Augustine was born in Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) in
354 and died almost seventy-six years later in Hippo Regius
(modern Annaba) on the Mediterranean coast sixty miles away. In
the years between he lived out a career that seems to moderns to
bridge the gap between ancient pagan Rome and the Christian
middle ages. But to Augustine, as to his contemporaries, that
gap separated real people and places they knew, not whole
imaginary ages of past and future. He lived as we do, in the
present, full of uncertainty.
Augustine's African homeland had been part of Rome's empire
since the destruction of Carthage five hundred years before his
birth. Carthage had been rebuilt by Rome as the metropolis of
Roman Africa, wealthy once again but posing no threat. The
language of business and culture throughout Roman Africa was
Latin. Careers for the ambitious, as we shall see, led out of
provincial Africa into the wider Mediterranean world; on the
other hand, wealthy Italian senators maintained vast estates in
Africa which they rarely saw. The dominant religion of Africa
became Christianity--a religion that violently opposed the
traditions of old Rome but that could not have spread as it did
without the prosperity and unity that Rome had brought to the
ancient world.
Roman Africa was a military backwater. The legions that were
kept there to maintain order and guard against raids by desert
nomads were themselves the gravest threat to peace; but their
occasional rebellions were for the most part short-lived and
inconsequential. The only emperors who ever spent much time in
Africa were the ones who had been born there; by Augustine's
time, decades had passed without an emperor even thinking of
going to Africa.
Some distinctly African character continued to mark life in
the province. Some non-Latin speech, either the aboriginal
Berber of the desert or the derelict Punic the Carthaginians had
spoken, continued to be heard in dark corners. In some of the
same corners, old local pagan cults could still be found. When
Augustine became a Christian clergyman, he found Africa rent by
an ecclesiastical schism that had its roots at least partly in
the truculent sense of difference maintained by the
less-Romanized provincials of up-country Numidia, near the
northern fringes of the Sahara.
So a young man like Augustine could belong irretrievably to
the world Rome had made, but still feel that he was living on the
periphery of that world. Augustine set out to make himself more
Roman than the Romans and to penetrate to the center of the
culture from which he found himself alienated by his provincial
birth. But that was only the beginning of his story.
Augustine was born on 13 November, A.D. 354, in Tagaste, a
town large enough to have its own bishop but too small for a
college or university. His
parents, Patricius and Monica, belonged to the financially
imperilled middle class. They were well enough off to have
educational ambitions for their son, but too poor to finance
those ambitions themselves. The fourth century was an age of
mixed marriages at this level of society, in which devout
Christian women like Monica were often to be found praying for
the conversion of their irreligious husbands. Her prayers were
not unavailing; Patricius accepted baptism on his deathbed.
Though Patricius offered no direct impulse towards Christianity
for his son, he must not have been much more than a passive
obstacle.
Of Augustine's childhood we know only what he chooses to tell
us in the highly selective memoirs that form part of the
Confessions. He depicts himself as a rather ordinary sort of
child, good at his lessons but not fond of school, eager to win
the approval of his elders but prone to trivial acts of
rebellion, quick to form close friendships but not always able to
foresee their consequences. He studied Latin with some
enthusiasm but never loved Greek. While he was leading what he
wants us to think was a rather conventionally boisterous
adolescence (it is best to imagine him in a crowd of conformists,
but edging towards the quieter fringes of the crowd), his parents
were worrying about paying for his education. Finally, with the
help of an affluent family friend, they managed to scrape
together enough to send him to the nearest university town a
dozen miles away, Madaura, the home of the famous second-century
sophist and novelist Apuleius, which was the second city in the
life of the mind in Africa.
After a time at Madaura, the youth's talents made Carthage
inevitable. There he seems to have gone at about the age of
seventeen. Not long after, his father died and his mother was
left with modest resources and nothing to tie her to Tagaste.
Augustine himself quickly set up housekeeping with a young woman
he met in Carthage, by whom a son was born not long after. This
woman would stay with Augustine for over a decade and, though we
do not know her name, he would say that when he had to give her
up to make a society marriage in Milan "his heart ran blood" with
grief as she went off to Africa--perhaps to enter a convent. The
son, Adeodatus, stayed with Augustine until premature death took
him in late adolescence.
So far the conventional outward events of Augustine's young
manhood. His intellectual life was a little more remarkable.
The education he had received in Tagaste and Madaura had made him
a typical late Roman pedant, with a comprehensive knowledge of a
few authors (especially Cicero and Vergil) and a taste for
oddities of language and style.
Only at Carthage did his education show any signs of breaking the
usual molds, but even then only in a conventional way. In the
ordinary course of the curriculum, he had to read a work of
Cicero's called the Hortensius.
This book, since lost and known only from fragments quoted by
Augustine and other ancient writers, was a protreptic, that is, a
treatise designed to inspire in the reader an enthusiasm for the
discipline of philosophy. Through all his other vagaries of
interest and allegiance, until the time of Augustine's conversion
to Christianity Cicero would remain the one master from whom the
young African learned the most; Augustine is in many ways the
greatest of Cicero's imitators in point of Latin style.
The zeal for philosophy led first in what may seem a strange
direction. Fired with the love of wisdom from his reading of the
quintessential Roman politician, Augustine immediately joined a
religious cult from Persia that had planted itself in the Roman
world as a rival of Christianity: Manicheism. This sensual but
sensitive young man, brought up around but not exactly in
Christianity, took his Ciceronian enthusiasm with the utmost
seriousness on the moral plane. He knew his own life did not in
fact match his noble ideals. He was torn between the
conventional pleasures of adolescence and the conventional rigors
of philosophy. For this tension, Manicheism offered soothing
relief. Augustine was not to blame that he felt this way, the
Manichees told him, for he was only the pawn of greater forces
that could, because Augustine was lucky and clever, be
propitiated. Security could be had without sacrifice, and guilt
removed without atonement.
The world the Manichees imagined was torn between two contrary
powers: the perfectly good creator and the perfectly evil
destroyer. The world seen by
human eyes was the battleground for their cosmic conflict. The
Manichees and their followers were the few who were on the side
of the good spirit and who would be rewarded for their allegiance
with eternal bliss. In the meantime all sorts of misfortune
might befall the individual, but none of the wicked things he
found himself doing wer