His childhood - 01

Augustine and child

The childhood of Augustine seemed to be happy in the home, and less happy at school.

There was nothing about it which gave indication of the greatness that would accrue to Augustine in his adulthood.

The childhood of Augustine is known only from what he chose to reveal in the highly selective memoirs that form part of his Confessions.

He depicted himself as a rather ordinary child.

From his description in his "growing pale with envy" (Confessions 1, 7) when he saw a sibling feeding at the breast of his mother, it would seem he was the eldest of the offspring of his parents, Patricius and Monica.

In his childhood Augustine would have had contact with Donatism, a heresy that later as a church leader and Christian author he combatted vigourously.

It is known from his writings that Augustine had cousins who were Donatists. They were sons and daughters of a brother or sister of Monica.

Siblings

The brother of Augustine was Navigius. He was with Augustine at Ostia when their mother died, but not at that stage of mid-life a baptised Christian.

Augustine did not give the name of his sister, although paradoxically she was more a part of his story than was Navigius.

(Without any historical foundation, the name Perpetua has often been assigned her for the sake of literary convenience).

When later in life she was a widow and Augustine was Bishop of Hippo, his sister conducted a monastery for women there, apparently on his behalf.

The letter that is called the Rule of Augustine was in fact written to that community in a crisis of leadership caused by her death.

His childhood - 02

Infant Baptism

Monica instructed Augustine in the Christian religion and taught him how to pray. As a child, blessed salt was placed on his tongue.

He thus formally became a catechumen, i.e., he was enrolled in the process of baptismal preparation.

Once while still of school age, he became dangerously ill. He desired baptism and his mother prepared everything for the ceremony. Then suddenly he grew better, and his baptism was put off.

His baptism was deferred lest he should stain his baptismal innocence by falling into sin before reaching maturity (which is exactly what happened).

This was an example of the practice of that era to defer baptism for fear that the recipient would fall into sin before coming fully to realise the great importance of the Sacrament.

As a bishop in his later years, Augustine denounced this custom of deferring Baptism as being very ill advised. He preached strongly against it.

Ordinary beginning

The early years of Augustine were not in any way out of the ordinary.

He was born in Numidia, in extraterritorial Pro-Consular Roman North Africa, on 13th November 354 into a fairly ordinary family.

As a student in his home town of Thagaste in his childhood, he showed some academic ability without betraying his future brilliance.

His parents, Patricius and Monica, rated education as a priority, but were sometimes financially strained in obtaining for him a fairly good grounding in Latin literature and the rudiments of Greek - a subject to which he took a dislike and resisted learning, possibly because of a teacher of that subject who was cruel to him.

In his later writing, he contrasted the difficulty and distaste he had in learning Greek in the tension and sadism of the classroom with joy and ease with which he learned Latin at home from his mother and his nurses.

He commented that "we learn better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion." (Confessions 1, 14)

(Continued on the next page.)

His childhood - 03

Face painting

Augustinian youth camp

Portugal

In the local school at Thagaste, Augustine received the beatings and whippings that seemed to be a routine method of instruction of the teacher.

With little respect or personal affection for this teacher, Augustine wrote for posterity of the angry nature of this person. (Confessions 1, 9)

In his writings, Augustine accuses himself of often studying by constraint, not obeying his parents and masters, not writing, reading, or minding his lessons so much as was required of him.

And this he did not for lack of intelligence or memory, but out of love of play.

But he prayed to God with great frequency that he might escape punishment at school.

Augustine was an intelligent but not a disciplined student. In his Confessions he admitted, "I did not like my lessons, and hated being forced to study." (Confessions 1, 12)

Augustine later commented that if a town were under siege requested help and was told to go away and stop being foolish it would have been equivalent to his feelings when in his childhood his parents responded likewise to his requests to be removed from the control of this teacher at Thagaste. (See Confessions 2, 5; Letters 17, 4; 222; 232)

This situation also led to another one of his most celebrated later lines, "What person if offered a choice between immediate extinction and the reliving of his childhood would not immediately choose the former?!"

