Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg

Saint Augustin

Louis Bertrand (1866-1941)

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Translated By Vincent O’Sullivan

Translator’s Note

The quotations from Saint Augustin’s Confessions are taken from CanonBigg’s scholarly version, which seems to me the best in English. But thereare places where M. Bertrand’s reading of the original text differs fromDr. Bigg’s, and in such cases I have felt myself obliged to follow theauthor of this book. These differences never seriously affect the meaningof a passage; sometimes it is a mere matter of choice, as with the wordcollactaneum (i, 7) which Dr. Bigg translates “twin,” and M. Bertrand,like Pusey, frère de lait, or “foster-brother.” As a rule, Dr. Biggchooses the quietest terms, and M. Bertrand the most forcible. Thosecurious in such matters may like to see an instance.

The original text runs:—

Avulsa a latere meo tanquam impedimento conjugii, cum quâ cubaresolitus eram, cor ubi adhaerebat, concisum et vulneratum mihi erat, ettrahebat sanguinem.

(Confessiones, vi, 15.)

M. Bertrand translates:—

Quand on arracha de mes flancs, sous prétexte qu’elle empêchait monmariage, celle avec qui j’avais coutume de dormir, depuis si longtemps,là où mon coeur était attaché au sien, il se déchira, et je traînaismon sang avec ma blessure.

Canon Bigg’s version is:—

My mistress was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage, and myheart, which clung to her, was torn and wounded till it bled.

In this place, it will be observed that Dr. Bigg does not emphasize theword ubi which, as the reader will find on turning to page 185 of thisvolume, M. Bertrand thinks so significant.

The remaining English versions of the writings of Saint Augustin and of theother Latin authors quoted are my own, except the passages from The City of God, including the verse translation of Persius, which are taken,with some necessary alterations, from the Seventeenth century translationascribed to John Healey.

V. O’S.

Prologue

Inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.
“Our heart finds no rest until it rests in Thee.”

Confessions, I, i.

Saint Augustin is now little more than a celebrated name. Outside oflearned or theological circles people no longer read him. Such is truerenown: we admire the saints, as we do great men, on trust. Even hisConfessions are generally spoken of only from hearsay. By this neglect,is he atoning for the renewal of glory in which he shone during theseventeenth century, when the Jansenists, in their inveterate obstinacy,identified him with the defence of their cause? The reputation of sourausterity and of argumentative and tiresome prolixity which attaches tothe remembrance of all the writers of Port-Royal, save Pascal—has thataffected too the work of Augustin, enlisted in spite of himself in theranks of these pious schismatics? And yet, if there have ever been anybeings who do not resemble Augustin, and whom probably he would haveattacked with all his eloquence and all the force of his dialectic, theyare the Jansenists. Doubtless he would have said with contempt: “The partyof Jansen,” even as in his own day, with his devotion to Catholic unity, hesaid: “The party of Donatus.”

It must be acknowledged also that the very sight of his works isterrifying, whether we take the enormous folios in two columns of theBenedictine edition, or the volumes, almost as compact, and much morenumerous, of recent editions. Behind such a rampart of printed matter he iswell defended against profane curiosity. It needs courage and perseveranceto penetrate into this labyrinth of text, all bristling with theology andexegesis and metaphysics. But only cross the threshold of the repellentenclosure, grow used to the order and shape of the building, and it willnot be long ere you are overcome by a warm sympathy, and then by a steadilyincreasing admiration for the host who dwells there. The hieratic faceof the old bishop lights up, becomes strangely living, almost modern, inexpression. You discover under the text one of the most passionate lives,most busy and richest in instruction, that history has to shew. What itteaches is applicable to ourselves, answers to our interests of yesterdayand to-day. This existence, and the century in which it was passed, recallour own century and ourselves. The return of similar circumstances hasbrought similar situations and characters; it is almost our portrait. Andwe feel half ready to conclude that at the present moment there is nosubject more actual than St. Augustin.

At least he is one of the most interesting. What, indeed, is more romanticthan this wandering life of rhetorician and student that the youthfulAugustin led, from Thagaste to Carthage, from Carthage to Milan and toRome—begun in the pleasures and tumult of great cities, and ending in thepenitence, the silence, and recollection of a monastery? And again, whatdrama is more full of colour and more profitable to consider than that lastagony of the Empire, of which Augustin was a spectator, and, with all hisheart faithful to Rome, would have prevented if he could? And then, whattragedy more stirring and painful than the crisis of soul and consciencewhich tore his life? Well may it be said that, regarded as a whole, thelife of Augustin was but a continual spiritual struggle, a battle of thesoul. It is the battle of every moment, the never-ceasing combat of bodyand spirit, which the poets of that time dramatized, and which is thehistory of the Christian of all times. The stake of the battle is a soul.The upshot is the final triumph, the redemption of a soul.

