The person in the Hebraic frame of mind, unlike the Hellenist, is not at ease in this world. She is conscious of sin, the forces in herself that impede the passage to perfection. As Arnold puts it, “To a world stricken with moral enervation, Christianity offered the spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice; to men who refused themselves nothing, it shows one who refused himself everything.”6
Augustine lived nominally under the rule of the semidivine emperors, who had by then become remote, awe-inspiring figures and were celebrated by courtly sycophants as “Ever-Victorious” and “Restorers of the World.”7 He was taught the philosophy of the Stoics, with their ideal lives of calm, emotion-suppressing self-sufficiency. He memorized Virgil and Cicero. “My ears were inflamed for Pagan myths, and the more they were scratched the more they itched,” he would later recall.8
By the time he hit his teenage years, Augustine seems to have established himself as something of a golden boy. “I was called a promising lad,” he recalled. He attracted the attention of a local grandee, Romanianus, who agreed to sponsor the young man’s education and send him away to centers of learning. Augustine hungered for recognition and admiration and hoped to fulfill the classical dream of living forever in the mouths of posterity.
At seventeen, Augustine went to Carthage to continue his studies. In his spiritual memoir, the Confessions, he makes it sound as if he was consumed by lust. “I came to Carthage,” he says of his student days, “where the cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me.” Augustine’s presence didn’t exactly calm things down. He describes himself as a tumultuous young man, his blood boiling with passions, lusts, jealousies, and desires:
I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the depths of my need, I hated myself…. What I needed most was to love and to be loved, but most of all when I obtained the enjoyment of the body of the person who loved me…I rushed headlong into love, eager to be caught…. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me, and sure enough I would be lashed with red-hot iron rods of jealousy, by suspicion and fear, by bursts of anger and quarrels.
Augustine was apparently history’s most high-maintenance boyfriend. His language is precise. He is not in love with another human being, he is in love with the prospect of being loved. It’s all about him. And in his memoir he describes how his disordered lusts fed on themselves. In book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine includes an almost clinical description of how his emotional neediness was an addiction:
I was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me prisoner. The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity. By these links…connected one to another…a harsh bondage held me under constraint.
Augustine was forced to confront, in a very direct way, the fact that he was divided against himself. Part of him sought the shallow pleasures of the world. Part of him disapproved of these desires. His desires were out of harmony with his other faculties. He can imagine a purer way of living, but can’t get there. He was restless, unaligned.
In this most fevered writing, Augustine makes it sound like he was some sort of sex-obsessed Caligula. And throughout the centuries many people have read the Confessions and concluded that Augustine was really just writing about sex. In fact, it’s not exactly clear how wild Augustine really was. If you look at what he accomplished during these years, he seems to have been a studious and responsible young man. He excelled at university. He became a teacher in Carthage and rose up the ladder from one good job to the next. Then he moved to Rome and eventually got a job in Milan, the real center of power, at the court of the emperor Valentinian II. He had a common-law wife, conventional in that day, for about fifteen years. He had one child by this woman and did not cheat on her. He studied Plato and Cicero. His sins, such as they were, seem to have consisted mostly of going to the theater to see plays, and occasionally checking out the women he saw at church. All in all, he seems like a contemporary version of a successful young Ivy Leaguer, a sort of normal meritocrat of the late Roman Empire. In Adam I career terms, Augustine’s life was something of a model of upward mobility.
As a young man, Augustine belonged to a strict philosophic sect called the Manichees. This was a little like joining the Communist Party in Russia at the start of the twentieth century. It was joining a group of smart, committed young people who believed they had come into possession of an all-explaining truth.
Manichaeans believed the world is divided into a Kingdom of Light and a Kingdom of Darkness. They believed there is an eternal conflict between all that is good and all that is evil, and that in the course of this conflict, bits of good get trapped within the darkness. Pure spirit can be trapped in mortal flesh.
As a logical system, Manichaeism has several advantages. God, who is on the side of pure good, is protected from the faintest suspicion that he is responsible for evil.9 Manichaeism also helps excuse individuals from the evils they perform: it wasn’t me, I am essentially good, it was the Kingdom of Darkness working through me. As Augustine put it, “It gave joy to my pride to be above guilt, and when I did an evil deed, not to confess that I myself had done it.” Finally, once you accepted its premises, Manichaeism was a very rigorous logical system. Everything in the universe could be explained through neat rational steps.
The Manichaeans found it easy to feel superior to everyone else. Plus, they had fun together. Augustine would remember “conversation and laughter and mutual deferrings; shared readings of sweetly phrased books, facetious alternating with serious, heated arguing, to spice our general agreement with dissent; teaching and being taught by turns; the sadness at anyone’s absence, and the joy of return.”10They also practiced asceticism to purify themselves of evil matter. They were celibate and ate only certain foods. They avoided contact with the flesh as much as possible and were served by “hearers” (including Augustine) who did soiling chores for them.
Classical culture placed great emphasis on winning debates, on demonstrations of rhetorical prowess. Augustine, living a life more of head than heart, found he could use Manichaean arguments to easily win debates: “I always used to win more arguments than was good for me, debating with unskilled Christians who had tried to stand up for their faith in argument.”11
Inner Chaos
All in all, Augustine was living the Roman dream. But Augustine was unhappy. Inside he felt fragmented. His spiritual energies had nothing to attach to. They dissipated, evaporated. His Adam II life was a mess. “I was tossed to and fro,” he writes in the Confessions, “I poured myself out, was made to flow away in all directions and boiled off.”
At a phenomenally young age, he won the ultimate mark of success. He was given a chance to speak before the imperial court. He found that he was a mere peddler of empty words. He told lies and people loved him for it so long as the lies were well crafted. There was nothing in his life he could truly love, nothing that deserved the highest form of devotion: “I was famished within, deprived of inner food.” His hunger for admiration enslaved him rather than delighting him. He was at the whim of other people’s facile opinions, sensitive to the slightest criticism, always looking for the next rung on the golden ladder. This frantic pursuit of the glittering vices killed tranquillity.