Augustine and the Bible

PART I

Encountering the Word: Augustine’s Biblical Initiation

1

Augustine, Confessions XI, 3–4

LET THY SCRIPTURES BE MY CHASTE DELIGHTS

O Lord my God, hear my prayer, and let Thy mercy regard my longing, since it burns not for myself alone, but because it desires to benefit brotherly charity; and Thou seest my heart, that so it is. I would sacrifice to Thee the service of my thought and tongue; and do Thou give what I may offer unto thee. For I am poor and needy, (Ps. 86:1) Thou rich unto all that call upon thee. (Rom 10:12), who free from care carest for us. Circumcise from all rashness and from all lying my inward and outward lips. (Ex 6:12) Let Thy Scriptures be my chaste delights. Neither let me be deceived in them, nor deceive out of them. Lord, hear and pity, O Lord my God, light of the blind and strength of the weak; even also light of those who see, and strength of the strong, hearken unto my soul, and hear it crying out of the depths. (Ps. 130:1) For unless thine ears be present in the depths also, whither shall we go? whither shall we cry? The day is Thine, and the night also is Thine. (Ps. 74:16) At Thy nod the moments flee away. Grant thereof space for our meditations among the hidden things of Thy law, not close it against us who knock. For not in vain hast Thou willed that the obscure secret of so many pages should be written. Not is it that those forests have not their harts, (Ps. 29:9) betaking themselves therein, and ranging, and walking, and feeding, lying down, and ruminating. Behold Thy voice is my joy, Thy voice surpasses the abundance of pleasures. Give that I may love, for I do love; and this Thou has given. Abandon not Thine own gifts, not despise Thy grass that thirsts. Let me confess unto Thee whatever I shall have found in Thy books, and let me hear the voice of praise, and let me imbibe Thee, and reflect on the wonderful things of Thy law; (Ps. 26:7) and from the beginning, wherein Thou madest the heaven and the earth, unto the everlasting kingdom of Thy holy city that is with Thee.

Lord, have mercy on me and hear my desire, for I think that it is not of the earth, nor of gold and silver, and precious stones, nor gorgeous apparel, nor honours and powers, nor the pleasures of the flesh, nor necessaries for the body, and this life of our pilgrimage; all which are added to those who seek Thy kingdom and Thy righteousness. (Mat 6:33) Behold, O Lord my God, whence is my desire. The unrighteous have told me of delights, but not such as Thy law, O Lord. (Ps. 99:85) Behold whence is my desire. Behold, Father, look and see and approve; and let it be pleasing in the sight of Thy mercy, that I may find grace before Thee, that the secret things of Thy Word may be opened unto me when I knock. I beseech by our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, the Man of Thy right hand, the Son of man, whom Thou made strong for Thyself (Ps. 80:17) as Thy mediator and ours, through whom Thou hast sought us, although not seeking Thee, but did seek us that we might seek Thee, – Thy Word through whom Thou hast made all things (John 1:3) and amongst them me also, – Thy Only–begotten, through whom Thou hast called to adoption the believing people, and therein me also. I beseech Thee through Him who sitteth at Thy right hand, and maketh intercession for us, (Rom 8:34) in whom is hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Col 2:6) Him do I seek in Thy books. Of Him did Moses write; (John 5:4–6) this saith Himself; this saith the Truth.

2

Augustine’s Biblical Initiation

ANNE-MARIE LA BONNARDIÈRE

At the age of nineteen, after reading Cicero’s Hortensius, which at first had filled him with exaltation, Augustine experienced a pang of disappointment. He wrote:

. . . in my ardor, the only thing I found lacking was that the name of Christ was not there. For with my mother’s milk my infant heart had drunk in, and still held that name deep down in it, according to Your mercy, O Lord, the name of Your Son, my Saviour, and whatsoever lacked that name, no matter how learned and excellently written and true, could not win me wholly (Confessions 3.4.8).