For a while Augustine transferred his schooling to Madura, a few miles (kilometres) south of Thagaste, when he was aged from twelve to fifteen years.

This happened when apparently his parents gave way to his urgent pleas to be rescued from the teacher in Thagaste.

The childhood of Augustine was to be followed by his late adolescence in Carthage.

Pear tree - 01

Pears

The pear tree excerpt from the Confessions appears on the Internet at: http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/260aug.html

To somebody lightly skimming through the Confessions for the first time, Augustine seems to be making much of a spontaneous act of juvenile delinquency.

Yes, Augustine does this, and does so because of the darker pattern of human nature that he saw hiding behind it.

In the pear tree incident in his Confessions, Augustine describes how he and a group of friends climbed into the orchard of a neighbour.

They stripped a pear tree of its fruit "not to eat the fruit ourselves, but simply to destroy it."

He admitted that there were better pears to eat in their own gardens.

In Book Two of the Confessions, Augustine selected this relatively minor boyhood action as the starting point of his discussion of sin.

For Augustine, the incident with the pear tree was consequential because the experience showed him that something was out of balance within the deep impulses of human nature.

Here in his own behaviour he saw an example of sin being committed simply for the sake of doing evil.

To him it was a mystery worth examining as to why people - himself included - did this.

Augustine uses the pear tree incident to represent all the other wanton evil committed in his youth, and then more broadly of the general tendency to sin within all people.

Pear tree - 02

Augustinian novices

Michoacan Province,

Mexico

To Augustine the author and the rhetor, the image of a pear tree also called to mind other memories.

Augustine offended God near this pear tree, and would later be converted to the Christian religion under another fruit tree during the tolle lege incident in a garden at Milan in the year 386.

Furthermore, in Genesis 2-3, it was the taking of fruit from the tree in the Garden of Eden that was a symbol of the sin of the first human beings.

That First Fall involved the tempting of Adam by Eve to join her in evil.

Likewise, he suggested, Augustine and his companions had dared one another to ruin these pears in early adolescence.

The writer of the Confessions would have been the last to shift the blame for his act away from his own decision.

And yet his final comment was that "By myself I would not have committed that theft in which what pleased me was not what I stole but the fact that I stole."

"This would have pleased me not at all if I had done it alone; nor by myself would I have done it at all. O friendship too empty of friendship!"

Friendship was in fact the "unfathomable seducer of the mind." Any kind of crime becomes possible "merely when some bad person says to others, 'Let's go! Let's do it!' and it appears to be evil not to be evil!" (Confessions 2. 9. 17)

Augustine thus followed the leader into evil, just as he regarded Adam as having acted out of a "compulsion to solidarity" (socialis necessitudo) with his female companion.

The sin is magnified for Augustine not only because of his illicit pleasure but because of the corporate character of the act when persons undertake evil in the presence of other people.

Set dramatically against this reflection upon the power of sin, Augustine saw the availability to all people of the miracle of the grace (in Latin, gratia) of God.

His education

Prior General

teaching

Augustine studied first in Thagaste, then in the nearby town of Madaura, and finally at Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa.

Although his parents, Patricius and Monica, struggled financially to arrange for him the best education they could, the education he received before turning himself into an outstanding scholar was not as outstanding by comparison.

His great intellect compensated for what his formal education lacked.

The years 354-365: The infancy and early schooling of Augustine.

His parents made financial sacrifices to see that Augustine received a classical Latin education in the local school. Augustine delighted in Latin literature, but he detested the brutally enforced rote learning of arithmetic and Greek.

The years 366-369: His education at Madaura.

His education continued at a school in nearby Madaura, a centre of education in Roman North Africa fifteen kilometres (twenty miles) south of Thagaste. He was sent there to study rhetoric at the age twelve. Here also Augustine was taught the polite language of Latin. Up until this point, he had probably spoken the Punic dialect of Numidia. His teachers at Madura were pagans.