What makes the life of Augustin so complete and so truly typical is thathe fought the good fight, not only against himself, but against all theenemies of the Church and the Empire. If he was a doctor and a saint, sowas he too the type of the man of action in one of the most disheartenedperiods. That he triumphed over his passions—this, in truth, concerns onlyGod and himself. That he preached, wrote, shook crowds, disturbed minds,may seem without importance to those who reject his doctrine. But thatacross the centuries his soul, afire with charity, continues to warm ourown; that without our knowledge he still shapes us; and that, in a waymore or less remote, he is still the master of our hearts, and, in certainaspects, of our minds—there is what touches each and all of us, withoutdistinction. Not only has Augustin always his great place in the livingcommunion of all christened people, but the Western soul is marked with thestamp of his soul.

First of all, his fate is confused with that of the dying Empire. Hewitnessed, if not the utter disappearance, at least the gradual swooningaway of that admirable thing called the Roman Empire, image of Catholicunity. Well, we are the wreckage of the Empire. Usually, we turn away withcontempt from those wretched centuries which underwent the descents of theBarbarians. For us, that is the Lower-Empire, a time of shameful decadencewhich deserves nothing but our scorn. However, it is out of this chaosand this degradation that we have arisen. The wars of the Roman republicconcern us less than the outlawry of the Barbarian chiefs who separated ourGaul from the Empire, and without knowing it, prepared the dawn of France.After all, what are the rivalries of Marius and Sylla to us? The victory ofAëtius over the Huns in the plains of Chalons concerns us a good deal more.Further, it is unfair to the Lower-Empire to view it only as a time offeebleness and cowardice and corruption. It was also an epoch of immenseactivity, prolific of daring and high-flying adventurers, some of themheroic. Even the most degenerate of the last Emperors never lost theconviction of Roman majesty and grandeur. Unto the very end, they employedall the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian chiefs fromimagining themselves anything else but vassals of the Empire. Honorius, atbay in Ravenna, persisted in refusing Alaric the title of commander of theCohortes Urbanæ, even though his refusal were to lead to the sack of Romeand imperil his own life.

Simply by his fidelity to the Empire, Augustin shews himself one likeourselves—a Latin of Occitania. But still closer resemblances draw himnear to us. His time was very like our own time. Upon even a slightfamiliarity with his books we recognize in him a brother-soul who hassuffered, felt, thought, pretty nearly like us. He came into an endingworld, on the eve of the great cataclysm which was going to carry away anentire civilization—a tragic turning-point of history, a time troubled andoften very grievous, which was hard to live in for all, and to even themost determined minds must have appeared desperate. The peace of the Churchwas not yet settled; consciences were divided. People hesitated between thebelief of yesterday and the belief of to-morrow. Augustin was among thosewho had the courage to choose, and who, having once chosen their faith,proclaimed it without weakening. The belief of a thousand years was dyingout, quenched by a young belief to which was promised an eternal duration.How many delicate souls must have suffered from this division, which cutthem off from their traditions and obliged them, as they thought, to befalse to their dead along with the religion of their ancestors! All theirritations which the fanatics of to-day inflict upon believing souls, manymust have had to suffer then. The sceptics were infused by the intoleranceof the others. But the worst (even as it is to-day) was to watch thetorrent of foolishness which, under cover of religion, philosophy, ormiracle-working, pretended to the conquest of mind and will. Amid this massof wildest doctrines and heresies, in this orgy of vapid intellectualism,they had indeed solid heads who were able to resist the generalintoxication. And among all these people talking nonsense, Augustin appearsadmirable with his good sense.

This “intellectual,” this mystic, was not only a man of prayer andmeditation. The prudence of the man of action and the administratorbalanced his outbursts of dialectical subtility, often carried too far. Hehad that sense of realities such as we flatter ourselves that we have; hehad a knowledge of life and passion. Compared to the experience of, say,Bossuet, how much wider was Augustin’s! And with all that, a quiveringsensitiveness which is again like our own—the sensitiveness of times ofintense culture, wherein the abuse of thought has multiplied the ways ofsuffering in exasperating the desire for pleasure. “The soul of antiquitywas rude and vain.” It was, above all, limited. The soul of Augustin istender and serious, eager for certainties and those enjoyments which donot betray. It is vast and sonorous; let it be stirred ever so little, andfrom it go forth deep vibrations which render the sound of the infinite.Augustin, before his conversion, had the apprehensions of our Romantics,the causeless melancholy and sadness, the immense yearnings for “anywherebut here,” which overwhelmed our fathers. He is really very close to us.

He has broadened our Latin souls by reconciling us with the Barbarian. TheLatin, like the Greek, only understood himself. The Barbarian had not theright to express himself in the language of the Empire. The world was splitinto two parts which endeavoured to ignore each other, Augustin has made usconscious of the nameless regions, the vague countries of the soul, whichhitherto had lain shrouded in the darkness of barbarism. By him the unionof the Semitic and the Occidental genius is consummated. He has acted asour interpreter for the Bible. The harsh Hebraic words become soft to ourears by their passage through the cultivated mouth of the rhetorician. Hehas subjugated us with the word of God. He is a Latin who speaks to us ofJehovah.