When Augustine decided to abandon the Manichean sect a decade later and was tempted for a while by the skepticism of the academics, he described his anguished doubt in these terms:

So in what I thought to be the manner of the Academics — that is to say, doubting of all things and wavering between one and another — I decided that I must leave the Manichees; for in that time of doubt, I did not think I could remain in a sect to which I now preferred certain of the philosophers. Yet I absolutely refused to entrust the care of my sick soul to the philosophers, because they were without the saving name of Christ. I determined, then, to go on as a catechumen in the Catholic Church — the church of my parents — and to remain in that state until some certain light should appear by which I might steer my course (Confessions 5.14.25).

After his revelation caused by a sermon of Ambrose’s concerning the meaning of man created in God’s image in Genesis 1:26, Augustine exclaimed:

So I was first confounded and then enlightened. And I rejoiced, O my God, that Your only church, the Body of Your only Son, in which the name of Christ had been put upon me while I was still an infant, had no taste for such puerile nonsense (Confessions 6.4.5.).

In light of these secrets, he called to mind how on the threshold of his first childhood, Monica had exercised a determining influence by teaching her small children the gestures of prayer and the invocation of Jesus’s name. Despite numerous obstacles, for thirty years the search for Christ’s name became the absolute criteria for truth and the interior light which guided Augustine’s path.

Between the ages of seven and sixteen, at Thagaste and later Madaura, Augustine pursued his elementary and secondary studies under the vigilant supervision of his father. This provided him with the liberal culture foundational for a professional life. His Confessions vehemently underline the imbalance which such an education provided young children, based as it was on false and immoral fables written by pagan authors (albeit illustrious pagans such as Virgil and Homer) and a Christian formation wherein the sacred writings appeared to have little solid foundation. In 409 when Augustine wrote to the pagan Nectarius of Calama (modern Guelma) concerning the grave troubles which existed between the Christians and the pagans, he commented:

Personally I don’t ever remember reading that a life of indigence makes one forever unhappy; I read it neither in our sacred books, to the study of which I admit with regret that I applied myself too late, nor in your books which I had in my hands since my childhood (Confessions 3.4.8).

This letter echoes the earlier testimony of the Confessions wherein Augustine regrets that the rudiments of reading and writing, the obvious base of all higher study, cannot be taught from the Bible. He deplores once having been obligated to compose and deliver a speech, supposedly by Juno, in Virgilian style:

What could all this mean to me, O My true Life, My God? Why was there more applause for the performance I gave than for so many classmates of my own age? Was not the whole business so much smoke and wind? Surely some other matter could have been found to exercise mind and tongue. Thy praises, Lord, might have upheld the fresh young shoot of my heart, so that it might not have been whirled away by empty trifles, defiled, a shameful prey to birds (Confessions 1.17.27).

Augustine took up this theme at a much later date during a sermon delivered at Utica, in the month of August 417. The bishop of Hippo, received by his colleagues in the Basilica dedicated to the martyrs of Massa Candida, commented that day on Psalm 144 which glorifies God. After his usual fashion, Augustine picked out verses of the psalm and commented upon them one after the other. Verse 4 states: . . . and they will announce your force. This can also be translated as . . . and they will proclaim your power. Augustine took advantage of the occasion to remind his listeners of a current pedagogical custom practiced by the grammarians. In order to teach children the art of composing adulatory praise they were asked to write hymns to the sun, the sky, the earth, the rose, or the laurel. All these objects of praise are the works of God, insisted Augustine, however while the creations are glorified the Creator is ignored.¹

Deficient as Augustine’s Christian education was during his youth, it was not nonexistent. Aside from the daily example of his mother, Augustine alludes to the influence of men of prayer but remains silent about their names and their positions. Are they members of the clergy from Thagaste? He writes:

Yet, Lord, I observed men praying to You: and I learnt to do likewise, thinking of You (to the best of my understanding) as some great being who, though unseen, could hear and help me. As a boy I fell into the way of calling upon You, my Help and my Refuge; and in those prayers I broke the strings of my tongue — praying to You, small as I was but with no small energy, that I might not be beaten at school (Confessions 1.9.14).