He now became fascinated by the world of literature that opened up to him through the Latin language. His studies of pagan Latin literature particularly included the works of Cicero and Virgil. These authors greatly influenced the style of his later writings. His reading of Cicero also influenced him to study philosophy, which is the study and the seeking of wisdom. By this point in his education, Augustine had emerged as a gifted student, drived hard by his parents, with a phenominal memory and a great attention to detail.

The year 370: A year without schooling in Thagaste at the age of sixteen years.

Augustine had to return home for a year while Patricius saved money for his further education. A year without school led the adolescent student into acts of dissipation and sexual adventure. This poor behaviour is recounted in Book Two of the Confessions.

The years 371-373: The study of rhetoric in Carthage.

Augustine moved to Carthage to be trained in rhetoric at a higher level. In today's terminology, this equipped him to use words to persuade an audience through the use of expressive, ornamented, and persuasive speech.

In those days it was fundamental to any professional career in law or government.

Today we would see rhetoric as the background to being skilled in public speaking, or to being a lawyer in a courtroom. Augustine described rhetoric as the skill required for the effective public communication of what a person was thinking.

After his period of full-time education ended, Augustine became a teacher in the year 374 in Thagaste, his home town.

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His adolescence - 01

Augustine

Adolescence can be a difficult time for any person. Augustine was no exception.

The adolescence of Augustine was far less dramatic than descriptions make it.

This is true even in the matter of his sexual exploits.

He did have a concubine and an illegitimate son, but in Roman times the story of Augustine was far more moderate than that in many other biographies.

Even so, from adolescence to the age of thirty two years Augustine frequently lost in the battle with his sexual passions.

His struggle with sex began in Thagaste his home town.

He later wrote that it was at the age of sixteen years that "passion gripped me and I surrendered myself entirely to sex."

At sixteen, he had come home from school at nearby Madaura. Unfortunately he had too much time on his hands.

He waited for a year while Patricius, his father, tried to raise money to send him to the final stage of schooling at Carthage.

Both his parents were aware that he was "floundering in the broiling sea of … sexual immorality," but each responded differently.

Augustine noted in his Confessions that his father was delighted when at the public baths he noticed that Augustine had developed the body of an adult.

Thus is was that his father, who himself broke the vows of his marriage, was amused at the budding sexual interests of his son.

The prospect of grandchildren appealed to Patricius, regardless of whether or not the children were legitimate.

Monica, the mother of Augustine, faced a problem. She did not suggest marriage for quelling the sexual fires.

Yet she feared that a hurried marriage would hinder the career opportunities of her talented son.

At the same time, however, she earnestly warned him about his lack of sexual restraint. When she told him, "above all [do] not seduce any woman who is a wife," Augustine laughed at her advice.

As a student eighteen years of age at Carthage, Augustine formed a sexual relationship with a woman, and they became parents to a son they named Adeodatus.

As much as rhetorically Augustine in his Confessions portrayed himself as a libertine, he was faithful to this one woman in a de facto relationship that lasted a dozen years.

The relationship was finally broken quite reluctantly so that Augustine could begin approaching somebody of his own social standing that he might marry.

His adolescence - 02

Augustinian professed

Jayapura

Papua

Indonesia

Augustine arrived in Carthage in the year 370 at seventeen years of age to complete his education.

He arrived with the dream of becoming a famous speaker or a government official.

When, however, he encountered the writings of the famous pagan writer Cicero, he switched his goal to seeking "the wisdom of eternal truth." (Confessions 3, 4, 7-8)

It is clear from his account of effect of Cicero upon him that his passion was not for philosophy as often understood today, i.e. an academic, largely argument-oriented conceptual discipline.

Rather, philosophy for Augustine was centred on what is sometimes incorrectly referred to as "the problem of evil."

