Kon BambooSchoot

St. Augustine by Rebecca West

THE MEDITERRANEAN WAS A MAGIC POOL in the heart of the ancient world. The peoples who dwelt on its shores swam in it and sailed on it and breathed its salt, and were given the powers of magicians. They practised the arts and sciences and crafts with an aptitude not to have been an ticipated in the kindred of apes. On its northern shores Greece and Rome drew an especially powerful magic from the waters, so powerful that the enchantment radiated all over Europe, all through time down to the present age. On its southern shores was Carthage, where the enchantment was of a different sort, more suited to a soil which engendered lions and elephants and snakes and jungle vegetation almost as fierce. That city also should have radiated power, that should have run down the continent to its southward tip, and Africa should have worked out its destiny in the light. But Cato and his sour like held the mean man?s myth that the prosperous man can only prosper at the expense of another man, saw Carthage as the competitor of Rome, and provoked the Punic Wars. The victory of the Romans in those wars left. Carthage rubble and turned North Africa into a mere colony, where African men of genius were still born but had to work without the support of their own national tradition. The sacrifice was in vain. For as the Roman Empire fell apart, North Africa experienced economic and administrative decay which produced poverty and anarchy, and it was harried on its seaboard by pirates and on its southern frontiers by tribesmen. It got no help from tottering Rome, and it was forced to succumb before the barbarian invasions. It appeared that all civilisation was being totally and finally destroyed. It was during this period, in 354 A.D., that there was born in North Africa a man named Augustine who was fatuous enough to ignore the catastrophe which was about to overcome him, engaged in an exhaustive enquiry into the nature of things which were about to lose their human audience, and set down his findings in manuscripts which seemed destined to be lost almost as soon as they were completed under the sands drifting from the spreading desert across burned and looted cities. It was an insane enterprise: and the most canny of writers composing in the illusion of perpetual peace cannot have hoped for such immortality as he attained. His works are the foundation of modern Western thought.

This was a stupendous act of faith. Every expert on international affairs would have told Augustine that he and his work were doomed. Had he not disregarded them, Christendom might have had as insubstantial an intellectual system as Islam, and there is not the slightest indication that anybody could have performed the task in his stead. With magnificent audacity he took as his subject matter a certain complex of ideas which intrude into every developed religion and are present in Christianity also: the idea that matter, and especially matter related to sex, is evil; that man, wearing a body made of matter, living in a material world, and delighting in the manifestations of sex, is tainted with evil and must cleanse himself before God; and that this atonement must take the form of suffering. He examined these ideas from a philosophical point of view and discussed how they looked in the new light cast on the world by the life of Christ, and he checked his conclusions by his own personal experience, which he used with a candour new in literature. The construction thus built stood up so well that the Western mind made it its home, and its finest achievements since then have consisted largely of mod ifying and extending the original structure. The teachings of Augustine are, of course, directly transmitted by the Roman Catholic Church to its members, and with various modifications by the Protestant churches to theirs; and they pervade Catholic and Protestant literature. Shakespeare was born about twelve hundred years later than Augustine, but if his work is examined for evidence of his general conceptions he proves to accept the same assumptions that Augustine makes when, in his Confessions, he deliberates on the religious and philosophical significance of the events of his life. But it is easier. to prove his domination of the modern world negatively. Our recognition of Goethe as a unique figure can be accounted for by his freedom from Augustinian conceptions; and in our own day the influence of Andr? Gide, not sufficiently explained by either his creative or critical works in themselves, is derived from his organisation of an anti-Augustinian revolt.