As a young child Augustine had received the first rites of the initiation leading to Baptism. He wrote: Even as a boy, of course, I had heard of an eternal life promised because the Lord our God had come down in His humility upon our pride. And I was signed with the sign of His Cross and seasoned with His salt as I came new from the womb of my mother, who had great trust in You (Confessions 1.11.17). This knowledge was enough to persuade the young Augustine to ask for the baptism of Christ when he was gravely ill and close to death. After he was restored to health, the baptism was put off. However in Augustine’s judgment, on the whole, there was an imbalance between what he learned in school and his Christian background. It is not surprising to read Augustine’s comment in the beginning of his anti–Manichean treatise The Two Souls that there are many things that I should have done to avoid having ripped from my heart so easily and quickly either by the error or trickery, of misguided or deceitful men, the seeds of true religion which had been happily sowed in me from my childhood.² Augustine reproached the education provided to schoolchildren considering it to inculcate good words rather than good works. The focus was upon knowing how to speak well rather than to live well. Augustine alludes to himself in his interpretation of the prodigal son:

For to be darkened in heart is to be far from Your face. It is not on our feet or by movement in space that we go from You or return to You: The prodigal son did not charter horses or chariots or ships, or fly with wings or journey on his two feet to that far country where he wasted in luxurious living what You as a loving father had given him on his departure — loving when You didst give, more loving still to Your son when he returned, all poor and stripped. To be lustful, that is darkened, in heart, is to be far from Your face (Confessions 1.18.3).

In this adaptation of the parable, Augustine locates the separation from the Father to the end of his second childhood and secondary studies. The Father whom Augustine addresses right from the start of the Confessions remains the self same to whose mercy he celebrates until the very last pages.

Augustine turned sixteen near the end of 369. It was the beginning of his adolescence and he traces its lively evolution in Books 2 to 6 of the Confessions. Two statements, forming an inclusion, are characteristic of Augustine’s harsh judgment upon his life from age sixteen to twenty–nine. Book 3 opens with the declaration: I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me (Confessions 3.1.1). Augustine introduces Book 7: Now my evil sinful youth was over and I had come on into young manhood . . . (Confessions 7.1.1) This period of Augustine’s life has provoked a plethora of literature. We have a single focus: What was Augustine’s biblical initiation between 370 and 385?

Difficulties forced Augustine’s father Patricius, to interrupt his son’s education. Augustine had to return from Madaura to Thagaste and spend his sixteenth year in idleness, the account of which makes up Book 2 of the Confessions. A new inclusion, inspired by the parable of the prodigal son frames the narrative: I departed further from You and You left me to myself (Confessions 2.2.2). The section concludes: "I slid away from You and I went astray, O my God, deviating from Your stability in the days of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want et factus sum mihi regio egestatis" (Confessions 2.10.18).

Meanwhile Romanianus, a rich friend of Patricius, aware that Augustine was wasting his intellectual gifts in pursuit of leisure, covered the tuition for Augustine to study at Carthage to follow the studies which would enable him to become a rhetor. The youth studied at Carthage between 370 and 373. Several fateful events occurred in quick succession.

Eagerly plunging into tumultuous city life with its many licentious pleasures, Augustine quickly met the woman who would remain his concubine for fourteen years. If the dates are precise, wrote H.–I. Marrou, it establishes that he is bound to his companion from the age of seventeen, in a state of concubinage, which the morals of the time and the law, if not Christian morality, considered quite normal. For fourteen years he remained faithful to the woman who gave birth to their son Adeodatus during the first year of their relationship.³ It was in fact a monogamous relationship of Roman concubinage the morality of which was admitted in 400 at the First Council of Toledo. It was a kind of morganatic marriage, meaning that it was contracted between two persons of different social status.

In 373, Augustine discovered Cicero’s philosophical work, the Hortensius. It galvanized him and sparked a genuine quest for wisdom:

Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upwards by which I was to return to You (Confessions 3.4.7).

This allusion to the parable of the prodigal son marks the decisive moment which was the beginning of a long and painful return to the Father. We have already pointed out that the outburst of emotion which Augustine experienced while reading the Hortensius was dashed when he discovered that the Saviour’s name was not there.