For Augustine still in late adolescence, this problem was of an existential nature. It was the issue of how to make sense of and to live within a world that seemed so adversarial and filled with inconsistencies.

How did a person best survive in a world in which so much of what matters most to people was so easily discarded?

For example, Cicero suggested that the passion for wisdom was nurtured best by a denial of the senses, yet Augustine was in the midst of a passionate relationship and of parenthood.

How was the wisdom of eternal truth attainable in this world? Were his desires for Truth and his desires for sensuality both truly part of his human nature?

And was he responsible for the apparent battle between Truth and sexual sin in his daily living?

In this sense, the wisdom - the "answers" - that Augustine sought was a common denominator in the conflicting views of such Greek philosophical schools as the Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, and among Neoplatonists (though this is a later title) such as Plotinus and Porphyry.

It also appeared in many Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy, including very unorthodox gnostic sects such as the Manicheans.

As part of his search for Truth, he briefly examined the Christian Bible, but was immediately put off by the poor quality of the Latin translation. Unfortunately, at this early stage of his life, his pride was too great for him to face a poor Latin translation in order to descern the truth being conveyed.

He then turned instead to a religious sect, and this was the beginning of his dozen years as a "hearer" of the Manichean religious sect.

He convinced the two persons who were to become his friends for life, Alypius (who also was his former pupil) and Nebridius, to become Manicheans with him.

Philosophy and religion aside, Augustine had to supply food for the table of his partner, his son and himself. He began his teaching career in Carthage at the age of nineteen.

He continued doing so, successively at Carthage, Thagaste, then in Carthage again, Rome and Milan, until he was twenty nine years of age. In Carthage - 01

Augustine

Augustine went to Carthage, the capital of Roman North Africa, to finish his formal education.

He then took up a teaching position, and remained there from 17 years to 28 years of age.

At the age of sixteen years Augustine moved to Carthage in the year 370 to study rhetoric.

This extension to his education was made financially possible by assistance to the family by Romanianus.

This man was a wealthy patron in Thagaste who supported Patricius, the father of Augustine, in planning for Augustine to become a lawyer in the Roman imperial civil service.

Regardless of whether Augustine fully concurred with this vision or merely acquiesced with it for the lack of any better option, he essentially lay this vision aside in his second year in Carthage.

At that moment, his reading of the Hortensius by the long-dead classical Roman author, Cicero.

The Hortensius captured his fancy and made desire seriously to turn himself towards the pursuit of Truth and philosophy. (This will be further covered on the Augnet page that follows this one.)

Within a year Patricius, his father, had died back in Thagaste, and Monica his mother could not exert much influence on Augustine from that distance.

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In Carthage - 02

Irish and an American,

Augustinian Encounter for

young adults: Guadarrama,

Spain, July 2003

As well, Carthage made an alluring impression on Augustine.

For a young man to go from little Tagaste to Carthage meant moving from a village to one of the five great capitals of the Roman Empire.

A seaport capital of the whole western Mediterranean, Carthage consisted of large new streets, villas, temples, palaces, docks and a variously dressed cosmopolitan population.

The city astonished and delighted the boy from Tagaste. Whatever local marks there were in Augustine, they were brushed off in Carthage.

This tempestuous big city environment succeeded in detaching Augustine from the Christian value system he had known as a boy.

In Carthage he experimented with the sensual style of life that was prevalent in that pagan Roman city.

He later wrote in his Confessions: "I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a sensual cauldron."

He frequented the theatre and kept company with a group of coarse friends whom he called "the destroyers" or "the overturners".

At seventeen years of age, he took a concubine and within a year had an illegitimate son, Adeodatus.

The teachers of Augustine in Carthage took note of his keen mind and flair for writing.

Augustine's dream was to become a famous speaker. He turned to the renowned pagan writer Cicero.

Through reading Cicero, Augustine was riveted and turned toward "the wisdom of eternal truth."

Augustine became a great admirer of Cicero, acknowledging him as "the greatest master of Roman eloquence."