But it would be a mistake to think of Augustine as having thrust on us an intellectual schedule so competently prepared that we adhere to it because there is no better. Rather is it that Augustine, being an exceptionally vital human being, in whom all human characteristics appeared in an intense form, and being given to self-examination, which he conducted with all this idiosyncratic intensity, predigested our experiences for us. He worked out the sum for us to the last stage, which each of us must work out in the light of the unique knowledge we derive from our unique circumstances. He was able to do us this service because he was one of the greatest of all writers. There is a peculiar vitality about his writing, which came to him, perhaps, as the favoured heir of a rich racial heritage. For tradition says that he was a Numidian, one of a people akin to the Berbers and Tuaregs, who were non-Semitic and sometimes fair-haired and blue-eyed, but dark of skin and with features cast in a non-European mould. There is very little doubt that he came of native African stock, whether of this branch or another. A pagan grammarian named Maximus once wrote to him a hostile letter in which he mocked at the Punic names of some Christian martyrs, and in his reply Augustine rebukes him for having, in a letter written "by an African to Africans", thrown ridicule at the Punic language which he describes as "our own tongue". He also, in a poem addressed to a friend who had followed him to Italy, speaks of the ancient race to which they both belonged, as if this marked them off from the Italians who surrounded them. This race had its strong vein of literary genius. Many Latin writers, whom we assume to have been Europeans, such as Terence and Apuleius, were, in fact, native Africans.

In the works of Augustine there is a dark abundance, a deeply coloured fecundity, which is beyond the range of nearly all Europeans. He lacked the delicacy which makes a writer happy in responding to the disciplinary demands of poetry, but that was all he lacked. He had to contend with the difficulty that he had always something to say, that the ideas flowed as fast as the ink from his pen, that his pages are crowded with arguments and illustrations, with hasty accounts of truths he has discovered on the planes of the flesh and the mind and the soul. This is a real handicap. Many a writer has earned a reputation for deliberation and restraint for no other reason than that he cannot muster more than one idea to a page, which suits readers who have not the capacity to deal with a more copious flow. To connoisseurs of impoverishment Augustine appears gross and unclassical, but it is not grossness but power which makes him, in his Confessions and in his correspondence, able to pick up a character and transfer it in its totality from life to literature. In this field he recalls the greatest of Russian writers, Aksakov; and this is a significant parallel. Aksakov was brought up on the eastern steppes of Russia, at the end of the eighteenth century, facing the cultured West, but with a primitive world, unblurred by self-consciousness, behind his back. Augustine looked North to Rome but he had wild Africa behind him, and he too possessed a frontier freshness, seeing civilisation with eyes that were not too tired.

Again and again he draws characters so fully, so intensely, that it seems to us we know them in life, in our lives, that we have to strip them of the modern clothes in which we have re dressed them and put them back into toga and tunic. There is our familiar friend, Alypius, whom we like. Who would not? When he sat on the Assessor?s bench in Rome he found it easy to refuse large bribes, even when powerful and dangerous men tried to force him to take them with menaces, but he found it very hard indeed not to take advantage of the customs by which the praetors were able to buy books at cut prices on the side. He was a very simple soul, and unlucky such often are. When he was a student in Carthage, he was going through the market-place at noon (when most of the shops would be closed) repeating to himself a lesson he had to learn by heart, when he saw a man drop an axe and run away very fast. He thought that very odd. The man was running at a speed which was really quite remarkable. Alypius picked up the axe, and examined it, and wondered what it was all about. As the man was a burglar, who had been disturbed while robbing a silver smith, and the axe was the old Roman equivalent for a jemmy, the police fell into a natural misapprehension about Alypius? part in the incident, and his friends had a great deal of trouble to get him released. He carried his artlessness into fields where it normally knows no survival. When Augustine was greatly concerned about his need for the love of women and meditated marriage, Alypius could not at first understand what Augustine was making all this fuss about. "For he had made a trial of that act in the beginning of his youth; but not having engaged himself by it, he was sorry for it, rather, and despised it; living from that time until this present most continently." But he was always open to argument, and as Augustine would go on and on about it, and he had a great respect for Augustine, he admitted that perhaps he had formed his adverse opinion of sexual intercourse too hastily and decided that there would be no harm in looking into the matter again. But he never set his heart on it, and was not greatly disappointed when Augustine decided that celibacy was better after all.