Augustine’s immediate reaction was to apply himself to the study of Scripture. He had spontaneously desired to understand what the Scriptures were. This was followed by disenchantment, the disenchantment of a purist. Some fourteen years later, in the Confessions, Augustine analyzed this first encounter with the Bible:

But what I came upon was something not grasped by the proud, not revealed either to children, something utterly humble in the hearing but sublime in the doing, and shrouded deep in mystery. And I was not of the nature to enter into it or bend my neck to follow it. (Augustine is writing in 397.) When I first read those Scriptures, I did not feel in the least what I have just said; they seemed to me unworthy to be compared with the majesty of Cicero. My conceit was repelled by their simplicity, and I had not the mind to penetrate into their depths. They were indeed of a nature to grow in Your little ones. But I could not bear to be a little one; I was only swollen with pride, but to myself I seemed a very big man (Confessions 3.5.9).

One wonders which portions of the Old or New Testament Augustine the aesthetic humanist, even more enraptured by beautiful language than philosophical ideas, touched upon such that his sensibilities were so affronted. There was no immediate follow–up after this initial foray. One notes only that Augustine’s Christian milk received from the bosom of the Church (Catholica) had been too insubstantial to allow him to surmount the shock in the difference in literary style between Cicero and the Bible.

Goaded by his desire for wisdom and disillusioned with the Bible, Augustine, attempting to return to the Father, errs by embarking upon the wrong road. Ill–equipped to grasp at the intellectual and the more profound spiritual level of the hidden mysteries of Scripture, Augustine was easy prey to the enterprising and subtle propaganda of the Manicheans. During the period when his contemporaries in the Eastern Churches, such as John Chrysostom, were receiving their scriptural initiation in the fervor of eremitic or monastic life, Augustine and Augustine alone, experiences more than nine years of heretical exegesis.

I fell in with a sect of men talking high–sounding nonsense, carnal and worldly men. The snares of the devil were in their mouths, to trap souls with an arrangement of the syllables of the names of God the Father and of the Lord Jesus Christ and of the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, our Comforter. Their names were always on their lips, but only as sounds and tongue noises; for their heart was empty of the true meaning (Confessions 3.6.10).

It is significant that in the Confessions, Augustine begins his denunciation of Manichean errors with an allusion to the Trinity. In 373, the hope of having finally found the name of Christ seduced him. In 397, nearly a quarter of a century later, his understanding had been secured. This Trinitarian text from the Confessions becomes highly significant when compared to Faustus’s profession of Manichean faith which Augustine has included in the Against Faustus:

God the all–powerful Father, Christ his Son from the Holy Spirit, we worship the one identical deity which has these three names. But we believe that the Father lives in that supreme and original light which Paul called inaccessible (1 Tim. 6:10) that the Son exists in created light, which is visible and derived, and because the Son is a double entity, the Apostle has knowledge of him when he said that Christ is the Power and the Wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:24) We believe that his Power resides in the Sun and his Wisdom in the Moon. As for the Holy Spirit, which is the majesty of the third level, we confess that this region entirely of air is his seat and receptacle. It is from his powers and from his spiritual profusion that the earth was conceived and begat the suffering Jesus who is the life and salvation of mankind, suspended upon wood. Such are our beliefs.⁴

The Faustus text alludes to the myth of Jesus patibilis which, according to F. Decret,⁵ was possibly native to Africa. Decret writes however: It is true that the only statement of it is found from the pen of Faustus of Milevus. In this case the whole of nature is nothing other than an immense cross to which is affixed Jesus patibilis. In other words the divine substance is imprisoned far from its original kingdom.

To the Against Faustus text, we must join another document addressed to the Manichees which Augustine conserved in Against the Epistle of Manichæus called Fundamental.

