The Restless Heart

The first three decades of Augustine’s life as the Confessions recounts them: born at Thagaste in 354 to the Christian Monica and the pagan Patricius; educated in the rhetoric schools of Madauros and Carthage; turned toward “wisdom” by Cicero’s lost Hortensius; nine years a Manichaean “Hearer”; a teacher of rhetoric at Carthage, Rome, and finally the imperial capital of Milan — and through it all a soul that the Confessions reads as restless until it should rest in God. This file follows that itinerary up to the threshold of his conversion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

“You have made us for yourself”

The whole of Augustine’s early life is gathered, in the Confessions, under the sign of its most famous sentence, which stands on the book’s first page: “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te) (Confessions 1.1; trans. Chadwick 1991). Everything Augustine narrates of his youth — the ambition, the appetites, the false philosophies, the long delay — he narrates as the restlessness of a heart made for God and not yet come home. This is the interpretive frame of the Confessions, and it must be held in mind: the work is not a neutral chronicle but a retrospective reading of a life as providence (see The Confessions as a Work). The events, however, are independently dateable and on the whole historically secure (Brown 2000, ch. 2).

Thagaste, Monica, and Patricius

Augustine was born on 13 November 354 at Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), a small municipality of Numidia, to a family of modest standing among the local gentry (Brown 2000, ch. 2; Chadwick 1986, ch. 1). His father, Patricius, was a town councillor (curialis) of straitened means and a pagan who became a catechumen only near the end of his life and was baptized shortly before his death (Confessions 9.9). His mother, Monica (c. 331–387), was a devout catholic Christian whose persistence in prayer for her son’s conversion the Confessions makes one of its great themes; Augustine reports the saying of a bishop who consoled her that “it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish” (Confessions 3.12; trans. Chadwick 1991). Monica is herself venerated as a saint (commemorated 27 August in the West, 4 May in some calendars), and her portrait in the Confessions — at Thagaste, at Milan, and in the vision at Ostia (Confessions 9.10) — is among the most influential depictions of Christian motherhood in Western literature (Brown 2000, ch. 2).

The family scraped together the money — with the help of a wealthy patron, Romanianus — to give the gifted boy the best education available: grammar and literature at Thagaste, then at nearby Madauros, and finally rhetoric at Carthage, the great city of the province (Confessions 2.3; Brown 2000, ch. 3). Augustine’s education was thoroughly classical and Latin; his Greek, by his own confession, was always weak, a limitation of lasting consequence for his theology and for his later reception in the Greek East (Confessions 1.13–14; on this, see Augustine East and West).

Carthage and the Reading of the Hortensius

At Carthage, where he arrived around 370/371, the adolescent Augustine plunged into the life of the city — its theaters, its ambitions, and its pleasures. The famous lament “I came to Carthage, and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves” (Confessions 3.1; trans. Chadwick 1991) belongs here. He took a concubine, with whom he lived faithfully for some fifteen years and who bore him a son, Adeodatus (“given by God”), around 372 (Confessions 4.2; Brown 2000, ch. 5). The relationship — a stable, exclusive union of unequal social standing, short of legal marriage — was an ordinary arrangement of late-Roman society, and Augustine’s later anguish over its ending (Confessions 6.15) is one of the rawest passages in the book.

The decisive intellectual event of these Carthage years was his reading, at the age of eighteen (372/373), of Cicero’s dialogue the Hortensius — a work now lost but for fragments, an exhortation to the philosophical life and the pursuit of wisdom. “This book changed my feelings,” Augustine writes; “it altered my prayers… Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom with an incredible ardour in my heart” (Confessions 3.4; trans. Chadwick 1991). The Hortensius turned Augustine from rhetoric for its own sake toward truth — but it set him searching, and the search would take him first into a blind alley.