But Augustine did not fall into the error of bolstering up that delusion, "the little man", innocent and harmless, as the children of men are not. Mildness was Alypius? salient and, it might have been thought, his essential and unalterable characteristic; but at Carthage, which was a place of heated and uncensored inclinations, he became an addict of the gladiatorial shows. This meant quite simply that he was given up to blood-lust, for these shows involved the brutalisation and slaughter of helpless men and beasts. He was shocked out of his vice by a public denunciation of the shows delivered by Augustine when he was a teacher at Carthage University, and the cream of his mildness rose to the surface again. But later, in Rome, when he was a mature man, his friends one day haled him to the Coliseum by sheer force, and though he covered his eyes again "a mighty cry of the people, beating strongly upon him he (being overcome by curiosity, and as it were prepared, whatsoever it were, to condemn it even when seen, and to overcome it) opened his eyes", and the love of cruelty flamed up in him again. "So soon as he saw the blood, he at the very instant drunk down a kind of savageness", and for a long space of time, until another spiritual upheaval cured him, he was what he had been before, a connoisseur of murder. It is as disconcerting to read this of Alypius as it is to visit an American town and learn that the quiet little house-agent led the mob to a recent race-riot; as it was to meet the Nazi who was also a good and kind family man and rate-payer; as it is to contemplate the atrocity of history and consider that statistically it is certain that this must be the work of the average man. But it is the special usefulness of Augustine that he was never alarmed by the disconcerting, it had to be set down on paper as justly as everything else.

This was true even when he himself was the disconcerting object. His Confessions tell a story which we may judge to have been embarrassing even by the standards of his time, for there is no autobiography like it. Penitent Christians, cleansing their bosoms by avowing all, have found it not impossible to own that they have in their day come near committing the sin against the Holy Spirit; but nobody has ever recounted in such detail the story of a purposeless, ungracious youth, dipping, as the thirties came along and there was nothing done, to the sordid. He was born in an untranquil home. He was the son of one Patricius, the owner of a small estate near Tagaste (now Souk Ahras, in the Algerian hinterland, near Constantine), and his wife Monica. Augustine always speaks of his father in tones of moral reprobation, but he seems on Augustine?s own showing to have been simply a typical country gentleman of the age, needy because the economic system was falling to pieces round him, harassed because he was one of the select but unlucky class of curiales, who were responsible for the taxes of their district, and, not unnaturally in these circumstances, hot-tempered. Like most of his class in that transition era, he was a pagan, but he was to be baptised before the end of his life. Augustine?s mother, Monica, was a Christian, born of a family firm for at least two generations in the Faith, and she was ardent in her devotion and active in church work. Of Monica Augustine gives a fuller picture than he gives of his father, indeed in all literature no son has ever painted a more detailed and more intimate picture of his mother. But by a curious chance this has been obscured from us. When she had been dead for a thousand years or so her story appealed to some Italians, who started a cult in her honour, and they made a soft-eyed Italian lady of her, passive in all but prayer; and this image has replaced the picture Augustine drew from life, and which is in fact all we know of her, and which represents an entirely different type of woman. According to him she was passionate, in spite of a remarkable power of self-control, vigorous, competent, full of good sense and worldly wisdom, dominating, and able to hold her own in argument. She is much more lovable than the popular legend, though the disparity is at first shocking to people who come on the Confessions late in life.

There was the making of much trouble here. Patricius? for tunes went from bad to worse; in spite of great efforts he had for a time to withdraw Augustine from school, and the lad idled at home, getting into mischief. There was the not quite eradicated difficulty of belonging to the conquered race. There was the religious difference between husband and wife; when Augustine was a child he accepted his mother?s Christianity, but as an adolescent stood with his father in his paganism. There was also the imminence of war and the threat of dissolution which overhung civilisation, and the imperfect quality which that civilisation had attained in this particular spot. For all these people (again like the Russian landowners in Aksakov?s pages) were thorough toughs. Augustine and his friends were studying philosophy at the highest level it has yet reached, and the North African mind was in touch with all that had been achieved in art and science; but when his mother entertained her friends it was as likely as not that they would fall to comparing the disfigurements that had been left by their husbands? blows, and Monica?s only comment was that they deserved what they got for having answered back their husbands. In this violent and vexed world Augustine developed into an unsettled adolescent and then into a clever wastrel.