Frequently, during the period that I was catechumen with you, I asked you why the Easter of the Saviour was so often celebrated in such a lukewarm fashion and by such a small number of people, without vigils, without even light fasts imposed upon the catechumen, simply without the accouterments of the most solemn holidays, when you distinguished with great honour your Bêma, the day when Mani had been killed? On that day you raised a five–level platform adorned with expensive cloth and readily visible to the worshipers. When I asked this question, they answered that one must celebrate the passion of the one who had really suffered, but that Christ was not truly born and had merely shown himself to men in simulated flesh which did not suffer and only pretended to suffer the Passion.⁶

The Manicheans professed one of the most radical forms of docetism. They denied that Christ had a real body. They denied his incarnation in the Virgin Mary, his real death on the cross, and his resurrection. Here we put our finger on the crux of the issue which distanced historical Christianity from mythic Manicheism. The Manichean Christ with his borrowed body had been crucified in appearance only and had not resuscitated.⁷ Concerning the Holy Spirit, the Manicheans taught that their founder Mani was its visible and real manifestation.⁸ Hence they refused to accept the Acts of the Apostles.

Augustine’s anti-Manichean works which date from 389 to 405 contain many extracts from the writings of Mani which Augustine analyzes and criticizes. In Book 3 of the Confessions Augustine takes another approach. Twenty years later (373–397) he attempts to call to mind the teachings he received during his Manichean initiation. Rather than describing his youthful enthusiasm, he dwells upon his later disillusionment. He compares it to the painful situation of the Prodigal Son who is reduced to wishing for pig slops in a foreign land. Augustine writes:

"Where then were You and how far from me? I had indeed straggled far from You, not even being allowed to eat the husks of the swine whom I was feeding with husks et longe peregrinabar abs te, exclusus et a siliquis porcorum, quos de siliquis pascebam. How much better were the sheer fables of the poets and literary men than all the traps . . . (Confessions 3.6.11, an allusion to Lk. 15:16).

In the same paragraph Augustine penned one of his thoughts which has crossed the centuries: "It was You I sought . . . Yet all the time You were more inward than the most inward place of my heart and loftier than the highest. Tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo" (Confessions 3.6.11, an allusion to Lk. 15:16).

In initiating their converts to the Books of Mani, the Manicheans did not hesitate to criticize books of the Old Testament or of the New Testament. Consequently, Augustine began to study certain biblical texts which he had barely known before if at all. His teachers drew strongly upon the Books of Moses and in particular Genesis. Augustine writes:

I let myself be taken in by fools, who deceived me with such questions as: Whence comes evil? And is God bounded by a bodily shape and has he hair and nails? And are those patriarchs to be esteemed righteous who had many wives at the same time and slew men and offered sacrifices of living animals?

Such questions troubled Augustine in his ignorance:

I did not even know that God is spirit, having no parts extended in length and breadth, to whose being bulk (moles) does not belong, for bulk . . . could not be wholly itself in every place, as a spirit is, as God is. And I was further ignorant what is the principle in us by which we are; and what Scripture meant by saying that we are made to the image of God (Confessions 3.7.12; Gen. 1:26).

Combined with this aberrant presentation of God and man was a persistent criticism of the Old Testament because of its scandals. These included the shameful morality of the Patriarchs and the Kings presented in the Bible as having multiple marriages; Moses’ murder of the Egyptian overseer, and animal sacrifice which had long been prescribed by Levitic law. Consequently, the Old Testament was no longer valid and Christians were wrong to recognize it as prophetic of the New. In order to be used to the advantage of Mani’s converts, the New Testament was attacked and truncated. The childhood narratives about Christ in Matthew and Luke were excluded. Docetist explanations of the chapters concerning the Passion and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ were applied. The Acts of the Apostles which contained the passages concerning the Holy Spirit of Pentecost were categorically denounced. If Paul’s work received favorable treatment, one had to read it with prudent reserve, because of the falsifications to which the epistles had been subjected. This, in brief, is the Bible as it was presented to Augustine, the twenty-year-old Manichean convert. It was this version which Augustine was to hear, read and comment upon.