Nine Years a Manichee

Looking for a wisdom that was also Christian, the young Augustine turned to the Scriptures — and recoiled. The Latin Bible of his day seemed to him, beside the polished Cicero, crude; and the Old Testament’s anthropomorphic God and patriarchal morality offended him (Confessions 3.5; Brown 2000, ch. 5). The Manichees offered exactly what he wanted: a Christianity that claimed to be rational, that discarded the Old Testament, that promised knowledge rather than mere faith, and that explained the evil he felt in himself as the work of an opposing kingdom of Darkness for which he was not responsible (Confessions 3.6–7; Chadwick 1986, ch. 2; on Manichaeism, see The Late-Roman African Church).

For roughly nine years (c. 373–382) Augustine was a Manichaean Hearer (auditor) — never one of the celibate ascetic Elect, but a committed adherent who drew his friends after him and argued the catholic faith down (Confessions 4.1; Brown 2000, ch. 5). His disenchantment grew slowly. The Manichaean cosmology could not satisfy his developing astronomical knowledge; and the celebrated Manichaean teacher Faustus of Mileve, to whom his questions were finally referred around 383, proved, when Augustine met him, an eloquent but unlearned man unable to answer them (Confessions 5.3, 5.6–7; trans. Chadwick 1991). The encounter with Faustus broke the spell, though it left Augustine not converted but adrift — drawn for a time toward the skepticism of the New Academy, doubting whether truth could be known at all (Confessions 5.10).

Rome, Milan, and the Approach

Frustrated with the unruly students of Carthage, Augustine sailed for Rome in 383 — leaving secretly, the Confessions records, to spare his weeping mother (Confessions 5.8). In Rome he taught rhetoric briefly and unhappily, and there, through Manichaean connections still useful to him, he secured in 384 the prestigious public chair of rhetoric at Milan, then the seat of the Western imperial court (Confessions 5.13; Brown 2000, ch. 6). The appointment, secured through the pagan prefect Symmachus, was the summit of Augustine’s worldly ambition — and it placed him, providentially in the Confessions’ reading, in the city of Ambrose.

Two intellectual currents at Milan prepared the conversion that the next section narrates. First, the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, whose allegorical and figural reading of the Old Testament dissolved at a stroke the objections that had driven Augustine to the Manichees: “the letter kills, the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6), Ambrose would say, and the offensive passages opened into spiritual meaning (Confessions 5.14, 6.4; trans. Chadwick 1991; on Ambrose, see The Garden at Milan). Second, the “books of the Platonists” — Latin translations, probably of Plotinus and perhaps Porphyry, that he read around 386 — taught him to conceive of God and the soul as immaterial reality and of evil not as a substance but as the privation of good, freeing him from the materialism that had bound his thought (Confessions 7.9–13; Brown 2000, ch. 9). The Platonists gave him the metaphysics; they could not give him the humility of the Incarnate Word, which he found only in Scripture: in them, he writes, he read that “in the beginning was the Word,” but not that “the Word became flesh” (Confessions 7.9, citing John 1:1, 1:14; trans. Chadwick 1991).

Meanwhile the social machinery of ambition was tightening around him. Monica had followed him to Milan; she arranged a respectable marriage for him, for which his concubine was dismissed and sent back to Africa — a separation that tore his heart, and which he records without excusing himself (Confessions 6.13–15). Augustine stood, by his own account, divided: intellectually persuaded of the catholic faith, morally unable to embrace the continence it seemed to ask of him, praying the half-prayer “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet” (da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo) (Confessions 8.7; trans. Chadwick 1991).

It is precisely here — a soul intellectually convinced, morally paralyzed, restless to the last — that the Confessions breaks toward the garden at Milan. The “restless heart” of the book’s opening has run its whole course of ambition and appetite and false wisdom and has come, exhausted, to the threshold of grace.

See Also

References

  • Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Books 1–8: Thagaste at 1; Carthage and the Hortensius at 3.1–4; Manichaeism at 3.6–7 and 5.3–7; Rome and Milan at 5.8–14; the Platonists at 7.9–13; the concubine at 6.13–15; “not yet” at 8.7.)
  • Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 2–9 on the early life, Manichaeism, and Milan.)
  • Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Chs. 1–2.)
  • O’Donnell, James J. Augustine: Confessions. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. (Commentary on the autobiographical books.)