He was, of course, recognised as brilliant. He won a high place in the Rhetoric Schools of Carthage, we hear of him being crowned in a poetical competition, he became a professor of Rhetoric. But he was consumed by sensuality, of a quite heartless kind, until he fell in love with a woman with whom he lived in a union as close and stable as marriage, though they were not married. There was probably some legal impediment: she may have been a manumitted slave, and therefore forbid den by law to marry a man of superior legal status. He was faithful to her and they had a son, whom he called Adeodatus, Given-by-God, and marveled over, not having expected that "though children be against our wills begotten, yet being born they even compel us to love them." But he was not easy in the relationship, which was displeasing to him by reason of its irregularity, and to his father, who had wanted him to make a good marriage within the imperial caste system. He made similar arrangements that pleased nobody over his religious life. His mother was firm in her Christianity, his father was still a pagan, but he himself became a Manichaean.

The heresy of Manichaeanism, then about a hundred and fifty years old, has since played an important part in history, and is always starting up again in our own time. If a playwright or a novelist feels the need for religion, and is unwilling to take the trouble to find out what orthodox faith accepts as proven truth, but feels the need to formulate a theory of the purpose of life, he is practically certain to achieve a restatement of the Manichaean heresy. It posits an extremely crude dichotomy between matter and spirit, invents a God who is in active conflict with Satan and might yet be beaten, and takes only a shadowy interest in any of the personages of the Gospel story. It has been highly intellectualised and ethicised in subsequent centuries, but in those days it was very much as its inventor Mani had left it, a Persian fairytale about the two powers, the kingdom of good and the kingdom of evil, which went to war and got smashed up and confused, so that now it is the business of the virtuous to recover the scattered particles of light which got thrown into the darkness and are still embedded in it. The universe was conceived as a sort of decontamination centre, where this salvage work is being done. There are all sorts of picturesque oddities in the story: in the sun dwelt primal man, and in the moon primal woman, and the signs of the zodiac, like dredger buckets, lifted up such particles of light as were rescued from the darkness by the virtuous, to be stored by these two celestial custodians. This sort of legend was well below Augustine?s intellectual level, but he remained a Manichaean for nine years. During this time Augustine?s father died, and Monica, who had been left in straitened circumstances, had to find money for the assistance of her heretical son and his concubine and child. Her material situation must have been harassing, and she was so deeply distressed by his spiritual state that, in spite of their deep attachment, she would not see him.

Time was going by. He was at the end of his twenties, with nothing achieved. The dreariness of the situation can be realised if a modern parallel is imagined: the case of a pious Roman Catholic widow, left with only a small amount of insurance, who has several children, one of whom is a young man of brilliant intellectual gifts, who fails to make a living, has a mistress and an illegitimate child, and practises one of the queerer Californian religions. But, of course, there was something more here than mere misfortune befalling a blameless woman. There was a conflict in Monica as well as in Augustine. By that time infant baptism was favoured by many strictly orthodox Catholics; but Monica had never had Augustine baptised. In his childhood, before he had renounced his mother?s Christianity and adopted his father?s paganism, he had been gravely ill and had begged to be baptised, but she had refused, on some trivial ground. Moreover, though she had early recognised and deplored his strong sexual nature, she had done nothing to help him by arranging an early marriage for him. It is typical of Augustine?s honesty that, in spite of his adoration of his mother, he sets down these two instances in which she failed him, without malice, but without any attempt to mitigate them.