It is surprising that he accepted this situation without reacting for such a long time. Augustine explains the reason in a passage of a treatise which he dedicated in 392 to his friend Honoratus who was still a Manichee. Augustine reminds Honoratus of their passion and dedication in studying Virgil together. He continues:

Now what time did we spend thus with these authors through whom ancient traditions assured us that the Holy Spirit had spoken. With all our youthful intelligence and our surprising need for rational inquiry we judged that there was nothing worth believing in them, without even skimming the books, without seeking out the masters, without questioning our possible slowness of spirit, without crediting the common good sense of those who wished that these writings be read over the generations? We allowed ourselves to be impressed by the words of their worst enemies who by their false promises of rational explanations lead us to believe and venerate thousands of their own outrageous fables.⁹

Augustine, in Book 4 of the Confessions, describes the ardor of his pursuit of the liberal arts (artes liberales) while he studied at Carthage. He had read and understood Aristotle’s Categories (Confessions 4.16.28). Although this work opened his eyes to the significance of the ten treatises dealing with substance, he was disappointed. What was the meaning and purpose of the wisdom of the liberal arts? The term substantia brought to mind again the parable of the Prodigal Son. He wrote:

What ever was written either of the art of rhetoric or of logic, of the dimensions of figures or music or arithmetic I understood with no great difficulty and no need of an instructor: this You know, Lord my God, because swiftness of understanding and keenness of perceiving are Your gift. But none of this did I offer in sacrifice to You. Therefore it was not for my profit but rather for my harm, that I laboured so to have so great a part of my substance in my own power quia tam bonam partem substantiae meae sategi habere in potestate, and preserved my strength, but not for You, going from You into a far country profectus sum abs te in longinquam regionem to waste my substance upon loves that were only harlots. For what did it profit me to have good ability since I did not use it well? nam quid mihi proderat bona res non utenti bene (Confessions 4.16.30).

Therefore, for nine years Augustine was seduced by Manichean exegesis which considered itself to be rational. He was progressively taken over by the study, undoubtedly valuable in itself, of profane sciences. He was not tempted to a deeper personal understanding of the Scriptures. However, is it fair to assume that on the whole Augustine’s biblical initiation during the Manichean years was a dead loss? Such a conclusion would be in error.

Even given the insidious and deformed nature of the critique, Augustine had acquired a textual knowledge of one portion of the Bible. He had read, at least partially, the Torah during his Manichean years. He had learned some Pauline writings. It was controversial reading no doubt, but a reading nonetheless.

In a concrete and personal way, Augustine knew the objections, the difficulties, the rejections, and the derision by which his Manichean masters opposed Christian and Jewish scriptures. That experience sensitized the future bishop to the multiple heterodox interpretations of scripture which he encountered during his ecclesiastic ministry. It is worth noting that Augustine would devote much attention, study and time to the examination of Donatist, Gnostic, Arian, Pelagian, and Priscillian texts sent to him for his response and elucidation. He could be severe in his judgments but he would never neglect the men who, while in the grip of heresy, had written the works. Augustine considered his dialogue with non-believers as an important pastoral duty. He had personally known the difficult experience of searching sincerely and anxiously, devoid of a master which one might consult. The immense polemical work of Augustine is rooted in this experience. It produced in him a vocation for exegetical precision and the desire to convince his adversaries by the Word of God.

If Augustine experienced the difficulties with the Bible met by the Manicheans, he became very conscious of the real difficulties which every uninstructed reader encounters, particularly vis–à–vis the Old Testament. Genesis had long proved enigmatic for him. Today with our diversified research into linguistics, history, archeology, philosophy and theology etc., we know the need for a nuanced hermeneutic of the Pentateuch. How are the first eleven chapters of Genesis to be interpreted? Where do the patriarchal traditions come from? The four source theory has been the object of intense scrutiny. What are the dates of the various documents and so forth? One should not be surprised that the great eastern and western bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries found themselves puzzled by and questioning in their reading of Scripture. The texts appeared contradictory and scandalous. They incited the reprobation of the heretics. It was a difficult text, addressed by Basil, John Chrysostome, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Each, in their own period, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit attempted to actualize the Word of God.