Others, no doubt, had done it before him. But none had found a similaremotion, a note of tenderness so moving. The gentle violence of his charitywins the adherence of hearts. He breathes only charity. After St. John, itis he who is the Apostle of Love.

His tireless voice dominated the whole of the West. The Middle Ages stillheard it. For centuries his sermons and treatises were copied over andover again; they were repeated in cathedrals, commented in abstracts oftheology. People came to accept even his theory of the fine arts. All thatwe have inherited from the ancients reaches us through Augustin. He is thegreat teacher. In his hands the doctrinal demonstration of the Catholicreligion takes firm shape. To indicate the three great stages of the onwardmarch of the truth, one may say: Jesus Christ, St. Paul, St. Augustin.Nearest to our weakness is the last. He is truly our spiritual father. Hehas taught us the language of prayer. The words of Augustin’s prayers arestill upon the lips of the devout.

This universal genius, who during forty years was the speaking-trumpet ofChristendom, was also the man of one special century and country. Augustinof Thagaste is the great African.

Well may we be proud of him and adopt him as one of our glories—we whohave kept up, for now almost a century, a struggle like to that whichhe maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who consider Africaas an extension of France. More than any other writer, he has expressedthe temperament and the genius of his country. This motley Africa, withits eternal mixture of races at odds with one another, its jealoussectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violenceof its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and itsquick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous, itsmaterialism and its mysticism, its austerity and its luxury, itsresignation to servitude and its instincts of independence, its hungerto rule—all that comes out with singularly vivid touches in the work ofAugustin. Not only was he his country’s voice, but, as far as he could, herealized its old dream of dominion. The supremacy in spiritual matters thatCarthage disputed so long and bitterly with Rome, it ended by obtaining,thanks to Augustin. As long as he lived, the African Church was themistress of the Churches of the West.

As for me—if I may venture to refer to myself in such a matter—I have hadthe joy to recognize in him, besides the Saint and Teacher whom I revere,the ideal type of the Latin of Africa. The image of which I descried theoutline long ago through the mirages of the South in following the waggonsof my rugged heroes, I have seen at last become definite, grow clear, waxnoble and increase to the very heaven, in following the traces of Augustin.

And even supposing that the life of this child of Thagaste, the son ofMonnica, were not intermingled so deeply with ours, though he were for usonly a foreigner born in a far-off land, nevertheless he would still remainone of the most fascinating and luminous souls who have shone amid ourdarkness and warmed our sadness—one of the most human and most divinecreatures who have trod our highways.

The First Part. Days Of Childhood

Sed delectabat ludere.
“Only, I liked to play.”

Confessions, I, 9.

1. An African Free-Town Subject To Rome

Little streets, quite white, which climb up to clay-formed hills deeplyfurrowed by the heavy winter rains; between the double row of houses,brilliant in the morning sun, glimpses of sky of a very tender blue; hereand there, in the strip of deep shade which lies along the thresholds,white figures crouched upon rush-mats—indolent outlines, draped withbright colours, or muffled in rough and sombre wool-stuffs; a horseman whopasses, bent almost in two in his saddle, the big hat of the South flungback over his shoulders, and encouraging with his heel the graceful trot ofhis horse—such is Thagaste as we see it to-day, and such undoubtedly itappeared to the traveller in the days of Augustin.

Like the French town built upon its ruins, the African free-city lay in asort of plain taken between three round hills. One of them, the highestone, which is now protected by a bordj, must have been defended in olddays by a castellum. Full-flowing waters moisten the land. To thosecoming from the stony regions about Constantine and Setif, or the vast bareplain of the Medjerda, Thagaste gives an impression of freshness and cool.It is a laughing place, full of greenery and running water. To the Africansit offers a picture of those northern countries which they have never seen,with its wooded mountains covered by pines and cork trees and ilex. Itpresents itself as a land of mountain and forest—especially forest. It isa hunter’s country. Game is plentiful there—boar, hare, redwing, quail,partridge. In Augustin’s time, wild beasts were apparently more numerous inthe district than they are to-day. When he compares his adversaries, theDonatists, to roaring lions, he speaks like a man who knows what a lion is.

To the east and west, wide stretches of woodland, rounded hill-summits,streams and torrents which pour through the valleys and glens—thereyou have Thagaste and the country round about—the world, in fact, asit revealed itself to the eyes of the child Augustin. But towards thesouth the verdure grows sparse; arid mountain-tops appear, crushed downas blunted cones, or jutted in slim Tables of the Law; the sterilityof the desert becomes perceptible amid the wealth of vegetation. Thisfull-foliaged land has its harsh and stern localities. The African light,however, softens all that. The deep green of the oaks and pines runs intowaves of warm and ever-altering tints which are a caress and a delight forthe eye. A man has it thoroughly brought home to him that he is in a landof the sun.