He studied rhetoric with eagerness and pleasure, but his motives were vanity and ambition, and to these he joined loose living.

And so at the age of seventeen years Augustine read the Hortensius by Cicero, a now lost treatise that inspired him to seek true wisdom through the study of philosophy.

The Hortensius advised against the pursuit of sensual pleasure as harmful to the discipline of thinking in a philosophic manner; however, the sexual drives within Augustine were then too strong for him to be willing to separate from his concubine.

In Carthage - 03

American and a Portuguese,

Augustinian Encounter for

young adults: Guadarrama,

Spain, July 2003

He sought a philosophical way to explain - or at least to be able to live with - his uncomfortable experience of knowing that he wanted Truth and sensual pleasure - and both of them simultaneously.

This is part of the so-called "problem of evil" in the world. With this quandary in mind, he thought there might be a solution offered by the Manichees.

They were a religious group that specifically stressed purity of life and the need to place emphasis on the importance of Christ.

The Manichees seemed so valuable to Augustine because they promised to provide him with the "truth" he was seeking.

With the Manichees, Augustine in the year 380 at the age of twenty four years was able to write his first work which dealt with aesthetics and was entitled, De Pulchro et Apto ("On the Beautiful and the Fitting,") a work that unfortunately has been lost.

(Another theory is that Augustine failed to keep a copy of it because he regarded it as too imperfect to be kept for posterity. It is the only one of the hundreds of works listed by Augustine in his Retractions that is not extant.)

A very honest comment about De Pulchro et Apto was made by Augustine himself when he wrote, "Although I found no one else who admired it, I was quite fond of it myself." (Confessions 4, 13-15)

He wrote this short philosophical book to display his intellectual and literary abilities and to advance his career.

Augustine remained in Carthage from his seventeenth to his twenty eighth year, first as a student and then, from the year 374 onwards, as a teacher. Seven years in Carthage matured the young teacher.

One of his pupils during that time was Alypius, who then became a friend for the rest of his life.

Alypius re-entered the life of Augustine again in Rome, Milan (where they received baptism together), and in North Africa after both of them took up leadership in the Catholic Church.

When, however, he became unhappy with conditions there, for an ambitious person there was only one direction in which to go - Rome.

His concubine - 01

Augustine

It is necessary to understand the word “concubine” as it was meant and regarded in the culture of Augustine’s time.

In that late Roman imperial, marriage was strictly regulated under Roman law, which was concerned with the control of the rights of citizenship and inheritance.

In that society, marriage was an alliance between families and estates. It was not a romantic affair based on personal preferences.

Marriage was illegal between persons of certain different classes in society, and some groups such as slaves were not allowed to marry at all. An alternate relationship was required, and concubinage was accepted as a respectable solution.

Concubinage was usually a monogamous, stable relationship. As such, it was a union distinguished from a formal marriage only by certain legal restrictions, in addition to the informality of its beginning and the possibility of a voluntary dissolution.

Author Peter Brown describes concubinage was a perfectly respectable arrangement for a potential professor of rhetoric in the later Roman Empire. The subsequent birth of his son apparently had a sobering effect upon him - the parenthood that later as a bishop he would later recommend to young Christian husbands.

Even so, taking a concubine was an uncertain area of church law. The North African bishops had decided that it would be impossible to forbid Communion to anyone who was faithful to one partner in concubinage.

From his youth, Augustine was filled with the desire for wisdom.

Writing in the Confessions at the age of forty three years (ten years after his dramatic conversion to the Christian religion), he describes his adolescence in the worst possible light.

In Book III of his Confessions, Augustine says that at the age of eighteen, "I came to Carthage, and all around me in my ears were the activities of impure loves. I was not yet in love, but I loved the idea of love." (Confessions 3, 51)

What Augustine demonstrates many times in his Confessions is the desire to love and to be loved.

His relationship with the concubine he took in Carthage focuses on the problem of restless love.

