Early Years of St Augustine
St. Augustine informs us himself that he was born at Thagaste (Tagaste; now Suk Arras), in proconsular Numidia, Nov. 13, 354; he died at Hippo Regius (just south of the modern Bona) Aug. 28, 430. [Both Suk Arras and Bona are in the present Algeria, the first 60 m. W. by s. and the second 65 m. w. of Tunis, the ancient Carthage.]
His father Patricius, as a member of the council, belonged to the
influential classes of the place; he was, however, in straitened circumstances,
and seems to have had nothing remarkable either in mental equipment or in
character, but to have been a lively, sensual, hot-tempered person, entirely
taken up with his worldly concerns, and unfriendly to Christianity until the
close of his life; he became a catechumen shortly before Augustine reached his
sixteenth year (369-370).
To his mother Monnica (so the manuscripts write her
name, not Monica; b. 331, d. 387) Augustine later believed that he owed what lie
became. But though she was evidently an honorable, loving, self-sacrificing, and
able woman, she was not always the ideal of a Christian mother that tradition
has made her appear. Her religion in earlier life has traces of formality and
worldliness about it; her ambition for her son seems at first to have had little
moral earnestness and she regretted his Manicheanism more than she did his early
sensuality.
It seems to have been through Ambrose and Augustine that she
attained the mature personal piety with which she left the world. Of Augustine
as a boy his parents were intensely proud. He received his first education at
Thagaste, learning, to read and write, as well as the rudiments of Greek and
Latin literature, from teachers who followed the old traditional pagan methods.
He seems to have had no systematic instruction in the Christian faith at this
period, and though enrolled among the catechumens, apparently was near baptism
only when an illness and his own boyish desire made it temporarily probable.
His father, delighted with his son's progress in his studies, sent him first to the neighboring Madaura, and then to Carthage, some two days' journey away. A year's enforced idleness, while the means for this more expensive schooling were being accumulated, proved a time of moral deterioration; but we must be on our guard against forming our conception of Augustine's vicious living from the Conlessiones alone.
To speak, as Mommsen does, of " frantic dissipation " is to
attach too much weight to his own penitent expressions of self-reproach. Looking
back as a bishop, he naturally regarded his whole life up to the " conversion "
which led to his baptism as a period of wandering from the right way; but not
long after this conversion, he judged differently, and found, from one point of
view, the turning point of his career in his taking up philosophy -in his
nineteenth year.
This view of his early life, which may be traced also in the
Confessiones, is probably nearer the truth than the popular conception of a
youth sunk in all kinds of immorality. When he began the study of rhetoric at
Carthage, it is true that (in company with comrades whose ideas of pleasure were
probably much more gross than his) he drank of the cup of sensual pleasure.
But
his ambition prevented him from allowing his dissipations to interfere with his
studies. His son Adeodatus was born in the summer of 372, and it was probably
the mother of this child whose charms enthralled him soon after his arrival at
Carthage about the end of 370.
But he remained faithful to her until about 385,
and the grief which he felt at parting from her shows what the relation had
been. In the view of the civilization of that period, such a monogamous 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.
Even the Church was slow to condemn such unions absolutely, and
Monnica seems to have received the child and his mother publicly at Thagaste. In
any case Augustine was known to Carthage not as a roysterer but as a quiet
honorable student.
He was, however, internally dissatisfied with his life. The
Hortensius of Cicero, now lost with the exception of a few fragments, made a
deep impression on him.
To know the truth was henceforth his deepest wish. About
the time when the contrast between his ideals and his actual life became
intolerable, he learned to conceive of Christianity as the one religion which
could lead him to the attainment of his ideal.
But his pride of intellect held
him back from embracing it earnestly; the Scriptures could not bear comparison
with Cicero; he sought for wisdom, not for ]Jumble submission to authority.
Extract from St Augustine IEP 2001 Ref url: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/a/augustin.htm
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