After an initial period of enthusiasm, Augustine felt a growing disillusionment with Manicheism. At the same time his professional career was becoming more and more promising. Claude Lepelley traces the steps precisely: Augustine studied at Carthage between 370 and 372. He was a professor between 374 and 383. He taught as a municipal rhetor, not as a private teacher; he left his position in 383 to teach in Rome because he was exasperated by the rowdies and troublemakers who had free reign when he taught in public. In Rome Augustine taught at home as a private professor (Confessions 5.12.22) but the Roman students disappeared when it came time to pay their fees to their masters. In 384 he applied for a new position in Milan. While in Rome, he participated in a type of contest before the prefect of the city, Symmachus. This time it was for a municipal post in the imperial city to the north (Confessions 5.13.23).¹⁰

Named as Milan’s city rhetor around October 384, Augustine made an official visit to Ambrose the Bishop of Milan. He wrote:

So I came to Milan, to the bishop and devout servant of God, Ambrose, famed among the best men of the whole world, whose eloquence did him most powerfully minister to thy people the fatness of Thy wheat and the joy of Thy oil and the sober intoxication of Thy wine.¹¹ For all unknowing I was brought by God to him, that knowing I should be brought by him to God (Confessions 5.13.23).

Attracted by Ambrose’s eloquence, little by little Augustine became interested in the meaning of the words he so admired. With his words to which I listened with the greatest care; the realities which I still held quite unworthy of attention penetrated altogether into my mind (Confessions 5.13.24). For Augustine the step from the words to the realities they expressed was a decisive moment.

I began to see that the Catholic faith, for which I had thought nothing could be said in the face of the Manichean objections, could be maintained on reasonable grounds: this especially after I had heard explained figuratively several passages of the Old Testament which had been a cause of death for me when taken literally. Many passages of these books were expounded in a spiritual sense and I came to blame my own hopeless folly in believing that the Law and the Prophets could not stand against those who hated and mocked at them (Confessions 5.14.24).

Monica arrived in Milan during the spring of 385 with her other son Navigius. She followed closely the preaching of Ambrose and each Sunday Augustine accompanied her.

Still I heard him every Sunday preaching the word of truth to his congregation; and I became more and more certain that all those knots of cunning and calumny, which those who deceived me had tangled up against the holy books, could be untangled. I learned that the phrase created by You in Your own image was not taken by Your spiritual children — whom of our Catholic Church-mother You have made to be born anew by grace — to mean that You are bounded within the shape of a human body. And although I had not the vaguest or most shadowy notion how a spiritual substance could be, yet I was filled with shame — but joyful too — that I had been barking all these years not against the Catholic faith but against mere figments of carnal imaginations. I had been rash and impious in that I had spoken in condemnation of things which I should have learned more truly of by inquiry. For You, O highest and nearest, most hidden and most present, have not parts greater and smaller; You are wholly everywhere, yet nowhere limited within space, nor are You of any bodily form (Confessions 6.3.4).

While listening to Ambrose, Augustine began to understand the errors of the Manicheans who in interpreting the Genesis verses about the human creation in God’s image incorrectly had concluded that God was a corporeal being like us. Ambrose’s sermons also laid to rest Augustine’s prejudices against the Old Testament. Augustine wrote:

I was glad also that the old Scriptures of the Law and the Prophets were set before me now, no longer in that light in which they had formerly seemed absurd, when I criticized Your holy ones for thinking this or that which in plain fact they did not think. And it was a joy to hear Ambrose who often repeated to his congregation, as if it were a rule he was most strongly urging upon them, the text; the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life (2 Cor. 3:6).

He would go on to draw aside the veil of mystery and lay open the spiritual meaning of things which taken literally would have seemed to teach falsehood. Nothing of what he said struck me as false, although I did not as yet know whether what he said was true. I held back my heart from accepting anything, fearing that I might fall once more, whereas in fact the hanging in suspense was more deadly (Confessions 6.4.6.).

Despite the painful fear of making yet another error, Augustine slowly changed his interior attitude regarding the sacred writings of the Jews and Christians and recognized in them a certain authority.

Thus, since men had not the strength to discover the truth by pure reason and therefore we needed the authority of Holy Writ, I was coming to believe that You would certainly not have bestowed such eminent authority upon those Scriptures throughout the world, unless it had been Your will that by them we should believe in You and in them seek You (Confessions 6.5.9).