For one thing, he went to Carthage wanting to be in love. He evidently was not in Carthage long before he took a concubine.

He wrote, "It was a sweet thing to be loved, and more sweet still when I was able to enjoy the body of a woman." (Confessions 3, 51)

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His concubine - 02

Window at Colégio San Agustín

Madrid, Spain

In North Africa of that era, many young men stayed with a woman until the time came to marry.

This is what Augustine did.

In this context, concubinage was an acknowledged relationship that protected the woman's reputation from being seen as a prostitute, and protected the man from charges of carnal knowledge.

He states that, "In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wife but a woman whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her." (Confessions 4, 4)

In the culture during the time of Augustine, such a union was distinguished from a formal marriage only by certain legal restrictions, in addition to the informality of its beginning and the possibility of a voluntary dissolution.

Taking a concubine was an uncertain area of law. The practice was partly generated by the rigid class system of late Roman society.

In that society, marriage was an alliance between families and estates. It was not a romantic affair based on personal preferences. Another possibility was that the woman in question was a former slave.

If so, Augustine, who was born as a Roman citizen, would not legally have been permitted to wed her.

Monica - the strongly Christian mother of Augustine - seems to have received her grandson and his mother publicly at the family home in Thagaste.

Augustine and concubine remained together and were faithful to one another for thirteen years, until about 385.

Augustine wrote of himself, "But she was the only one and I was faithful to her."

The grief which Augustine felt at parting from her shows how strong the relationship had been. It was, nontheless, out of ambition rather than for any moral scruple that Augustine parted from the mother of his son.

Augustine never recorded for posterity the name of the woman he loved, the mother of his child.

It seems likely that the concubine in the life of Augustine was a freed woman (i.e., an ex-slave).

Roman law forbade marriage between a person born as a Roman citizen and a slave, or an ex-slave.

From their union came a beloved son, Adeodatus, born in 372-373. His birth happened early in his parents' relationship.

In Confessions 2.2.2., Augustine indicates that there was an unwillingness to have children, which has led to speculation that some forth of birth control must have been practised in the final fifteen years of the relationship.

 

His concubine - 03

Augustine:

Window at Colégio San

Agustín, Madrid, Spain

In his book called De Magistro ("About the Teacher"), Augustine later described Adeodatus as an exceptionally intelligent child and close friend to Augustine himself.

Even so, Monica was going to accept only what was socially most acceptable for her son and for his career now that he was a rising star in Milan.

When she came to live with Augustine in Milan, she told him that he should have a "proper" wife whom he was legally able to marry.

In deference to the pleas of Monica, Augustine agreed to marry a chosen woman of suitable station.

One temporary problem was that the young lady in question had not at that time reached the legal age for marriage. The marriage would have to be delayed.

Some authors suggest that this could mean that she was as young as twelve or thirteen years of age at the time of the agreement.

Other writers have surmised that, because Monica was a great influence in this plan, the young lady in question must have been a Christian.

This is possibly a safe presumption to make, but Augustine never wrote on this matter.

Monica argued with such force and persistence that Augustine finally agreed to send back to Carthage the woman who was his de facto partner (concubine) and the mother of Adeodatus.

Many writers have pointed out the harshness of this decision, but it reflected the social realities of the time.

A person in the social circles of Augustine would never have married his de facto partner, and certainly could by Roman law have done if his former concubine had ever been a slave.

Even so, their parting was very painful for Augustine. He wrote in his Confessions, "When they took from my side her with whom I had slept for so long, my heart was torn at the place where it stuck to her, and the wound was bleeding.....My heart, which clung to her, was broken and wounded and dropping blood."

The love of his life returned to Carthage in North Africa "after having made a vow to you [God] that she would never go to bed with another man... " (Confessions 16, 132-133)

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His concubine - 04

Augustine:

Window at Colégio San

Agustín, Madrid, Spain

Some writers have suggested that back in Carthage this woman became a Christian, but Augustine certainly made no such statement.

