The book presents itself as one long continuous
prayer, inviting readers to think they are listening in on a spontaneous
unguarded monologue. In fact, Augustine had mastered the rhetoric of sincerity,
and the work is composed with great artistry. First we are charmed with stories
about his youthful transgressions, which don’t seem so terrible — most
memorably, his throwing away pears he had just stolen. Yet this tale leads to a
profound digression on the nature of sin. “I had no motive for my wickedness
except wickedness itself,” he writes. And we realize that the triviality of the
example reveals the real core of evil: its gratuitousness.
Augustine then presents himself as a relentless seeker after truth. A
change comes over him when reading a book by Cicero, and he experiences an
inner conversion to the philosophical life, now seeking out teachers and
companions with whom he can discuss God and the good life. Eventually he comes
across the teachings of Mani, the mystical sort-of Christian guru prone to
captivating dualistic visions of a cosmic battle between the Kingdom of Light
and the Kingdom of Darkness, and whose influence stretched from Spain to China.
Augustine would remain with the sect for nine years, converting many of his
friends along the way.
Up to this point “Confessions” resembles other books that circulated in
antiquity, describing philosophical quests for the truth or laying out
spiritual exercises for reaching inner serenity. But then the story takes an
unexpected turn. Augustine had been brought up nominally Christian by his
devoted and overbearing mother, St. Monica, but had never been baptized, to her
great regret. The reason, he told himself, was that the Bible seemed
preposterous and no Christian could explain to him how a good God could have
created evil. But while teaching in Milan he began listening to the sermons of
St. Ambrose, then the city’s bishop, who proposed an altogether fresh way of
understanding Scripture. Think of the stories in it, he said, as allegories,
not literal accounts of events. Who knows if creation took six days or 60
million years? The first chapter of Genesis is there only to provoke meditation
on the goodness of the natural world God created and our place in it. A major
stumbling block to baptism disappeared.
Yet still he couldn’t make the step. And he
began to realize why: His quest for knowledge was really a dodge to avoid
experiencing the overwhelming anxiety and despair he felt inside. He was
unhappy, and, after the death of a friend, unhappier than he had ever been.
Pursuing philosophical truth was one way of avoiding this existential truth.
Another was to lose himself in physical pleasures that did nothing to fill the
emptiness inside. (He kept a concubine and had a child with her.) And yet he
couldn’t give them up. He was a living contradiction. “Grant me chastity and
continence,” he prays to God, “but not yet.”
A crisis was brewing. And when it arrived, God
in his grace made the first move. “You took me up from behind my own back,”
Augustine prays, “where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe
myself.” An extraordinary image, as if Augustine’s true visage was laminated to
the back of his head, so that no matter which way he turned he could not see
it. What confronted him when God peeled it off was horrifying, unbearable.
Something in him said: Enough. At that moment an inner muscle grasping his old
life relaxed and he could finally let God in. And a new life began.
“Confessions” is so perfect that one
can’t help wondering why anyone would accept the challenge of writing a
biography of its author. What could a historian possibly add to this
unforgettable story? Fifty years ago we learned how much more there was to say
when Peter Brown published his magnificent life, “Augustine of Hippo.” Brown
placed Augustine squarely in the world of late antiquity, the first few
centuries of the Common Era when Roman and Greek pagans, Christian sectarians
and mystics of every stripe competed for allegiance, and individuals floated
from one community to another or mixed their own eclectic spiritual cocktails.
In the popular imagination the advent of Christianity ended the classical age
and inaugurated the medieval period, as if one day people woke up to find the
old temples gone and crucifixes everywhere. In fact, the transition was a long
one, confused, and in retrospect quite fascinating. Brown’s approach made
“Confessions” appear even more remarkable.
Robin Lane Fox, a British historian retired from Oxford, has now done
Brown one better. The author of “Pagans and Christians,” a superb and
accessible study of late antiquity, he has now given us a massive book on
roughly the first half of Augustine’s life, running from his youth to the
writing of “Confessions.” Brown managed to tell the whole story, from birth to
death, with great economy and flair. Fox aims for full immersion, and he
conjures the intellectual and social life of the late Roman empire with an
almost Proustian relish for detail. Augustine left behind dozens of books and
hundreds of letters, all of which Fox seems to have consulted. He also provides
vivid sketches of the saint’s friends, acquaintances, correspondents, patrons
and spiritual enemies. Less might surely have been more. At points I had the
sense of being in an American restaurant where each portion is large enough to
feed an entire family. But Fox is such a good writer that interest never flags,
and you always feel that “you are there.”
The most absorbing and rewarding
chapters are those devoted to Augustine’s intellectual quest and, in
particular, the ones about Manichaeism. Fox gives the clearest short exposition
of Mani’s bizarre doctrines that I have ever read, no easy task given that his
visions involved things like divine messengers who appear as beautiful naked
girls, causing demons caught in the zodiac to ejaculate into the sea, producing
monsters. But he also explains plausibly why someone like Augustine might have
been attracted to this teeming myth. Christians could never explain adequately
why God permitted evil. Mani claimed that evil was never created, it was always
there, even before God. Next question, please.
The weakest chapters of this excellent book
are, oddly, those devoted to Augustine’s actual conversion. Fox is rather
obsessed with sex, in the way erudite English scholars tend to get as they age.
(No one knows why.) The problem of wayward desire was obviously urgent for
Augustine, and indeed sexual renunciation was something of a competitive sport
among the religious sects of his time. But Fox makes it so central to
Augustine’s inner struggles that the future saint comes off as an insatiable,
guilt-ridden pickup artist. This approach culminates in the flat emphatic
statement that Augustine’s “is not a conversion to Christian faith. . . . It is
a conversion away from sex and ambition.” As if celibacy were all Augustine
really needed to open himself to God.
But this is not the way Augustine tells his story. The problem of sex is
just the shell around a much deeper mystery, the workings of the human will. It
is a subject Augustine turned to time and again in his sermons and books. The
mind commands the body but cannot command itself. Why can’t we will ourselves
to will? Or, often we decide to do something, but the will proves too weak to
follow through. How, if the will is one thing, can that be possible? To explain
these puzzles, Augustine hit upon an idea that would shape Western
consciousness for centuries: the notion that human beings have two wills
within, a defiant one that wants autonomy and a chastened one that wants to
serve God. The only way to achieve happiness, Augustine believed, was to
subordinate the former to the latter.
For a millennium Augustine’s portrait of
himself served as a model for self-cultivation in Christian civilization. The
imitation of Christ was the ideal, but those falling short could turn to
“Confessions” for help getting there. It was during the Renaissance that this
conception of the self came under serious challenge, most powerfully in
Montaigne’s “Essays,” which mocked the idea of sin and preached
self-acceptance. To Augustine’s anxious admission that he was a problem to
himself, Montaigne simply responded, So what’s the problem? Don’t worry, be
happy. As modern people we have chosen Montaigne over Augustine. We traded
pious self-cultivation for undemanding self-esteem. But is love of self
really enough to be happy? You know the answer to that, dear reader. And so did
Augustine.
AUGUSTINE
Conversions to
Confessions
By Robin Lane Fox
Illustrated. 657 pp. Basic Books. $35.
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