That honesty continues to operate when he goes on to the next and most lamentable phase of his story. This began by what might have been supposed to have been a step in the right direction. He left the Manichaeans. He had a speculative mind, but a great deal of horse sense, and the astronomical fantasies were more than he could stand in the long run. Also he spent some time with a famous Manichaean bishop named Faustus, and found him a silly fellow. Augustine never despised reason, and was later to bid his followers put "far from us the thought that God detests that whereby he has made us superior to other animals, far from us an assent of pure faith which should dispense us from accepting or demanding proof". But this rejection of heresy did not take him very far. He did not become a Christian, and he could not get on with his work. It seemed to him that he might do better away from Carthage, which had many painful associations for him, and he took his mistress and his child to Rome to start afresh. This step was passionately opposed by Monica, who travelled from Tagaste to Carthage to beg him not to go, and he only managed to get on board his ship by telling her that he must leave her for a while to say goodbye to a friend who was sailing from the harbour. Her excessive emotion over what was a reasonable course of action is an indication of the extent to which things were wrong in this troubled family. In Rome good Alypius was already installed as a civil servant, and he beat the drum for his brilliant friend and got him some pupils. But though students in Rome were more orderly than they were in Carthage they were apt to bilk their teachers. Augustine fell into financial difficulties and was ill. Moreover he could not win peace of mind, not only in the commonplace sense, but in the literal sense of peace of the intellect. He tried to find contentment in the doctrines of the Sceptics, who held that the human mind is incapable of enquiring into the nature of things, and that all one can do is to fold one?s philosophical hands and cultivate blandness, but the attempt was vain.

At last he had a stroke of good fortune. He was made Professor of Rhetoric at Milan, which was the seat of the Imperial Court. But there was something dubious about this appointment, for it was obtained on the strength of recommendations from Manichaean friends, who might have been less active in the matter had they known of Augustine?s alienation from their faith. But this dubiety brought him under the influence of a figure who was shining with candour and rectitude, the Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose. Here was a superb man, an aristocrat not cast down by the plight of aristocracy in the foundering Empire, who had been the governor of a province before he was, by the curious custom of the time, conscripted a bishop, and who was an inspired preacher and interpreter of Scripture. Ambrose was too much wrapped in the preoccupations of his exacting office to pay much attention to Augustine, as is recorded wistfully but without malice in the Confessions. But Augustine was profoundly impressed by Ambrose, and when Monica came to Milan, about a year after he settled there, he was able to tell her that he had become a catechumen and was only waiting for some sign of the divine Will to be baptised.

But he was still in a state of miserable futility and discontent. Alypius and eight or nine of his African admirers had thrown up all other ties to follow him and be his pupils, and they were living in a common household, reading the Neo-Platonists and worrying about the future in a way that was quite contrary to Neo-Platonic doctrine. They had no money. Augustine was in bad health, and could not undertake much beyond his official duties, and found those distasteful, because of the lip-service he had to render to imperial majesty. They thought of becoming a closed community devoted to scholarship, persuading some rich man who loved learning to support them; but Augustine was firm that he could not live without a woman, and this hardly fitted in with the idea of a secular monastery. Then it occurred to them that Augustine might save the situation by marrying a rich wife. He expressly says in his Confessions that there was no question of marrying in order to have children and build up a family; he was simply moved by the expectation that he would find a sexual mate and that

by means of ample patrimony, it were possible that all those whom you wish to have living with you in one place could be comfortably supported, and that by this reason of her noble birth she could bring within your easy reach the honours necessary for a man to lead a cultured existence.

To this end Monica went into the marriage market and found a bride for him. This meant that he had to part with the woman who had been virtually his wife for fourteen years. "When that mistress of mine which was wont to be my bedfellow, the hinderer as it were of my marriage, was plucked away from my side," he wrote, "my heart cleaving unto her was broken by this means, and wounded, yea, and blood drawn from it." She was sent home to North Africa, and proved what her relationship with Augustine had meant to her by taking a vow of celibacy. What is quite horrible is that when Augustine and Monica sent her home, they kept her son, who was a clever and lovable boy. This was to be a worse crime than then appeared, for he was to die in a year or two; but it was immediately ex posed as unpardonable by Augustine?s behaviour. For the bride his mother had chosen for him was so young that there could be no question of her marriage for at least two years, and to fill in this time he took another concubine, so that nothing was gained by this separation of the mother from her son, it was gratuitous cruelty. How twisted and confused were all the people in this group at the time can be judged from an examination of Monica?s motives. She must, of course, have been under grave material compulsion. Her means were small, and for some reason none of her children?neither Augustine nor his brother nor his sister?were self-supporting. She also professed to be moved by the desire that her son should repudiate his mistress and marry, so that his sexual life could conform to the Church?s requirements, and he could be baptised. But that makes it very strange that she should have chosen a bride so young that Augustine would be obliged to wait for her, for with her knowledge of his nature she must have known that he would not wait in a state of celibacy. If these had been a group of White Russians in Munich, of Middle Western expatriates in Paris, one would certainly know what to think of. them all: the needy widow who forces her clever unsuccessful son to send away his aging mistress so that he can marry a rich young girl, but insists that the poor woman should leave her child behind, because he is an attractive and promising boy. But what is significant is that it is through Augustine?s own candour that we know what to think of them.

