upon the hut of a hermit. In the hut they found a book, the Life of St Antony. One of them began to read it; and the book exerted such a fascination upon them that they forthwith resolved to leave all and follow Antony. The narrator told this story with flaming enthusiasm; he had himself been present and a witness of the sudden transformation. He did not see what an impression his tale made on his listener. A fearful struggle arose in Augustine’s mind: “Where do we allow ourselves to drift? Why is this? The unlearned take the kingdom of heaven by force, and we with our heartless learning still wallow in flesh and blood!” In the conflict of his feelings, no longer master of himself, he flung into the garden. The thought of that which he was to renounce struggled in him with the might of a new life. He fainted; and only awoke to consciousness as he heard in a neighbouring house a child’s voice, probably in play, repeating again and 165again the words, ‘Take and read, take and read.’ He hurried back to the house, and, remembering the story of St Antony, opened his Bible. His eye fell on the passage in Romans, “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” “I would not read further, nor was there need; for as I finished the passage there immediately streamed into my heart the light of peaceful certainty, and all the darkness of indecision vanished away.” At this moment he broke with his past: he felt in himself the power to renounce the sinful habit, and to lead a new and holy life in union with his God. This he vowed to do, and kept his vow.

A proof that it was an inner transformation which he had undergone lies in the fact that while he thenceforward renounced his wife and his public occupation as an evil, he in no 166degree for the present gave up his studies or the circle of his interests. So far from it, that he removed with his friends and his mother to an estate near Milan, in order there to devote himself undisturbed to philosophy and to serious intercourse with his companions, and to pursue his philosophical speculations as he had pursued them hitherto. His ideal and that of his friends was not St Antony, but a society of wise men, as conceived by Cicero, Plotinus, and Porphyry. No obtrusive Church dogmas as yet disturbed the philosophical dialogues of the friends; but their minds were ruled by a sure belief in the living God; and in place of the old uncertainties about the starting-point and aim of all knowledge of truth, they now lived in the assurance given by the revelation of God in Christ and by the authority of the Church. The question whether happiness is secured by the search for truth or by the possession of truth, was mooted by Augustine in the circle of these friends, and decided in favour of the latter 167hypothesis. He resolved to pursue his unceasing investigations further; but the last and highest truth he sought no more, convinced that he had found it in subjection to the authority of God as proclaimed by the Church.

In this narrative I have attempted to follow the ‘Confessions,’ and only toward the end have I corrected their representations from those more trustworthy sources, the books written by Augustine immediately after his conversion. You will not have failed to feel the problem offered by this life. On the one side, a development from within outward by incessant toil, an ascent from a fettered and distracted existence to freedom and stability in God; on the other, the development into the belief laid down by authority, repose upon the Church, and the monkish conception of marriage and work. Even if we keep in mind the state of the times, how strange is it nevertheless that this rich and untiring spirit, striving after personal Christian piety, should only attain it 168by submitting to the authority of the Church!

These two things are henceforward inseparably interwoven in Augustine’s life and thought. On the one side he speaks in a new fashion—but on the lines of the Church-of God and divine things. From the experience of his heart he witnesses of sin and guilt, repentance and faith, God’s power and God’s love. In place of a sterile morality he sets up a living piety, life in God through Christ. To this life he summons the individual; he shows him how poor and wretched he is, with all his knowledge and all his virtue, so long as he is not penetrated by the love of God. He shows him that the natural man is swayed by selfishness, that selfishness is slavery and guilt, and that every man is by nature a link in an infinite chain of sin. But he also teaches him that God is greater than our heart, that the love of God as revealed in Christ is stronger than our natural impulses, and that freedom is the 169blessed necessity of what is good. Wherever in the following millennium and later the struggle has arisen against a mechanical piety, self-righteousness, or jejune morality, there the spirit of Augustine has been at work. But, at the same time, no one before Augustine has, in so decided and open a fashion, established Christianity on the authority of the Church, or confused with the authority of institutions the living authority of saintly persons, who engender a life like their own.

The forces which were inseparably conjoined in his own experiences and life have continued to affect the Church through his influence; his significance in the formation of Catholic ecclesiasticism and in the rule of the Church is no less than his critical significance, or than the power given him to arouse individual piety and personal Christianity.

The solution of this problem I shall not here attempt; it must suffice to observe that fundamentally it is by no means astonishing. Religion and the faith dependent on authority, 170different as they are, are severed by a narrow partition; and, where faith is imagined as first of all a matter of knowledge, the partition vanishes entirely. At this point Luther stepped in and undertook to establish the Christian on a foundation from which he must view the authority of institutions, and monasticism, as a degenerate form of belief.

But every age has received from God its content, and every spirit its measure. Augustine’s limits are at the same time his strength and the conditions of his activity. Within his limitations, in the forty-three years of his Catholic life, he raised himself to a personality whose sublimity and humility are amazing to us. A stream of truthfulness, kindness, and benevolence, and on the other hand of living ideas and deep conceptions, runs through his writings, by means of which he became the great teacher of the West. True, he was left behind at the Reformation, though that very Reformation he helped to call into existence; and his religious view of the world 171failed to hold its ground against the scientific knowledge to which we have since Leibnitz attained. True, Catholicism strove to stifle his still surviving influence at the Council of Trent, in the contest with Jansenism, and by the Vatican Decrees. But he is, in spite of all, no dead force; what he has been to the Church of Christ will not vanish, and even to the Romish Church he will leave no rest.

From Easter 387 to Easter 1887 fifteen hundred years have passed since Augustine was baptised and started on the service of the Church. No one has celebrated the day; no monument has been set up to the teacher of the Church. But he has the noblest of all memorials: his name stands written in imperishable characters on the leaves of Western history from the days of the great migrations to our own.