He praises her for vowing to take no other man, while he himself showed no such control of his passions.

He promptly took another woman while he waited for two years for his betrothed to reach the legal age for marriage.

His never including the name of his concubine in his voluminous writings is also sometimes held against Augustine.

But this reticence, surely, is to his credit. He was writing his own Confessions, not hers.

It would have been a gross breach of her privacy to publish her name to his readers in Carthage when he was then the Bishop of Hippo, which was only a few days' journey away.

The classical culture in the time of Augustine suggested that only men could be friends to men.

Because friendship presupposed the full equality of those involved, it was thought that only other males could be the friends of a man.

It was thus significant that Augustine applied the term friend to this woman who had been his lover and who was the mother of Adeodatus, his son.

Although Augustine sensitively wrote about his concubine in his Confessions, little mention was made of her from the time of the writing of Augustine's friend and biographer, Possidius, until the era of Jordan of Saxony O.S.A. (or Jordan of Quedlinburg), who lived in c. 1299 - c. 1380.

This writtten silence about her and Adeodatus was possibly because they both were startling reminders of the relatively-unbridled lust of Augustine in his early years - something that also was passed over in embarrassment by centuries of Christian writers.

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Home | Life of Augustine | Growing up | As parent - 01 ID 0247

As parent - 01

Augustine at Nativity

Augustine was a parent for eighteen years between the ages of seventeen and forty three.

In the year 371 at the age of seventeen years Augustine left home in Tagaste once again to study at Carthage.

He also he entered into a stable relationship with a woman whom he came to love dearly but whose name we do not know.

In the year 372, his unnamed concubine bore him a son, Adeodatus, which in Latin means "given by God."

They lived in Carthage until the year 374, when they returned to Thagaste, the place of birth of Augustine.

There he began a small school that taught grammar.

They moved back to Carthage in 376, where Augustine now felt confident enough to open a more formal school of rhetoric.

He persisted there for eight years, while Adeodatus approached adolescence.

In 383 the young family moved to Rome, to be reunited with some North African friends, including Alypius, his life-long friend. In 384 they moved to Milan. Monica joined them in Milan in 385.

She arranged for Augustine a marriage to a woman of an appropriate social class. Augustine reluctantly accepted the plan as a means to advance his career.

For Augustine, this meant he had to send away his faithful partner of fourteen years, who was the mother of Adeodatus.

This separation was emotionally wrenching for both of them. The woman went back to North Africa, and Adeodatus remained in Milan with his father and with Monica, his grandmother.

Adeodatus was therefore in Milan at the time of the conversion of Augustine in 386. As parent - 02

Augustine and child

Indeed, father and son prepared for baptism together, and were baptised, along with Alypius, at Easter 387 by the Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose.

In 387 Adeodatus was present with Augustine and Monica at the port town of Ostia, await a ship back to North Africa. He witnessed his grandmother's death.

Augustine wrote that Adeodatus had to be consoled afterwards. The journey back to North Africa was postponed, and father and son then spent over a year in Rome.

Adeodatus accompanied Augustine back to Thagsate, where Augustine sold the family property and began a lay Christian community.

The early writings of Augustine from this period covered his dialogues with his son.

As a proud parent Augustine wrote that Adeodatus was intellectually advanced for person of only seventeen years of age.

In the year 390 Adeodatus died before reaching his eighteenth birthday. He had been the object of the tender solitude of his father.

Within a period of three years, Augustine had lost both his beloved mother and his son through death.

Augustine always fondly remembered his son, who he believed surpassed many educated persons: “The brilliance he evinced filled me with awe,” and added, “I remember him without anxiety, I have nothing to fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for him.” Confessions 9,6,14

Augustine the parent, even in the evening of his life expressed poignant regrets for the unachieved promise that was cut short by the early death of Adeodatus.