This deed could not be undone; but the hideous phase of which it was a part suddenly passed. The darkness in Augustine?s mind grew blacker, and there came an afternoon when an agony fell upon him. He wandered about in his garden, horribly aware of his own baseness and its contrast with virtue, and of the paralysis afflicting his will which prevented him from choosing to be other than base. He had been talking to Alypius, but in his distraction left him, letting a book of the Scriptures fall as he rose. Then he heard the voice of a child from a neighbouring house, chanting in a singsong, "Take ... up.. . and. . . read. Take. . . up. . . and. . . read." But the chant went on. He began to suspect that this was a sign; and? he remembered how St. Anthony of Egypt had taken up a hermit?s life because he had opened a copy of the Gospel and read a text that seemed to be spoken directly to him. So he assumed that it was the book he had cast down that he was being ordered to pick up and read. The text that met his eyes was a verse from the Epistle to the Romans which read: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscence." The trouble was over. He felt easy and confident. He had no need to worry about a rich wife or place-hunting or budgeting for the costs of a community or satisfaction of his emotional appetites. He had simply to become a Christian and give himself wholly to the service of the Church. Putting his finger in the book to keep the place, he went to Alypius and told him what had been happening during the last few minutes, and he found that Alypius also had been passing through a crisis of torment, of which he had said nothing. Alypius took the book from him and read the next verse, which ran, "Now him that is weak in faith, take unto you", and he applied it to himself and announced that he would follow Augustine into the Church. They went into the house and told Monica, who had never anticipated such a transformation of Augustine?s earthy character. She had prayed that he might marry, and keep to a Christian rule of life; it had never occurred to her that he might renounce the world for the sake of the Church, and she was full of amazement and rejoicing.

Thereafter everything went well with them, there was an end to this phase of ambiguity and squalid striving and cruelty. Augustine and Monica and Adeodatus and Alypius went to a friend?s villa on the hills above Lake Varese, and there he spent the winter teaching some African pupils and writing some treatises, which delight by their pictures of the Italian scene and by his character sketches of his pupils, and by their crystalline serenity. At Easter he and Adeodatus and Alypius were baptised at Milan by Ambrose. Then they set their faces toward their home, and in June they were at the port of Ostia, waiting for a ship to take them to Africa. Actually Italy was in a state of grave disorder, for the usurper Maximus was about to cross the Alps and sweep down on Milan, and the Emperor Valentinian had before him the long flight which was to end in his captivity and death. But these people were tranquil, and one day, when Augustine and Monica were sitting by a window that looked down on a garden in a courtyard, they talked of the love of God and were raised to a moment?s understanding of him. "And while we were thus talking of his wisdom and panting for it, with all the effort of our hearts we did for one instant attain to touch it," wrote Augustine, "then sighing, and leaving the first fruits of our spirit bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own tongue.. . ." The account of this moment records the most intense experience ever commemorated. The passage has the massiveness of Milton; but Milton, perhaps for the very reason that he was master of our human tongue, never soared to a region where he heard another, and it is that which Augustine persuades us he has done.