Augustine rejoiced that sacred Scripture was accessible to all, while at the same time reserving the dignity of her mysteries for more profound interpretation. During this period Augustine was still anxious. He turned thirty in 384 and from his perspective his quest for wisdom from the age of nineteen had made little progress. Granted he now looked more favorably upon the Scriptures of the church, but how was one to find truth? He wrote:

But where shall I search? When shall I search? Ambrose is busy. I am myself too busy to read. And in any event where can I find the books? Who has them, or when can I procure them? Can I borrow them from anyone? . . . My pupils occupy the morning hours, but what do I do with the rest? Why not do this? But if I do, when shall I have time to visit the powerful friends of whose influence I stand in need, or when prepare the lessons I sell to my pupils, or when refresh myself by realizing my mind from too close pre–occupation with my heavy concerns? (Confessions 6.11.18).

The distinguished thirty-year-old rhetor of Milan, on the threshold of a brilliant literary career did not have the leisure to study the Bible nor access to its manuscripts. According to the conventions of the time, Augustine was a year beyond his adolescence and into the age of maturity. Curiously, until 384 Augustine’s biblical knowledge had been acquired more by listening to either the Manicheans or Ambrose than reading the Scriptures. However, this is less surprising when one considers the values of the period and the importance attached to oral instruction.

Meanwhile Augustine struggled with the issues of the origin of evil, astrology, and what one was to think of God (Confessions 7.1.1–8,12). While writing the Confessions in 397, Augustine describes this period of his life:

At first You willed to show me how You resist the proud and give grace to the humble (1 Pet. 5:5), and with how great mercy You have shown men the way of humility in that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among men (Jn. 1:14). Therefore You brought in my way by means of a certain man — an incredibly conceited man — some books of the Platonists translated from Greek into Latin (Confessions 7.9.13).

This sentence is the key to the whole second half of Book 7 of the Confessions. In 386 while desperately searching for the path to the Father, Augustine discovers and is seduced by certain Neo–platonic writings. Contemporary scholarship has established that Augustine in all probability must have read the works of Plotinus and Porphyry. In 397–398 Augustine makes his point in an interesting manner. He repeats the word via ten times (Confessions 7.7.11, 9.13, 18.24, 20.26, 21.27; 8.1.1) in the course of his comparison between the platonic path and the Christian path as presented in Ambrose’s preaching. It is presented as a comparison between pride and humility. Augustine writes:

So I set about finding a way to gain the strength that was necessary for enjoying You. And I could not find it until I embraced the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is over all things, God blessed forever (1 Tim. 2:5), who was calling unto me and saying: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6); and who brought into union with our nature that Food which I lacked the strength to take: for the word was made flesh that Your Wisdom, by which You created all things, might give suck to our souls’ infancy. For I was not yet lowly enough to hold the lowly Jesus as my God, nor did I know what lesson His embracing of our weakness was to teach (Confessions 7.18.24).

Nevertheless it was no small benefit that Augustine acquired out of reading Neo–platonists during this period. In his own words:

I had read the books of the Platonists and had been set by them towards the search for a truth that is incorporeal, I came to see Your invisible things which are understood by the things that are made (Rom. 1:20). I was at a standstill, yet I felt what through the darkness of my mind I was not able actually to see; I was certain that You are and that You are infinite, but not as being diffused through space whether finite or infinite; that You truly are and are ever the same, not in any part or by any motion different or otherwise; and I knew that all other things are from You from the simple fact that they are at all. Of these things I was utterly certain, yet I had not the strength to enjoy You (Confessions 7.20.26).

Through Neo–platonism Augustine discovered the existence of the spiritual world, the formlessness of God, and the nonphysicality of evil. He thanked the Father who had permitted him these readings before he tackled the Scriptures:

Where was that charity which builds us up upon the foundation of humility, which is Christ Jesus? Or when would those books have taught me that? Yet I think it was Your will that I should come upon these books before I had made study of the Scriptures, that it might be impressed on my memory how they had affected me: so that, when later I should have become responsive to You through Your Books with my wounds healed by the care of Your fingers, I might be able to discern the difference that there is between presumption and confession, between those who see what the goal is but do not see the way, and those who see the Way which leads to that country of blessedness, which we are meant not only to know but to dwell in" (Confessions 7.20.26).

Finally, Augustine read for himself the writings of Saint Paul. He transcribes his burning memory at the end of Book 7 of the