Augustine’s thoughts of the child he admired, grievously present in his absence, like a lost limb, is revealed by a sentence in his last book, where Cicero speaks for him: ‘Do not these words of Cicero for his son come from the viscera of every father, when he says to him in a letter: “Of all people, you are the only one I would wish to surpass me in everything.” The Manichee - 01

Augustine

In the year 370, Augustine at the age of fifteen years moved to Carthage for his university studies.

It was there that the Manichean sect began its nine-year grip on him.

In Carthage pleasure reigned supreme, and Augustine became its delighted slave.

Disgusting festivals of the Mother of the Gods still moved through the streets.

Augustine joined the wildest young men of Carthage. They were called the "overturners" or the "destroyers."

He took a partner, and they soon were parents of a baby boy whom they named Adeodatus.

Augustine pushed aside the Christian faith of his mother. His mother, Monica, had raised him as a catecheumen of the Christian church.

Although her religion did not hold an important place in his early life, the Christian religion never totally lost its grip upon him.

When he was twenty-two years of age, the death of a close friend greatly distressed him. It caused him to reconsider the claims of the Bible.

He was fascinated with the problem of the origin of evil.

When he attempted to find a solution for this problem in the New Testament he was disappointed by the coarse and rustic style of his Latin Old Testament compared to the elegance of the Greek classics.

Instead of embracing the Christian faith, Augustine at the age of seventeen years in 373 joined a sect called the Manicheans. He wanted to be a follower of Christ and a rationalist, and the Manichees promised to make that possible. The Manichees accepted the name of Christ and introduced Augustine into a systematic and rationalist analysis of the letter of Scripture.

They rejected and scorned the Old Testament as being primitive and immoral, and selected from the New. It seems that at least among African Manichees the writings of Paul were esteemed, and this was to have a decisive influence on Augustine's future doctrine and life.

Furthermore, Manicheism (or Manicheanism) attracted Augustine because it taught the harsh but strangely comforting doctrine that sex was synonymous with darkness and bore the marks of the evil creator.

According to Manichaeism the world was in a struggle between the substance of light and the substance of darkness.

The human soul was a part of light trapped in the area of darkness. Christ was seen as the saviour who could liberate the trapped light particles and let them escape to the region of eternal light.

The Manichee - 02

Augustinian church

Chile

Manicheism thus claimed to explain the presence of evil. It seemed to conform with the goal for Truth that had been inspired in Augustine at this time by his reading of the Hortensius by Cicero.

The founder of the sect was Mani, a Persian born about the year 216. He claimed that he was an especially inspired "Apostle of Jesus Christ."

Mani taught that the universe was comprised of two eternally opposing substances--light and darkness.

Mani held that there were thus two Gods. One god created good, the other created evil.

The conclusion of Mani that no human being could be held totally accountable for his or her sins was attractive to Augustine.

For a summary of Manichaeism or Manicheanism, click on:

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0831537.html

Manichaeism claimed to provide a rational Christian doctrine on the basis of a purified text of Scripture. It was a mixture of Christianity and Persian dualism.

Augustine could see Manichaeism as a kind of intellectual and enlightened "true Christianity," in contrast to the Catholics that they accused of being half-Christian and half-Jewish because they did not reject Judaism.

Augustine abandoned himself to the Manichean sect for nine years. He was flattered by its intellectualism, seeking its supposedly scientific answers.

He was also dazzled by its parade of purity, and calmed by the thought that not he, but darkness in him, was the real sinner.

Here was the classic escape from the responsibility for personal evil because "the devil made me do it."

Augustine abandoned himself to the Manichean sect for nine years. He was flattered by its intellectualism, seeking its supposedly scientific answers.

He was also dazzled by its parade of purity, and calmed by the thought that not he, but darkness in him, was the real sinner.

Here was the classic escape from the responsibility for one's evil because "the devil made me do it."

And yet Augustine partially stood back from Manicheanism. He never joined the "elect," but remained only a "hearer."