Monica felt that she had no need for further life, and indeed it was only a few days before she died; and in Augustine?s account of his bereavement men and women who have not yet lost a beloved parent can learn beforehand what sorrow they will feel. He did not shrink from reliving any moment of suffering, since his truthful spirit insisted that he must write down what had really happened. In that year Augustine was thirty-two; and he was seventy-six when he died. All the remaining years were spent in the service of the Church. He missed the summer sailings to Africa that year and went to Rome, where he wrote some treatises against Manichaeanism, probably at the behest of the new Pope, Siricius, who was a great foe of these heretics. In the following August he went back to North Africa, and used his share of his father?s estate which was waiting for him there to found a small religious house. There he lived very happily for three years, writing busily. But after that he fell a victim to the prevalent danger of those days, involuntary episcopacy. As the Roman Empire fell apart, Christianity was taking over its territory. It gave the populations a sense of security, and therefore they needed priests who could preach them the doctrine of salvation; and they needed priests too to warn them of what was stable orthodoxy, which would give them shelter, and what was heresy, which would lead them into profitless warrings; and they needed priests to distribute charity, to settle disputes, to replace function after function that fell from the hands of the dwindling bureaucracy. So members of a congregation which lacked a priest (and priests were scarce) were apt to seize any able person of character who in cautiously came within their orbit, drag him to the altar, and forcibly consecrate him. This often happened to government officials who had no inclination toward the priesthood, but it could also happen to the religious man who had found his proper vocation in the monastic life and had no taste for pastoral duties. Thus it was with Augustine, who, when visiting the town of Hippo (now Bona in Algeria) in order to convert a pagan, was kidnapped and made a presbyter and later a bishop.

For the rest of Augustine?s life he conducted with astonishing success two parallel careers. He was a prolific author, pouring out definitions of the Faith, reconsiderations of political and philosophical problems in the light of Christianity, blueprints for contemporary social action, explosive contributions to controversy on matters of theology and scholarship, and immensely long letters of advice to persons troubled by spiritual perplexity. He also was an administrator with duties that perpetually extended as civil disorder increased in pace with poverty, as the forces of heresy multiplied and grew madder, and the threats of invasion from the southern tribesmen and the northern barbarians came nearer and nearer to realisation. It can be said with certainty that no man ever worked so hard for so long. He was still in harness when the vandals sailed from Spain on Africa and swept the Roman and Visigoth defenders out of their way. He was still in Hippo when it was besieged, and died in the hours of defeat, praying stoically, "I ask God to deliver this city from its enemies, or if that may not be, that he give us strength to bear his will, or at least that he take me from this world and receive me in his bosom." To the end he was under the government of truthfulness and did not pretend he found a pleasure in the chastening hand of God. But it never failed him during these years of double service. Not unnaturally he had made many mistakes during the forty years when he was both writer and man of action, he had often been tactless and obtuse and disrespectful to the merits of others; but he had always written down what he was in his own correspondence. He would not bury the truth.

Augustine made many gifts to humanity, including a great deal of entertainment. There is very little of his writing, on whatever subject, which does not warm the interest in a few sentences, and he had an immense range. His description of the ecstasy that uplifted his mother and himself as they stood at the window reveals the substance of mysticism to the least mystical of readers, and proves its right to primacy over all other experience; and his letter to a certain pious Lady Ecdicia, telling her not to be an ass and to stop annoying her husband, is a masterpiece of humour, and not unconscious humour either. But the quality by which he has rendered most service to humanity is probably his truthfulness. He demonstrated it beyond all doubt when he described without mitigation how deep he had been at Milan in a web of futility and nastiness. Let it be remarked that he did not wallow in his state, he was not smacking his lips over his abjection in order to make an effective contrast with his later uprightness. He was simply describing that phase as it had been. Bearing that in mind, it is significant that this same man asserted in all his writings that he was in constant relations with a living God. Many other people who have written of such relations have been weaklings who could not bear to look facts in the face and might be suspected of inventing a God to obviate the necessity of considering the universe a systemless chaos. But Augustine is not subject to such suspicion. When he said that he knew God it must be accepted that something really happened which his perceptions and his intellect interpreted as the knowledge of God; and none of us can claim perceptions as delicate or intellect as strong.